Scott Wade took the time out to tell us about their music and how they make it. Let’s see what they have to say!
First off, What’s up with your name? Is there a story behind it?
Well, my name is my real name – Scott Wade. That is not to say there isn’t a story. Funly enough I think about the name, and the process of choosing one, for artist can be so important. And I always thought so, I liked the feeling of customization it brings having a different name and in the past I had various names for projects I worked on. There was a time when I even got a nickname in my day-to-day life. Something that was kind of like a dream for me. A dream I had no say in until I got one. But I found that the nickname brought it’s own identity, an identity which I think didn’t respresnt who I am. So, starting this music project, I wanted to do so being with the identity that I know, which is myself – Scott Wade. Maybe I will get a different artist name in the future but I think I would have to know what that name represents before doing so.
Tell us about your musical past, would you tell us about your early years?
Music has always been part of my life. I’ll try and pick something interesting to talk about because not all of it is. One thing that I have come to realise is that I am someone who is quite easily influenced. Not only with music but with many ither things and I have to be careful to manage it and recognize when it is happening. This presented itself very early with music. I wanted to make music that was really not mine. I was making music that was copies of other music, which was fine as I learned many things and could actually finish tracks and none of it was really tied to me as an artist. But it hindered me from believing that I could make my own music for a long time.
What I have had to arrive at now is to find a way to be uninfluenced. To write without being influenced too deeply or if I am to be influenced then it is within my control and it is from an objective point of view as opposed to an artistic one.
How would you describe your sound?
Progressive electronic
Which artists have the biggest influence on your sound?
As for musical influences, I’m moving in a direction of being influenced by artists based on their approach to, or attitudes of, work as opposed to being influenced by a sound.
Considering this, I’d say I was influenced by Oneohtrix Point Never and the writer Cormac McCarthy. Those names in particular helped me get out of some tricky spots in the writing process.
As for sounds and themes, I found a mood on the latter half of my previous record which I wanted to explore in more depth – particularly heard in the track ‘__ B’. So going into this project I had that in mind, while the themes were outlined mostly in the short stories.
The track My Sting Machines, grew out of a singular cyclical piano line that I was particularly enticed by. I knew I wanted this as a key theme in the song and I wanted the rest of the track to be tussling with that theme in a way. As with the short story, it is about fighting with something natural and inevitable. The piano I saw as the hook, and the hook is always inevitable, even in music that doesn’t intend to have one. The hook needed to be something that the rest of the track fought to disavow.
What’s the last song you listened to?
I don’t really listen to music so much but often songs are popping up in my head when I get up in the morning, and they might, or might not, have some relevance to what I am thinking at the time. This morning was Kiss Me Thru the Phone by Soulja Boy
What’s your source for hearing new music?
If I were looking for something new, I tend to check out Rate Your Music. There are also some independent voices on Instagram that I like to check out from time to time.
Who is your dream producer?
I say this without a hint of arrogance. Me, I am my dream producer.
If you could collaborate with anyone, who would it be?
I would love to do some work with some k-pop artists. I would either really thrive or it would crush me.
What led you to music, and what motivates you to keep making it?
I get ideas, I write them down and look at them on a page and think, someone should really do this – this is something that I want to experience. It doesn’t have to be music, could be stories or videos. The point being that I want to hear it.
Then the process of making itself, its addictive. The same way with going to the theme park. Theres all these things and you want to do them all. You choose one, you wait in a queue a long time, can even being tiring at points how long it is. Then you ride the rollercoaster and its wild, you get off and throw up on your shoes and feel bad and embarrassed. But you clean yourself up and go again.
Tell us about the songwriting process. How does it all come together?
The writing process is built around two key points: the need for constant review and revision; and the acceptance that all work could be destroyed and rebuilt.
On the first of these two points, as previously mentioned, in this project I was looking to be driven by my own ideas, therefore I found myself relying on my own gauge as a means of understanding direction and completion of tracks.
I’d be working on the track for several months. Each day I would sit down and listen to it with fresh ears on a comfortable listening setup. Then I would listen out for the things that didn’t fit in that gauge and go back to work on them until they were right. This kind of process applied from the first ideas until the end of the mixing process.
I refuse to make note of any of the issues I hear while reviewing – I worked on anything that stuck in my memory, if there was something I missed and heard it again the next day then I would change it, if I didn’t hear it ever again then it was right and I didn’t need to change it.
