Nathan Micay

Nathan Micay’s Blue Spring is a futuristic rave album based on the infamous Castlemorton Common event in the mid ’90s. Danny Turner discusses the role Ableton Live played behind the DJ/producer’s remarkably inventive debut

Under the former pseudonym Bwana, the prodigiously talented Torontoborn Nathan Micay genre-hopped from post-dubstep to psychedelic trance and prog-house, with a collection of anthemic releases on LuckyMe and Will Saul’s Aus Music. Alongside an exhaustive DJ schedule, the restless producer has also recorded sets for the likes of Fact, Boiler

Room and Resident Advisor. Now based in Berlin, Micay’s debut release under his own name, Blue Spring, was made almost entirely in Ableton Live. An infectious body of futuristic fiction, inspired by the ’90s rave era, the album is accompanied by a comic book scripted by Micay and brought to life by Peter Marsden and LuckyMe’s Dominic Flanagan in homage to Katsuhiro Otomo - the man behind the legendary manga character, Akira.

Your music seems to encompass a wide range of influences from traditional dance music tropes to something a lot more leftfield. What had the biggest influence overall?

“This is going to sound pretty out there, but my parents really got me into Mozart. They made me watch Amadeus and read about his life, instilling the idea of not following the beaten path. As far as producing dance music, without a doubt I’d say James Holden, who I think you could apply the same principles to. The guy came out of nowhere as a young trance producer. TheIdiotsAre

Winning threw everyone off guard; then he came back with TheInheritors, which was like a modular, synth drum, saxophone thing. I haven’t had a career as long as his, but I hope to do be able to do that with each album.”

The new album Blue Spring is a big leap from your previous dancefloor productions…

“I was very aware of the traps of releasing a dance music album in that there needed to be a reason why I wouldn’t just put out three EPs. Making this album took three tries. I wrote two other full albums and decided they weren’t up to snuff because they needed to have a concept and a certain cohesiveness.”

You’ve said that your family were very supportive of your music career. Was it difficult to convince them?

“I happened to get an exchange to England while I was at university. While I was there, things took off and I started touring a lot, then I was mugged on the way home from school and it totally messed me up for a year so I couldn’t make music. Thankfully, my parents saw I was able to do it the first time, so when I returned home I got a part-time job but spent most of the day as a glorified housekeeper. That was a weird one. One thing my dad was very insistent on was that if I was going to do this I had to treat it as a 9-to-5 job, so I was up every morning at 7:30, put on a nice shirt and walked from my bed to my desk and worked on music all day. But that year was really formative – it was like a boot camp of my own making. I also took an hour every day to practise DJing with vinyl, and by the end I had my first booking at the Panorama Bar.”

When you first started putting tracks out, you got a lot of feedback from some high-profile producers/labels. Was that encouraging?

“It was terrifying and encouraging because I started putting tracks online purely for fun and next thing I know I’m getting emails from Will Saul saying, ‘Hey, we want to release this record on Aus’. I don’t even know how he got it. One day I woke up and one of my tracks was on an Essential

Mix by Sasha. I didn’t send it to Sasha, but there seemed to be these little blind hands moving behind the scenes. Jane Fitz emailed me out of the blue recently, and she’s my favourite DJ – crazy.”

You initially took the pseudonym Bwana. Have you closed the chapter on that now?

“Yeah, I’d say so. I felt the Whities release last year was a whole new step in terms of my production. The Bwana stuff was very scattered, there’s wasn’t a narrative to each EP, which is something I’ve always regretted but I can’t help writing lots of different types of music. I’ve been doing a lot of film work in the last two years under my own name too, so I hope those worlds will combine at some point. Everything feels more cohesive now.”

Is it a case of feeling comfortable enough in your own shoes to create something that’s not tied to a genre?

“When I was using the pseudonym Bwana it all happened by fluke. I have lots of friends who blew up in their late 20s because they had a plan, but I had attention at 19 when I didn’t have any idea about the industry, let alone building up a discography. Now I have an idea of how this works, I feel more comfortable with my production chops and being able to write the music that’s in my head. I have a fan base that I hope will trust me, so it’s time to turn a new page.”

What precipitated your move to Berlin?

“I love Canada but it’s in a funny place if you want to be a musician. The US is hard to access and Europe’s obviously across the Atlantic. This type of music is mostly happening in Europe and the UK at the moment, so I thought, screw it, let’s go for it. I moved here with 2,000 Canadian dollars and lived on some guy’s couch for six weeks while he was on vacation. DJing’s a big part of my life too, so the move also makes a lot of sense from that perspective.”

