Words by Emma Warren

XL’s in-house producer Alex Epton is on the line from New York. He’s just released a sample library with Spitfire Audio, inspired by his dread-drenched soundtrack to Clayton Vomero’s arthouse documentary about Russian youth culture. He’s a classically-trained drummer with a high level of producer chops thanks to a stint which began with an internship at cult dance music label DFA and which culminated in producing rapper Spank Rock under the name XXXChange. Since then the Baltimore-born producer, engineer and remixer has worked with FKA Twigs, Björk and Thom Yorke.

Last year you released the soundtrack to the film 30HA (pronounced ‘Zona’). Now you’re releasing a sample library. How are the two things linked? 

It’s a standalone library that exists outside of the soundtrack. I started using this synthesiser set-up during the tail end of the score. It’s BBC Radiophonic Workshop, freaky ‘50s-sounding stuff, almost musique concrète, where everything is disoriented and distressed. That was the idea for the instrument [for the sample library]. To make a bunch of stuff that people could use, [without] needing a modular synth to do it. It’s a little bit chaotic so you might get some ideas from it.

What’s your modular set-up?

Verbos. For years Marc Verbos was the only guy who could fix a Buchla, which is really important because they break all the time. He came out with his own line of modular stuff, based off the Buchla sound but more reliable. It fits within that modern Eurorack format. That’s what I’ve been using. It’s mostly stuff from that manufacturer. I’m a big fan of Suzanne Ciani and Morton Subotnick. I love that music and I love the way it sounds.

Ciani talks about having a very intimate relationship with modular synthesisers, particularly the Buchla…

This is why I like only using stuff from one manufacturer. It has a personality. It feels like you’re in a dialogue with the instrument. There’s relationship. It’s a struggle relationship, I’m always fighting it, it’s like playing  game of chess. It’s fun but you have to fight it.

So what kind of boyfriend or girlfriend is your rack?

A sophisticated one. 

Is there anything else we should know about the sample library? 

There was some back and forth. It was a pleasure to work with the developers. They knew I made my own gear so we did some drums and percussion using my stuff I have at XL and weird outboard gear I’ve made over the years. 

Tell me about some of the weird outboard gear you’ve made over the years…

There’s a distortion thing I used a lot. That’s a homebrew. It’s a modification of these old Siemens talkback compressors from an old ‘60s console. That’s a crazy over the top distribution thing. That’s a cool thing I have that nobody else has. In the basement at XL there’s a big empty oil tank they used to hold oil for the boiler to heat this whole SoHo building. It’s empty, so that’s a reverb thing that we had set up. A speaker blowing into it and a couple of mics down the end and that picks up this funky, metallic reverb. There’s a lot of fun stuff going on down there. 

Where did you start with the 3OHA soundtrack? 

I have a close relationship with the director and we started talking about the music before he started shooting. We’ve known each other for a long time. He was a DJ before he made films and he’s thinking about the music before he’s made the PDF that he sends around to get the money or whatever. He’s just obsessed with music. 

Are you saying you had pieces of music composed before the shoot started?

I sent him 30 or 40 minutes of music, as a vibe, before they started shooting. Once the editing happened, we’ll go through and discuss. Refining it as we go, from that point. 

What kind of problems did you come up against? 

The edit changed, radically. The music had to be extended, or repurposed. He completely changed the music usage half way through so that was a lot of readjusting and writing new stuff. It’s pretty normal. You have to roll with it.

How did you know it was finished?

When he’s happy with it and when I’m happy with it. The notes get more and more minute. As he’s giving me notes I’m spotting things where I think ‘hmmm that could be better’. How do I generally know when something’s finished? It’s good to have a deadline. Otherwise you could work on it forever. A passion project is really hard to finish.

You worked with cellist Lucinda Chua on the soundtrack. What did you learn from her?

I enjoy so much more working with another musical collaborator versus working on my own. Even with the most basic ideas, just having that jump-off point. It goes so much faster than when you’re looking at a blank page.

You’re the in-house producer for XL in New York. What was the last thing you worked on before lockdown? 

Oh man, I can’t remember. I’ll have to check. I was recording with Standing On The Corner. They’ve been recording on this little 1/4” 8-track so when they come into XL and record on a half inch they’re like ‘wow it sounds so much better!’ It’s still really lo-fi but it’s pretty fun. I think I caught coronavirus from them. They were in Milan in late January when all the shit hit the fan, that was right in the middle of our session. 

Did you get sick?

Yeah, I was sick for a few weeks. I don’t know if that was it, it was super early. Nobody was even doing any testing.

You were even on coronavirus early.

Ha! [laughs]

I was talking to a mastering engineer recently who described his job as ‘chasing ghosts’. He says it’s about getting rid of elements that have crept in, and to making it sound as close to the musician’s intention as possible. What do you think your job is? 

That’s a super interesting way to express the sentiment. Mixing and mastering, more than in the trenches producing, there’s an element where you need to get inside the person’s head and figure out what it’s trying to be. The more you’re in multiple lanes of music, it’s really helpful. You want to fix it up and make it clear and presentable so it’ll interface with the marketplace and all the different systems people are listening on, but you don’t want to take all the life out of it, or the uniqueness. There’s a balance. The stuff I work on is definitely trending super-weird sounding. I’ll look at where the goalposts are. If you think about Ariana Grande and then My Bloody Valentine, you see how wide the goalposts are. You can run in there and do a lot of weird stuff. 

You’re a classically trained musician and you also spent a long time as a beatmaker, deep in producer culture. What does it give you to have access to these two strands of music-making? I think it’s still unusual to find people with such high levels of both. 

It’s really rare to find people that are awesome dance music producers that can also do song structure and different genres. I don’t see that too much. I’m not saying I’m an awesome dance music producer but at one point, I was competent. 

What does the combination of both give you? 

I just want to have all the tools I can get to solve a problem. The more stuff I can learn how to do, the more effective I’m going to be, if I’m working for an artist as their additional producer engineering or finishing. Or a film director, who wants something to feel like this or that. I want to have access to all the tools to help people get where they want to go. 

How did you get into dance music?

I was friends with Tim Sweeney, he does the Beats in Space radio show. He is also from Baltimore and we went to High School together and he also moved to New York. He was interning for DFA and I went and interned for a little bit. That’s when I had the moment, listening to Metro Area on their crazy sound-system, so loud it’d shake your teeth. It sounded so good. I was like, I’m in. It happened in the studio rather than in the club.

Anything else you’ve been working on recently?

Some of my own music, exploring instrumentation with choir and brass. It’s been super exciting and challenging to do that remotely. We have time now, which seems to be a thing. I have little kids and that takes a lot of energy. Oh and I mixed the Arca album, which is coming out soon.

What’s your studio set-up at home? 

I’d been at XL every day for the last five years but now, I just have a pair of speakers and a computer and one little synthesiser I brought home. I’d got this system from MakeNoise and I’d been putting off learning it. So now I’m doing a bunch of music on that system and really trying to get inside it. I’m about to go and get some more [from the studio] because it seems like this thing is going to go on forever.