!earshot Top 200 of 2021

Bedroom Bliss

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5. Tell me about your first attempts at recording.

Davin:I wouldn't say there were any first "attempts" at recording per se. I mean, everything I collected five years ago is still somewhere on my hard drive or on my tape recorder. If there is one thing I've learned in my years of making music it is that nothing should be discarded, only carefully filed away, allowed ample time to ferment, and rediscovered again eventually. Most of my early recordings for tracks were short-wave radio excerpts and degraded tape loop samples of my favorite conventional tunes.

Kevin:I loved to sample music. Ever since I discovered the wild and wacky ways of Canada's favorite son Eric San (Kid Koala), I've been sampling like a madman. But seriously, from as early as 1999 or 2000, I have been helping my brother collect all these short-wave samples, vinyl samples, and cassette samples, and onward. We have an entire digital library of collected source sounds now; finally, we got our shit together and the result is "Ariel Winter". Impressed?

6. What musical projects are you currently involved in?

Ariel WinterDavin:I am involved currently in a project along with my brother called Keys. It is an experimental minimal project inspired by countless traditional and modern minimalists.

Kevin:I founded Keys, a minimal glitch-drone project, along with my brother in the latter stages of 1999. The primary focus of the project is the creation of sparse, emotive installations beget from the natural environs of everyday living.

7. When did you both decide to start making music together?

About five or six years ago (1999-2000), we knew we had to make music together. We valued the same aesthetics and musical goals; it was an obvious endeavor to which we had to commit.

8. Tell me about the origins of your "Keys" project. When did you decide to do it?

Keys was our first project. It had begun about five years ago (2000). It has taken us the better part of five years to complete our debut "Ariel Winter" record. The impetus for the project was simple: To create music we enjoyed listening to; and since it was such artists as Taylor Deupree, William Basinski, and Oren Ambarchi that we were consistently infatuated by at the time (and continue to be infatuated by today), that certain Japanese-infused organic minimalism popularized by the aforementioned artists seemed like a good direction to take our music.

9. How do you currently record and write your music?

We have no really regimented system for creating music at this time. It has always been just about collecting sounds throughout the years and slowly shaping them into pieces that we feel fit the Keys aesthetic. The one thing we have learned is that good things take time, and we have realized it may indeed take us another five or six years to construct a follow-up to "Ariel Winter". But time has never really acted as a constraint; instead, it has proven to be quite an effective buffer in ensuring cohesiveness and entirety for both the music and the underlying human importance of sound. Like any good wine, time perfects. Furthermore, sampling has really come into the forefront of our compositional endeavors as of late. Less and less do we actually play our own instruments. Sampling has become a sort of greater challenge for us. We will do a sort of "blind" sampling technique (credit Jimmy Tamborello of Dntel) where we sample a piece of music blindly, and incorporate it into a song we are constructing. We find a greater satisfaction in creating something fresh and unique out of a certain sound listeners have already somewhat familiarized themselves with. We've even ventured to contact Taylor Deupree himself, and he has graciously permitted sampling of his work. That said, I would say 90% of "Ariel Winter" is sample-based, with tape and radio samples dating back to late 1999.

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