A lifetime of synth explorations with Ryan Smith
We had a chat with the very talented Ryan Smith. He produces huge, synth heavy techno as Taraval, operates the synths for Caribou and is one half of modular ambient duo Bathing. Our Harry had a chat with him about his various musical projects, where he feels most at home, early warehouse raves in Hamilton, psychedelic space rock sounds, and of course, much more...
Harry: When I was first getting into music writing a few years ago, I was doing some ‘new artist’ blurbs for DJ Mag North America, and wrote a short article about you being an exciting, up-and-coming artist. I’ve traced your progress since then, and always been very interested in you as an artist / musician, so thought I’d reach out for a chat to dig deeper into yourself. It’s nice to see the writing stuff go full circle seeing as I’m now interviewing you!
It must be satisfying to experience the different atmospheres as a musician involved in multiple different scenes. Caribou the thrill of playing live, Taraval going deep, playing techno in the dark corners of the globe, and Bathing, just sort of floating on a cloud. Where do you feel most at home?
Ryan: I’ve been playing with Dan Snaith and Caribou for 20 years by the time this next tour ends! Dan and I are childhood friends, we went to the same school in Ontario, Canada. So, I do feel very at home there, because we grew up in the same town, and share a very similar music taste. Even though Caribou has gone through a lot of different twists and turns, with the music / style Dan is working in, the reference points between Dan and I are always very similar. At one point it took a turn to be more dance music influenced after being psychedelic / classic rock sounding, the dance music influences weren’t entirely surprising to me, because I was on the same page of making the leap from the song writer / classic rock to the weirder end of dance music at the time. I just feel really at home there because I’ve been playing with the other guys in the band for a really long time also, and we all live in different places so it was always nice to link up. I used to live in London, so I used to see Dan way more.
Where abouts did you live in London?
I lived there for ten years, all over the place! Mainly in North London, Stoke Newington for the last few years. Dan lives there too, so we were right round the corner from each other. But yeah, I feel really at home with Caribou, the music is always really fun. It’s a funny one, because Dan writes all the music, but then we get together and do it live, and there’s a bit more creativity within the band trying to figure out how to recreate the music, because a lot of it’s made with samples instead of live instrumentation and we have to figure out how to make it work in a live environment.
How about Taraval and Bathing?
Taraval and Bathing are just me, really. Bathing is me and my wife and that one is very relaxed - probably the most at home because we make it right where I’m sitting at my desk. I have another studio space in a theater and arts institution called the Gray Area in San Francisco, which I share with a few other people - it has proper walls, synths, monitoring and stuff and that’s where all the Taraval and other electronic stuff goes down. So yeah, I’d say Bathing is the one that’s the most relaxed, but I do definitely feel very at home with Caribou for sure.
It’s interesting that Bathing is the one that’s the most relaxed for you, because the music you’ve produced with Bathing is very in tune with the Moon Roq aesthetic and the sound of our mix series - floating ambience / spacey / trippy / after hours vibes. How long have you and your wife been working on Bathing as a project?
A few years… four… five… long periods in between. It started with no intention, which is why it’s so relaxed and easy. Emma wanted to learn some synths and drum machines, so we made some music as an experiment for fun. Then a friend invited us to play a show, so we did that, and then we played some bigger shows with Four Tet at the Warehouse Project. So, yeah it’s been a few years. Even with our latest record, there’s not really much percussion, so it’s even more floating and relaxed than the previous ones.
Our mantra, which has driven our mix series and the whole aesthetic of the blog is “you’re watching a lunar sunset, as you relax on a deckchair on the surface of the moon, whilst sipping a cocktail and coming down from a day of tripping”. I’m curious, out of all the musical projects you’ve been involved with, which tracks have you produced that would best fit this hypothetical situation?
