“I owe more to Intellijel, who made the Metropolis sequencer, than I do to Stevie Wonder on this album”: James Blake on Playing Robots Into Heaven
“It’s just like long periods of synth exploration, shall we say.”
Image: Steve Jennings / Getty Images
Producer-songwriter James Blake recently revealed just how instrumental the Intellijel Metropolis sequencer was in the making of his new album Playing Robots Into Heaven.
Discussing the record’s inspiration in a chat with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Blake said that it all began with him “fucking around with sounds and having fun”.
“I just had this increasingly large folder of modular jams that I’d been making,” explains the producer, who called modular “an amazing outlet for addiction or ADHD”.
“I had like 120 modular jams and they were all like an hour long, and I was just going through them,” he recalls. “I was just doing it for fun and eventually I started turning them into pieces of music that were listenable because you know a lot of that stuff, it can be a bit… some of it’s atonal, some of it’s not necessarily in song format. It’s just like long periods of synth exploration, shall we say.”
Blake says that despite his tendency to overthink, “a lot of the music on this record happened quite quickly and it’s not really that overwrought.”
“Every skill that was required to make this record was already there.”
The musician credits the help of one creative tool in particular, saying, “I owe more to Intellijel, who made the Metropolis sequencer, than I do to Stevie Wonder on this album. The machines definitely spoke for me in a lot of this.”
Also in the interview, Blake says while there’s been a lot of talk about AI recently, “generative music’s been around a long time.”
“AI’s going to open up a lot of possibilities for composition,” he adds. “I think there’s a lot of very exciting things going on with it. For example, there’s this one guy who creates a synth called Synplant, which is this thing where you can put in any sample – say it’s the sound of me going ‘derr’ – and then the synth would recreate that sound on a synth, magically. It just does it — you don’t have to do anything. You can imagine a thing and it just can be there.”
“So there’s going to be a lot of people who can make music who weren’t previously able to in the ways that they want to. I think it’s really interesting.”
