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Plasitician will be making his return to Toronto on April 17th, 2015 for an intimate affair at Velvet Underground. He took time out to chat with Off Centre about Rinse FM, his thoughts on DJing & Production, and where electronic music is heading.
EVENT INFO 
OCDJ - Glad to see that Rumpshakers is bringing you to Toronto! Have you been here before? What are your impressions? PLASTICIAN - Yep been here many times! It's been one of the coldest places I've ever been on my travels, and always a good time. I remember playing at the Hoxton with Skream & Benga, Jackmaster a while back. That was wild. Was one of the best stops on that tour definitely. OCDJ - What are your thoughts on the current state of electronic music. Where are we taking this ship? PLASTICIAN - I think it's healthy in terms of the creativity we're hearing. People have lots of freedom to take their music wherever they want it to go now, without the constraints of staying within a genre constraint. At least within the circles of bass music anyhow. Obviously genres like Techno are still very much sticking to their guns and keeping their sound and events pure and true to their roots. But I like evolution, change excites me and I think today we're in a place where you log into your soundcloud stream and really don't know what you're going to hear next. OCDJ - Your Rinse FM sets are moody and quite eclectic. How different is one performance to the next? Is there something that we can expect from your live performance this week in Toronto? PLASTICIAN - I differ a lot, always try to change things up. Some weeks I'll play really moody, and others I'll play more club oriented. I think the performance this week will be guided by the audience, I'll normally start off a little slower and then ease into clubbier stuff - by the end it'll be a bit faster paced, and I'd imagine I'll find time to throw a few oldies in there too. OCDJ - Production wise, is there a favourite piece of gear or software that sits as the centre of your creative process? PLASTICIAN - I've produced everything I've ever released on FL Studio, in the early days it was Fruityloops of course. I love the simplicity of it. I have an extremely basic grasp of beatmaking, as down the years I've had less and less time to work on tracks so I still use FL pretty much the same way I did back then - mostly with samples and various VST's. I have only a couple of hardware bits in the studio - and one of them is only a controller, so everything is digital for me really. I guess it's more of a workstation than a studio in that sense. Just a workstation with great monitors! OCDJ - You started off more as a DJ correct? Does this skill set play a large role in your production work? PLASTICIAN - Yes definitely, I always try to produce things I fit will sit well between two or three styles I'm feeling at the time. Most of my more famed productions bridged the gap between grime and dubstep when I was playing mostly that. Right now it tends to sit somewhere between grime, jersey club and what people would refer to as "cloud rap" although you'd never hear me call it that! I'm always trying to create things I think people won't have heard before, which is why so little gets finished. I think I am such a hard person to please musically, even with my own productions. OCDJ - As a producer do you think it's important to intimately understand the lineage of the beats your producing? PLASTICIAN - Not necessarily. I sometimes find the best way to work on things is to just experiment and go crazy. You can always take the good stuff from it and simplify if you feel the need later on. OCDJ - If electricity ceased to exist would you still be making music? PLASTICIAN - No, I'd be fucked. I'm not even sure I'd be able to live let alone make music! OCDJ - Hypothetical question: there are two shows on the same night, both DJs worthy of being called your "favourite". One plays vinyl, the other uses the SYNC button. If you could only choose one show, where would you go? PLASTICIAN - Absolutely no bother to me. If I was in the mood to dance and have a drink I'd go to the one most likely to achieve that with their selection. Or if I wanted to zone out and experience something different, the same for that. I'm not hung up about the making of the music, or how it is being done. So long as I enjoy it that is really all that matters.
Big thanks to Plastician for taking time out to have a chat with us about all things music and to Rumpshakers for feeding Toronto with some proper electronic music talent.
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