I think this helped twofold, I didn’t burden myself with work that was unnecessary – I think making notes can quickly become cumbersome (this is coming from someone who makes a lot of notes). And, I was not actualizing things that needed to stay in my mind.
There is a change when a thing is taken from your mind and put into physical form, sometimes it is absolutely vital that this happens – in order for it to grow, but the same is true if it is premature, something is lost. This is why I tend to reserve note making for ideas (as opposed to tasks) as much as possible, ideas are always something that has to come out, they move outward.
On the second of these two points, there were times during the course of the project where I had built something that I quite liked but I knew that it wasn’t what I was looking for exactly. However, in each case, the tracks still had the right air about them which I didn’t want to lose. This resulted in the destruction of the track in a sense. I’d be heavily processing all the elements and stripping things away making it almost bare, then processing some more.
It was a very brutal approach and brought more energy to the writing than I often experience, electronic music being quite a sedentary experience as I know it, this was both invigorating and useful.
Listening back to early versions of My Sting Machines I can hear this process going on (versions of the song named whatisthishit.wav and im caughhrt5 in a trap.wav, the second involving me taking out some stress on my keyboard apparently), there were a variety of ideas drawing the track in different directions but only one remained exactly right, which we hear in the final track as the piano loop that appears throughout the song. Others remain present, in through the process of destruction.
The work I do exists because I feel both that it doesn’t already exist and that it needs to exist. If someone else were doing it, I’d absolutely be doing something else. So really it means nothing other than its completion. I cannot say why the parts in the early versions were destroyed or removed, they just didn’t fit and what remains does.
How do you connect with your audience? What is the easiest way for them to connect with you?
I am keeping my Instagram updated with new content, feel free to get in touch with me there.
https://www.instagram.com/wadeordeal/
https://www.youtube.com/@wadenoreal
What’s next for you?
As of April I will start releasing more video content that goes with the current project. The album will be coming out at the tail end of this year.
Bio:
Scott Wade is a British-born producer and writer. Currently based in Tokyo, Japan, his recent work combines music with short films, allowing the artist to showcase his imagination through multiple formats. Incorporating various methods of manipulating time into his writing, each single has a pre-ordained structure based on its accompanying visual story. Structure plays a big part within Wade’s writing, shifting the mood and tone across tracks which is integral to his unique progressive electronic sound.
His latest work began as a pitch to a fashion brand in Tokyo. Along with videographer Matthew Sperzel, they built an idea about a narrator in a dark room reading very brief stories. Wade ended up using the pitch for his own work instead and thus his latest project was born. The result is something which took months to complete. With the desire to be driven by his own ideas, Wade relied solely on his own gauge as a means of understanding direction and completion of tracks. He confides, “Each day I would sit down and listen to it with fresh ears on a comfortable listening setup. Then I would listen out for the things that didn’t fit in that gauge and go back to work on them until they were right.”
“My Sting Machines”, accompanied by the short film Lots If Love, are the first to be released from his new project, following his 2022 debut album, Sew. “My Sting Machines” grew out of a singular cyclical piano line that the artist was particularly enticed by. Entering an unknown world, Wade’s music is like nothing you’ve heard before. The instrumental features layered textures, experimental melodies and a rich palette of sounds and tones, creating something truly hypnotic. Wade explains, “As with the short story, it is about fighting with something natural and inevitable.”
Lots If Love was shot at a forgotten-about phone box, plonked on a patch of grass and surrounded by a pretty lush greenery. Wade shares, “We wanted to shoot there, the location says a lot. It’s a really beautiful place, sort of like you want to get lost in there for a moment.” The short film narrates the story of a worn and salaried man seeking out the consult of his memory. Set between the worlds of an isolated phone booth in a sea of overrun green, and a nondescript blue, humming room. Arthur Barlow plays Teddy, defeated and slouching into the phone line. Teddy cannot define what he feels beyond their physical symptoms, a “pain on the front part of your head”. While Memory, played by Ora Margolis, comes slightly baffled by his call but seeks to reveal to Teddy the objects of his ab-feelings.
Wade continues, “The film was a pretty pure experience in the sense that it came about very naturally. Most certainly, the crux of the video began with the phone booth location. That was the catalyst of the rest of the ideas.”
Prior to his solo work, Wade wrote music for TV and advertisements, working with brands such as New Balance and McNai Magazine, as well as on a handful of short films and video games. His album Sew received some success among independent voices of the Instagram music community such as Earfeeder. 2023 sees Wade entering a new chapter with his mini-series of short stories and films paired with original music.
