Kusser
Open Labs Exclusive Artist Interview
- by Tatiana Ryckman, Open Labs Staff Writer
Raised on '70s soul and classic R&B, Kusser didn't have his first run-in with electronic music until he was 13 years old. Laughing he says, “One summer I actually got exposed to cable ... I saw this group from the UK, called Renegade Sound Wave, and they were just doing this really weird thing with beats and with bass and it was like nothing I'd ever heard before and I was like, 'What the hell is this?' From that moment on, I was like 'music is great.'” And, he says, being inspired is still that easy. “I can get inspiration from museums or from a movie, or something I see from TV. Or when I close my car door and it makes a weird sound I think, that'd be kinda cool. I mean, I look for inspiration anywhere.”
An abundance of inspiration and a storehouse of influences (such as Jack Dangers from Meat Beat Manifesto, Skinny Puppy, and Alec Empire) are just the surface of Kusser's eclectic swarm of sound.
Acknowledging that he's in a genre that is primarily mash-ups and pre-recorded set lists he prides himself on doing something a little different, “I'll take an acappella or something and then create all original music underneath. It's a little different than just doing a mash-up, because typically a mash-up is just blending two different songs together. Typically, what I do is take a good vocal snippet or something and process the fuck out of it and then make my own music to it. I've been shifting a lot more toward party music, stuff that helps make people have a good time.” But he doesn't stop there.
The quote on his Myspace page could sum up his passion for making music not only sound good, but look good, too. It reads, “Making everything sound better with video,” while a stream of drum beats, curse words, and video play in the background. On his current project, he says, “I'm just doing the video installation for someone, I'm not doing any of the music, but I can do it all on the same machine ... basically taking the regular faceless DJing guy who's up in some high booth that you can't really see anyway, and bringing him back down to the people and making it a show and a performance.”
Though he spent a number of years feasting on the musical highs and lows of others he eventually decided to “just get off my ass and stop complaining about music and make it myself.” It was this attitude that Kusser started performing with—when he could. “Before I started using Open Labs gear I had to use a lot of different equipment. I used a Yamaha RS7000, I used a Roland SP808, I used two Fisher Price turn-tables that I had specially modified with outboard quarter-inch jacks so that I could actually send that input into my SP808 and to the RS for extra effect. And then I had to have my mixer and there was a whole bunch of stuff that I had to carry around to do shows so when I was using all that equipment I would only do maybe two shows a year.”
He laughs remembering the disorder of his first musical endeavor, “We'd get a bunch of guys crammed into this room and we'd each bring a little piece of music equipment. Some would use my turn tables and everyone would just plug into my desktop machine that I had, and I would just take these little bits of samples and use them in this program called Wavelab, which is an editing program, it's not really meant for real music production. I would take this thing and just do these weird crazy loops and just add layers and layers and layers. That was my first real foray in trying to make music.” Memories like this one, and the pile of dusty music equipment in his home studio, are reminders of how much his MiKo has changed his work flow and method of production.
“There's a lot of stuff that I don't even need any more. Every now and then I'll think just for nostalgic reasons - 'Hey I haven't turned that on for a while, I wonder what I could do with that' - and then I just remember all the ass-pain stuff that comes with actually doing that. I'm in a creative work flow right now, I'm just going to keep working with my MiKo because you can find yourself easily in this hole of 'Oh, I'm going to plug in this other piece of gear just to mess around with it,' then you just go on a different path, instead of being creative and getting what you want done. I could still do what I do with the other equipment but it would just be that much more of an ass-pain.”
While Kusser refers to a lot of things as “ass-pains” setting up his purple MiKo and learning to use it isn't one of them. “To get it up and going it took me maybe 15 minutes? But to understand the full power of it, and all the things I could do with it [happened] a little bit over time, just like peeling back an onion. The deeper it goes the more you go, 'Wow, it can do this?' It took me beyond what I could originally do ... so I'm still learning all the secret possibilities and combinations I can do. That's what’s so great about the open system. There's all the basic stuff to get going but then there's a whole wealth of opportunities and possibilities that you can learn over time.”
He's had the last year and a half to learn about his MiKo's “secret possibilities.” He's still using one of the original purple models, and says, “I'm not even sure what you would call the [model] of it now because I've updated it — the outside is still the same — but inside it's running state-of-the-art stuff. That's the good thing about Open Labs gear, that it's open. Really, you get the chassis and as the technology moves forward ... you can keep going forward. When I first got it, it was just running a dual-core, and now I'm running a quad-core. I'm still running it in the same basic machine and the same basic work flow, I just have more power. So, when they come out with the octa-cores and all of that, I can just upgrade.”
Kusser doesn't see himself hitting his peak any time soon, but it's not for lack of talent. “It's because,” he says, “once you hit a high point, you sit on your laurels and think that's it. When you reach your peak, then it's time to die.”
Equipment Used
Purchased MiKo LX (Gen 2)
Artist Links