We’re sticking our neck out with this question, but Romance Dawn for the Cyberworld has

strong Blade Runner overtones. Is that right?

“You can’t mistake the synth for anything else – it’s clearly very Vangelis. I wasn’t trying to go for

BladeRunner, but I wanted a sci-fi theme and was very conscious of it sounding like that. Clearly, it’s somewhat of an homage, but that track’s the only part of the album with any exposition in it and there’s a very detailed comic book coming with the album that elaborates on the whole story behind it.”

Who designed the comic book?

“Dominic Flanagan, who runs the label LuckyMe and is an incredible artist. He brought a guy on board called Peter Marsden and said they wanted to make a comic book and could I think of a story, so I came up with this whole synopsis. It’s going to be one page per track, but the pictures are so unbelievably detailed. As far as I know, if you order the vinyl from the LuckyMe Bandcamp, it will come with a copy of the comic book.”

As you say, the album has a very futuristic theme – were you always writing to one particular concept?

“The whole concept of the album was about heading out to a night on the rave, set in a sci-fi, dystopian world. There’s a big synth line and all these arpeggios, and then as the night gets deeper you have all these euphoric ups and downs before the piano-based track at the end, RomanceDawn

fortheNewWorld. I guess the whole album is meant to promote that idea of cherishing a community, sound and environment that once existed. Can we get back to that, rather than this digital sphere of just presentation and numbers? I was a huge Pink Floyd fan throughout my teenage years and every album they put out came with a story and concept. I’ve always dreamed of being able to do that myself.”

Did you find that having a narrative made it much easier to imagine a direction of travel for your tracks, that could be seen through to a logical conclusion?

“Absolutely. That’s why I had to make the album three times. The first two times, I was just writing a collection of tracks and didn’t really know where it was all going. As soon as I had an idea of what I wanted, I could fill in the gaps. I’d find new sounds and techniques, and obviously they drove the tracks, but having that concept made it so much easier. I definitely had a sound palette I wanted to keep, although certain things happened that I didn’t anticipate.”

There are a lot of ‘rain forest’ sounds. Are they sourced from sample packs or somewhere more esoteric?

“Do you mean the nature stuff? I got this cool field recorder last year, a Tascam 44W, and my apartment is right next to a river so I’m constantly recording birds. My uncle is always sending me ideas and he told me about this website where you pay a subscription for nature sounds, and so once in a while I’ll go through those and start making little hits from bird sounds. If you take a bird tweet, throw a flanger on it and some overdrive, suddenly you’ve got this cool sci-fi hi-hat.”

So you were basically distorting those samples until the point where they turned into percussive instruments?

“I got into that on the Capsule’sPride project I did as Bwana. Every sound on the album was from the movie Akira, right down to the snare sounds. For example, on the first track, RomanceDawnof

theCyberWorld, one of the snare drums is a famous YouTube video of a cat getting spooked and jumping into a wall. It’s a low-quality sample, but I flipped it on its head and layered it up with a 909 clap to create this pretty intense-sounding clap/snare. There’s another sound too – a gut-wrenching twisting/turning hi-hat that turns into a skippy-sounding hat. Again, that was bird noises I’d warped into metallic-ness.”

We gather Ableton Live was your route into production. When did you first come across that, and with what intention?

“I remember it very clearly. It was around the holidays of 2010 and I was starting to get deep into dance music. I’d downloaded a trial of Reason and was following all these YouTube tutorials, but the whole thing freaked me out – I found it so confusing. There were so many things on the one screen that it didn’t have space for me to breathe. I got Logic, but found its userfriendliness was non-existent. Then I saw an ad on Facebook for Ableton and thought it looked really user-friendly. I wasn’t a computer-savvy person, but it started to click and make sense to me. Having said that, for the first two EPs I didn’t even know what an EQ or compressor was. I just limited all the channels.”

Did you find there was a turning point in your knowledge gap?

“It was only when I was sat down with Brian Wong (aka Gingy) and a friend called Kevin McPhee and got walked through how to use Ableton that I went from being an amateur to having a game plan. Instead of just messing around and throwing in samples at random, I felt that I then had all of the tools to, for example, bring a sound to the foreground while keeping it clean or make the background lush while still keeping it all present.”

Are your tracks entirely composed, recorded and mixed in Ableton?

“Yeah, I kind of insist on it too. I had the option to have the album mixed by other people but I’ve done that once or twice before and, one, I felt guilty that I didn’t do it myself when I knew I could and, two, it loses some sort of signature of my own making.”

