Drink a case of Red Bull. Stay up for 36 hours straight. And then go listen to the overamped and fucked-up digital noise that soundtracks Eprom's days and nights.
How do you feel? Weird? Scared? Awesome? Like you're falling into a partially pixilated reality where Wario or some other evil boss has just slipped into a seizure that might be some new ecstatic dance move? Yeah, Eprom touches on all those reactions, especially the last one.
Tonight he hits the Trinumeral Festival's first night at 7th Circuit Studios. But before dropping digi-chaos on the crowd, he answered some questions about strange effects, hybrid music, video games, and other stuff.
New Times: Are you into Trinumeral's mandate to bring people together?
Eprom: Yeah, I'm into that personally because my crowd is sorta cross-genre. I make electronic music, but I like to think I have a fan base coming from hip-hop as well as traditional concertgoers.
What kind of hybrid music are you making? How do you conceptualize your stuff?
I'm building electronic music that has a dance-floor framework, but with more complex sounds than you'd normally hear on club track. I pull a lot of influence from video games, sorta 8-bit sounds, as well as hip-hop beats. And then I try to make everything work together within that melodic framework.
On your MySpace page, you list "psychedelic" as one of the genre tags? What does that mean exactly?
I think about "psychedelic" in the sense of, like, mind-altering. You know, I want people to come away from the experience with a perspective shift of some kind. It doesn't sound like psytrance or anything. (Laughs) But I want the music to be more of a head-shifting experience.
So do you toy with chance and randomness a lot in your music?
I would say when I'm working live, there's a certain element of chance in that I don't really know what I'm gonna do with my set; it changes based on my mood or crowd response or whatever. Then in the studio, I'm interested in finding strange sounds by abusing hardware and circuit bending and those kinds of things.
When playing with chaos, are you trying to lose yourself in it or harness it?
I would say I'm trying to harness it. It is dance music, you know, and it needs a dance-floor structure that people can relate to. And that's important to me, so I'm taking random elements and finding some structure in them or imposing some kind of structure onto them.
Last thing: What about video games do you dig so much?
I think the most interesting thing about video games is when they break and glitch out and create these pixilated splashes of color all across the screen. Like a broken Nintendo or arcade game will generate these errors that are more beautiful than the intended art. Or they'll generate some tone that's a broken bit of noise just creeping through the original melodies. And I think that's the most fascinating thing because that's when human agency has fallen by the wayside and the computer has just sort of taken over.
The Trinumeral Festival with Tokimonsta, Eprom, Otto Von Schirach, Panic Bomber, and others. Friday, October 8, at 7th Circuit Studios, 228 NE 59th St., Miami. Doors open at 10 p.m. each night. Individual tickets cost $15 to $25, and three-day passes cost $50. trinumeral.com.
