Dark Victorian Fairytale Science Fiction: An Interview with Psyche Corporation
Freshman year of college, one of my best friends (a sophomore at the time) introduced me to FL Studio (Fruity Loops). It’s a sequencer type program. I made all the background music for an old song of mine called Get Down on that program and recorded vocals over it, singing through a stocking I had stretched around a wire coat hanger to minimize plosive consonants.
Sophomore year I started taking the computer music intro class at Columbia and using Digital Performer (another program, kind of like Pro Tools except on a Mac).
My home studio (which I used to make my 3rd album, “Pretend”) also uses Digital Performer. The rest of my studio consists of: midi keyboard, Audio Technica AT4040 microphone, Roland XV-5050 synthesizer, and a MOTU Traveler preamp.
Do you play any other instruments?
Besides piano? Not really.. I played recorder in 4th grade and violin in middle school. I also played a combination lock to create the sound effects for my song “Antoinette.”
Sepiachord had described your music as “baroque pop.” What do you think of that term?
Baroque pop sounds pretty cool. I like the baroque term, in part because when I first started out, knowing almost nothing about making background music, my stuff was very minimalist. I would have LOVED to be able to create more elaborate music, but I didn’t have the experience. I think they used baroque in that context– to hint at multi-layeredness, not to say the music is overly ornate. Pop, I have mixed feelings about. I’ve always associated pop with having really good production values. Maybe the content isn’t always great, or the lyrics might be cookie cutter, but the sounds will be good. And production values are something I’ve tried to work on as much as possible given that I’m very into clarity of sounds and sonic textures and have always admired artists who can work well with noise. One of my favorite songs to listen to for texture is “Zerospace” by Kidneythieves. So when someone says my music is pop, I have to think about the context. I Don’t think Sepiachord was trying to say my music is cookie cutter, so maybe they mean it has mass appeal, which would be great, or maybe they are saying it has good production values–also good to hear (no pun intended).
Do you use labels to define your music?
I have had to come up with labels to help people parse my music (most common phrase lately: “Dark Victorian fairytale science fiction”) but when I’m working on my music, I definitely don’t think in terms of verbal labels. I’m usually thinking about dynamic rhythm (not that I think my rhythm is dynamic so much as dynamic rhythm’s always been one of the hardest things for me so I think about it more), and what sound frequencies my instrumentals and vocals are spreading across. I like to mix different timbres and have a nice distribution of pitch frequencies to use. I also like to do something musically that brings out strong emotions, or evokes dreams, or strange thought patterns. I think to myself “Does this feel Psyche Corp.?” And if not, it ends up either being deferred, revised, or used for a secret music side project that will likely never see the light of day.
Do you think steampunk plays a big part in your music?
Sometimes. I think some of my music themes overlap well with steampunk, such as “Antoinette” (a song about a girl made of clockwork and flowers), “Whirring World” (about the Fibonacci sequence, among other things), “Institute,” and other steampunk-friendly songs. By the way, I love that Sepiachord description, “steampunk-friendly.” I think it fits very well.
Steampunk plays another big part in my music because it influences the presentation of my performances since I enjoy the steampunk style very much, and often perform in steampunk segments of events.
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