Probably some of the Bathing stuff - the last album that we made ‘To Live Is Enough’ - is a live album which was recorded in as close as you can get to that theoretical environment. We worked at this large format, immersive video and sound combination instrument and venue recording studio in the Gray Area theatre space where my studio is. It has an eight way sound system, forming a large rectangle with the audience seated in a raised platform in the middle. For that, my studio partner, Jacob Sperber who runs the label Honey Soundsystem had a going away party called ‘Ambient Goodbye’ and it was basically like a rave in the hours, quality of sound, and environment, but it was all ambient music. From 10pm - 4am the bands all set up with the eight way sound system, we were in the centre of the theatre and the sound system was set up in a circle around us, the audience was in a circle around the band and everyone was lying on mattresses, tripping. It was really fun to play that. All the artists were playing music that would fit really well with our project.
Who else was playing with you?
Another DJ from San Francisco called Solar and his partner Mozghan were also playing some trippy live ambient music. We played ‘To Live Is Enough’ in that environment so I’d probably say that music would be best fitting for the hypothetical Moon Roq situation.
That all sounds very on point. I think a lot of tracks from the Caribou discography would also fit well into the hypothetical, trippy, lunar sunset situation...
It’s funny you should mention because one of the things that a lot of people are into Caribou about is not necessarily the huge dance music band tracks, it’s more the introspective stoner ones! We always get messages from people being like ‘we’re driving across Canada, taking a hit of acid, listening to your music’ having those kinds of experiences, so there’s many Caribou tracks that would fit that vibe too.
I was wondering if you guys ever had that concept in your mind when you were producing the stoner Caribou stuff. Was that the case or did it just kind of fit that psychedelic, desert drive unintentionally?
Good question… Dan writes all the music and I think he just gets those vibes out of the music, listening to old weird records. I know he (and I) listens to older rock and soul from the 60s and 70s which has a calmer instrumentation / songwriter kind of vibe, not that you can’t get there with electronic music, but I think these influences have definitely helped. Lots of these influences seep through into the music. Lots of my favourite, non- electronic music, somehow has that same kind of drifting, psychedelic vibe to it.
We love the psychedelic stuff at Moon Roq. I read in your interview with ‘Talking Techno’ that the minimal rave scene infiltrated the small town you were living in, in Canada, and that you were influenced by the psychedelic, space rock aspect of it.
The town I grew up in, is a small, leafy town in Canada called Dundas, Ontario. It was an awesome place to be a teen - the time in your life when you’re getting into music and having psychedelic drug experiences. There wasn’t a venue or any musical spaces in the town I lived in, so you’d go into Hamilton to see shows, which is a bigger city about an hour away from the largest city in Canada - Toronto. Hamilton is an ex-industrial city like Detroit, which had big social problems; big bosses of companies moved money out of steel companies in the 70s and 80s which led to economic decline. So, at that time, lots of people were living there, but there was lots of empty space and not much happening in the city. So, people decided to throw raves in the warehouses and empty spaces! All that music in Hamilton at the time was all kinds of spacey techno and weird psychedelic rock more than soul or disco. At the time, I was getting more into being a crate digger and finding older records, as well as the contemporary techno records coming out at the time. I was really into stuff like ‘Sheet One’ by Plastikman. Some of my friends lived way out in the country and it would take like 40 mins to drive to their house on completely empty roads. I would have my license for the first time, drive out in a snowstorm and have Sheet One playing really loud. I didn’t have any reference that it was for raves, it was just weird music. Later on, I would go out and see that music being played at early rave parties in Hamilton - home made weird places. Richie Hawtin would sometimes come to play at those parties. I was just seeing my friends and just getting into it. The people putting them on would be like “I think this is what a rave is”, it would be in a warehouse, techno would be playing and we would just be getting a feel for it all. It was a weird scene, but a good one.
Are there any artists or people or particular records that you think of when reminiscing about that spacey techno / psychedelic rock rave era?