Not too many producers feel they can wrap an entire production in Ableton. You’re living proof that it’s more about having an in-depth understanding of it.

“Let me give you two examples. Skream’s

MidnightRequestLine is one of the best dubstep/ dance music tracks of all time and he made it in Fruity Loops, and the producer Boy Wonder who produces Drake’s big hits also uses Fruity Loops. If you asked me, could I go to Reason and do what I do? Probably not, because I don’t know it like I know Ableton, but then I’ll go to studios that only use hardware and they’ll ask me to show them how I do certain stuff in Ableton.

“The big thing is making sure that you have a few set tools and then to learn them inside out. There are many things in Ableton that I still don’t know very well, but there are also some techniques I do know and the workflow just works for me, and quickly.”

Do you have any hardware?

“I have an Akai MIDI keyboard and used to use some hardware back in Toronto. I also invested in

“Having a concept made things easier. I definitely had a sound palette I wanted”

some Universal Audio stuff, but otherwise it’s pretty much all in the box. When I work, my fingers work so fast that the hardware’s too slow for me. People say, why don’t you make the machines sync for you, but I’ve figured out ways in Ableton to make the sequencers and chains do the same thing. One thing I have done though, which is kind of cheating, back in Toronto I recorded the middle C of all the presets on my friends’ gear and used them as a starting point in Simpler on Ableton. I did that with a Juno-106, and those sound great.”

Tell us about some of the Ableton chains you’ve created?

“On the album there’s a track JoinMeorDie. Can

YouDoAnyLess and there’s this big, crazy delayed arpeggio running throughout the whole thing. The sound source is a u-he Diva synth, but I built a chain that I’ve thrown onto a lot of tracks made of three different Ableton arpeggiators going at once sent into a few different delay sends. One of them has a serious Auto Pan on it, which gives it a really great width, and one of the other’s very overdriven but with a high EQ, which gives sheen to the delay but not the notes themselves. You end up with these unquantised delays and they’re all over the album.”

There’s originality to your choice of sounds, but maybe it’s less the sounds themselves than the fact that they’re being blended with ones you’d not expect?

“I wanted to create futuristic, non-traditional sounds. Ableton’s scary on the one hand because you have endless possibilities, but if you pick a few techniques that you know how to use and apply them to different sounds, each time you can turn those sounds into a whole new thing. I was very conscious that I’m influenced by the Sasha/early ’90s trance era, so there’s a lot of sounds influenced by classic rave, but I’m also aware I’m living in 2019 and have access to many new techniques and sounds. It was very much about how can I take those sounds out of the classic breaks or 4/4 formula.”

Do you seek out software that enables you to be more creative with sound or is it more about the techniques you apply?

“I think it’s the techniques because, if I’m honest. I don’t use that much third-party software within Ableton, I find the stuff they provide within their own DAW is great and everything you need is in there. The only third-party plugins I really used was u-he Diva and a few Universal Audio plugins for mix downs. Within Ableton, I constantly used the Max for Live stuff. The Mono Sequencer is all over the album – it’s a beast. You have 16 notes and if you play with the velocity, pitch and octaves, the next thing you know you have a crazy riff. You can throw anything in there and it’s so random. I also used the Convolution reverb.”

How do you manage to get that wide, spacious sound wherein everything has ample room to co-exist together?

“I’m huge on the stereo field. I actually teach Ableton part-time at the Open Music Lab, which is for refugees and people from underprivileged backgrounds. I taught a whole class just about the stereo field because it’s so fascinatingly underused. You hear so many big club tracks that are not mono, but all in the centre, yet there’s so much more excitement you can have.”

What techniques do you apply?

“I’ve read a lot about how music and sound is perceptive to our ears. If you take one sound on the left, keep it down under a filter and have it open up as it moves across to your right ear, there’s not only a change in the tone but the movement from left to right ear. I try to keep pads off to the side so there’s room to breathe in the centre of the stereo field, and on top of that you start to think about foreground and background. I think of it like a cube; you have the back, the front, top, bottom and sides, and in the middle you have to slice up the air through sidechaining and EQ.”

Do you see your future beyond albums, moving into advertising and film scoring?

“I’d love to be more involved in film as I get older, but it seems quite a hard industry to crack from what I hear. Anime would be great. I’ve been learning Japanese for almost two years, not for that purpose, but it might help if I ever want to move there. I’d also like to dip my hand into producing for other people. By the time I turn 30 in two years, I’d like to take all this and apply it to scoring and pop production.”