- What inspired the name of the band, and what are your influences?
— Hi, my name is DiipSilence, my artist name means deep and silence, which reflects the meaning of my original name. I’m a Chinese artist-producer located in LA. I’m a big fan of IDM/Trip-Hop music, some of my influencers are CocoRosie, Massive Attack, Richard Devine, etc. I also think Chinese culture influences me from the beginning of my life. I love the minimalism inside Chinese poem, by only four sentences it can express the artist’s conception and emotion. Most of my songs incorporate ancient Chinese poetry in the lyrics.
- How do you approach songwriting? Are there any themes that you are keen to explore when you start off?
— My songwriting procedure comes from sound. One of my most significant sound resources comes from the field recording I did while traveling. I will sound design the raw materials in my studio and make them completely different instruments. After I have the unique sounds, I’ll compose with them to bring the memory of the place I went. Most of my songs will bring me the scenery of the site, and the emotion while I was there. My theme is quite simple: ” Everything can be music.” Because I’m just using daily sounds to make music, no matter how normal or weird they are, any sound can be programmed musically, anything can be music.
- Why do you write the sort of music that you do?
— Mostly because of my experience, before jumping to the music world I was learning math for six years. I think everything in our daily life can be explained in a math module, now I realize this idea also works in music. Regular life sounds can also be music, so I started to self learn sound design and write all of my music with organic sounds.
- How do you decide what songs to perform live, and how do you transpose them into that live setting?
–I will choose the songs which express the most of my emotion to perform live, I also select songs according to harmonic mix theory. Most of my songs are instrumentals that can be looped in Ableton, I’ll create different scenes within Ableton Live which will represent each part of the song. Some of the instruments can be recorded live such as guitar and keyboards, I’ll DJ while performing live. I also have Max for Live setup for VJing, some of the songs will have image materials linked to the song, in this case, images are being triggered by Max for Live VJ setup, which means when you trigger a pad the corresponding picture will show up, also there will be some video effects going on. On other songs which have lyrics, I’ll do the same thing except cut out the lead vocal, then it’s a vocal plus sequencer performance.
- What are your plans for the future?
— I’m planning to release one or more single per month, one video on either music or sound design tutorial per month. For now, my next EP “Meteorology IV” will be released soon, which contains four songs, each song will describe a meteorology phenomenon. I wrote them with lots of foley and location recording sounds in this album, stay tuned!
All of my music releases are here: http://smarturl.it/diipsilence
Official website: http://diipsilence.com