KnoxEDM Podcast 01 – Alex Falk

Welcome to the new Knox-EDM Podcast and local artist interview feature! The goal here is to provide insight into the mind of a local electronic music artist/DJ every other week, with a featured interview and full-length mix. We are proud to announce our very first podcast centers on techno producer and DJ Alex Falk, who has been making and mixing music for a decade or more. He’s been kind enough to thoroughly answer all the questions we threw at him, so let’s have at it:

Knox-EDM: You’re a producer and DJ that’s been working at it for a decade or more. What can you tell us about how you got into electronic music, and perhaps describe some influences you had when you were younger?

I first picked up some CDs featuring early techno/rave tracks in the discount bin when I was 10 or 11 years old.  I didn’t know anything about EDM culture at the time, but I was listening to tracks by Orbital, Aphex Twin, Richie Hawtin, and even some Miami Bass artists. At the same time, I was also very much into making “tracker” music on my 386 PC.  I started going to raves around the age of 17, the dark sounds of DnB and techno were my favorite — until I got hooked on the Goa trance coming out Asheville, NC.  Eventually, the national psytrance scene became my preferred stomping crowds.  Outdoor trance festivals introduced me to a variety of music: ambient, “idm”, dub, and eventually back to techno!

Knox-EDM: What styles of music most suit your taste these days? What artists and labels are you listening to?

The past few years I have been DJing and producing “Techno / Tech House / Minimal”, as Beatport would classify it.  I try to keep an open mind about the sounds I DJ, but I’m a sucker for dark, spacey, hypnotic techno with a clean and dynamic mix!  Some of the producers I’ve been following closely include: Adultnapper, Seph, Oliver Dodd, Kilowatts/Voodeux, Miro Pajic, Par Grindvik, Maetrik, Gaiser, Boris Brejcha, the list goes on…
Knox-EDM: When producing a track, tell us a little about what you use and what the production flow is like.

If I’m working alone, I often start a track with sound design and loop arrangement in Ableton Live on my laptop.  I use this setup as my playground — once things start to firm up, I start recording the sounds into Cubase, which runs on my desktop.  I prefer to use Cubase for mixing and fine scissoring / arrangement of the recorded audio parts.  As I work in Cubase, I may continue to use Ableton on the laptop to add new sounds, especially if I need to use it’s superior audio warping, MIDI assignment, audio routing and plugin chaining capabilities.  If I could only get the two programs to run on the same computer in tandem (and behave), I’d be a much happier man…
Knox-EDM: You’ve had several psy-trance releases, along with a debut techno/minimal EP on Wreckless Records, what else is next for Alex Falk/Piltdown Sound…(and how’d you come up with that name?)

Piltdown Sound is a production and DJ collective comprised of myself, Joel Cox, and Igor Bogatoff.  We’ve all been friends since the beginning of my involvement with the EDM scene, starting in Knoxville. The three of us DJ regionally and nationally (Igor and Joel are now based on the west coast), and we have several live sets lined up for this festival season as well.  New Piltdown Sound tracks will be dropping on Blipswitch Digital and Bleepsequence in the near future, whilst still more EP releases are in the works for later this year. As for the name “Piltdown Sound,” you’d have to ask the other two members of the crew about the inspiration for the name!  Top secret stuff there.

Knox-EDM: What’s your opinion on the local/regional scenes in and around Knoxville, and what advice could you give to up-and-coming EDM producers and DJs around here?

EDM is still flying under the radar in most parts of the USA, but the last few years have seen change and growth in a variety of regional scenes.  A lot of the new enthusiasm in the southeastern region seems to be coming from the jam band / live electronic music scene and the associated following of dubstep, glitch hop, and psychedelic downtempo sounds.  I’m glad interest in EDM is growing, and hope the new fans’ interest in electronic music will evolve and mature past the popularity of the current “hot” sounds! Up-and-coming producers and DJs, I think, could both benefit from the same advice: *learn how to beatmatch*!  Hearing the subtle phase relationships of transients is essential for making tight DJ mixes as well as for fine-tuning the rhythmic structure of original tracks. For example, producers can use very small predelays on individual channels in order to time-align the transients of percussion sounds in a pleasing way.  New DJs who rely solely on Ableton Live are at a serious disadvantage when it comes to their ability to subtly manipulate time alignment in realtime.  And please…   no more mash-ups!

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