One person I have to mention, and Dan will always mention from that time is ‘Koushik’ - he does records out on Stones Throw. He was a year or so older, going to England at the time, bringing records back. He was the first person I knew who was a really obsessive crate digger. In high school he had an insane collection of records. I probably still haven’t heard most of them. He gave me the Plastikman record, so really set me on my path into that scene. It was really fun to go back through the records from the Steel City records comp ‘Northern Ncounters’ that me and Jeremy put out on our label Geej. The catalogue reminds me more of that time. It was all a bit of a blur at those warehouse raves to be honest. I don’t think I can even picture where the DJ was at those parties, it was just a big warehouse with weird music playing loudly to lots of people! Mixing that music with the first Mercury Rev album ‘Yerself Is Steam’ and a bunch of weird classic rock records. I was actually thinking this morning of this record from the 60s called ‘Aphrodite's Child 666’ and it’s like a proto prog rock album. I remember hearing that for the first time in high school because Koushik found it, and it’s like a super hippy conceptual classic record. A way weirder dark side of the moon. That mixed with stuff like the Plastikman record is what reminds me of that time.
Sounds like a very cool scene to be a part of…
These are the big weird mind blowing things I remember, but I would also go and see indie bands at shitty rock clubs. I was playing in crappy cover bands in weird shitty bars and then there would be the occasional odd warehouse party because of the open space.
What were you playing in the bands?
In friends' basements just jamming on the guitar. I was playing Koushik, we were channeling weird, fun, psyche stuff towards the end of high school. Then we all went to different universities and stuff, some of us met up and did music later.
So you’ve always been pretty musical… How do you manage your various different projects nowadays?
Well when Caribou is on it’s very on, we do big world tours and tonnes of rehearsals, so that correlates in big gaps in working on my own music. My own personal music comes and goes. I have lots of half done Taraval tracks and need to be in the right mood to finish them and be excited about them. In the pandemic I’ve been more into practicing instruments. I’ve actually been working on a piece for another art space in the Gray Area theatre called the RML Cinechamber, which also features an 8 way octophonic sound system and has 10 screens for visuals.
I’m interested to hear more about the visual stuff going with the music on this project.
The guy doing the visuals is called Brandon Eversole and he did some visuals for the last time Bathing did a live stream performance. Brandon takes all these shots of ocean waves and works them into different shapes. The piece we wrote for it was very short, it's a couple minutes long, but it has all that droney, synth stuff, but stuff really moves around in the space and there’s lots of dynamics to it.
Do you always have visual stuff when you play live with Bathing?
Not always, in fact, I used to find it a bit intrusive, it can be over the top. Now everyone has spent 18 months looking at a zoom screen, I think I just wanna see people and their faces, not screens! But Brandon’s visuals are much more mellow and detailed. It’s nice to have in the right environment, especially with the ten sided space.
Sounds like a mind-boggling concept, I wanna check it out!
It’s really fun, it certainly puts you in a different mindset when producing. I’ve seen longer works produced on it, and it’s like you’re watching a movie, and then you have to turn around and it’s a different experience. It’s different for the music as well. Instead of the usual structure of an intro and then a chorus and then a break, you’re just thinking of these sounds taking place over time and space.
Tell us a bit more about Bathing because it ties in very nicely with Moon Roq’s musical flavour. Have you got a couple more tunes to share that we should check out?
We use a lot of ideas from electronic music that are not necessarily techno / house per say but still has a driving rhythmic aspect to it. I really love old 70s stuff like Harmonia too. So a lot of the time it's ripping off one of those artists and then we twist it to our liking. Sometimes we set out to make something that’s a certain length, like we’ll say this one is going to be 6 minutes and then we set a timer and start playing, so it’s all very live. One track on the album ’Stoke Potential’ is an arpeggio for five minutes! But the arpeggio is constantly changing with notes and in an order. It's very relaxing. In electronic music you constantly want to be doing things with all the buttons and knobs, but with mellow electronic music you let the machines do the talking and interfere with the process only occasionally.
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