Fred Again has opened up about his career and creative process in a new interview with behatted Canadian journalist Nardwuar.
In the 45-minute conversation, Fred touches on a variety of topics that include his relationship with “friend and mentor” Brian Eno, his love of the Amen break, and experimental compositions written during his studies at Trinity College London.
Speaking about his introduction to electronic music-making, Fred recalled how his guitar teacher introduced him to Logic, his first DAW, at age 12. “I was making songs on a Boss,” he says.
“I had one of those Boss eight-track things, and because I wanted to do these really grand pieces, I would do that thing of recording eight tracks on to the Boss, and then recording all eight on to one track of the new session, so I could get seven more tracks, and then recording all eight of that on to the next two tracks, so I could get six more tracks, so cumulatively I could get 60, or whatever.”
It was at this point that Fred’s teacher introduced him to Logic, which he says blew his 12-year-old mind: “He showed me Logic, and I was like, ‘how many tracks can you use?,” he recalls. “He was like: ‘as many as you want’. I was like, ‘oh my gosh’.... And that was the beginning of the greatest love affair of my life”.
Later in the interview, Fred describes an unconventional piece composed during his time at university, the orchestral performance of which featured a full-length playback of D’Angelo’s Untitled (How Does It Feel).
“I went to Trinity College to do classical writing”, Fred recalls. “They said we had to write a piece for a 30-piece string orchestra. But they said we could also use a keyboard, like a synthesizer. I asked the person, ‘can the keyboard synthesizer be a sampler?’ And they said yes, it can.
“But we know that a sampler can be anything. You can press the C and it could trigger the noise of Kennington train station, or it could trigger a whole song that you’ve sampled. My idea was to have the orchestra improvise random notes for six minutes, and then at the six-minute mark, the keyboard player holds middle C for six minutes, and it just plays Untitled by D’Angelo in full.”
“That was my favourite song at the time, and still one of the best ever. I was like, this is brilliant, this is an excuse for me to get to listen to my favourite song in a big room on nice speakers. Then I wrote an essay, because I had to intellectually justify it, so I was saying it was a comment on how all music is plagiarized.
“In the first half, they were improvising in the key of Untitled, and arguably some of them would have accidentally, by sheer probability, played some of the notes and melodies from Untitled… it was totally bullshit, but kind of funny. One of the teachers said it was about as useful as a concerto for sewing machines.”
Fred’s composition might sound a little out-of-the-box, but when we consider his penchant for integrating samples, field recordings and even iPhone Voice Memos into his tracks, this unconventional idea sound a little less preposterous.
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