Steve O’Sullivan

After hitting a creative wall in the early 2000s, new tech enticed Steve O’Sullivan back to his minimal techno roots. Danny Turner grills the producer about his path to re-assimilation

Initially influenced by Underground Resistance founder Robert Hood, techno mainstay Steve O’Sullivan’s slowly evolving, minimal club tracks have been a prescient component of his sound for three decades, on releases under his own name and versatile aliases including The Wise Caucasian and Blue Spirit. O’Sullivan has released music on numerous labels, including his own Mosaic, Bluetrain and Green, the latter of which recently showcased his signature take on raw, minimal techno via the compilation Green Trax, charting releases from ’95-99. Meanwhile, lockdown has seen O’Sullivan rejuvenated with a new 20-track collaboration taking shape for early summer release.

What appealed to you about making minimal techno over other subgenres?

“I’d say my biggest influence was probably Robert Hood who simplified his sound down to its bare essentials. Even now I don’t think he’s put a shit track out, which is always a sign of a good artist. In those early days I was listening to a lot of Chicago stuff from Beneath Records, which was basically just drum tracks, and if you listen to my music you can hear that all over them. I think that minimalism is the key to my music and the sound is really what it’s all about. The production is as important as the musical ideas, including this whole idea of making music out of nothing and not overkilling it with huge chord progressions or cheesy snare rolls.”

You were a big fan of the Street Sounds compilations back in the day…

“I grew up on those. It was the precursor to what we’re listening to nowadays – that whole electro sound with drum machines, which I was obsessed with more than anything else. When I was about 16, a music store opened in my local high street and it had a little Roland TR-505 drum machine. They showed me a demo of it, so I saved my money up and bought it six months later for about £150. That was all I had for a year. I was just making various tracks with it, so you can imagine how difficult that was [laughs].”

How did you develop your productions?

“In my early days I essentially had a tape-to-tape hi-fi and I’d record strange things from films and overlay that with a drum machine beat. A friend added guitar and I had a little Tandy 4-channel mixer that was so primitive that when the volume went up on one channel it went down on all of the others. About a year later I bought an Oberheim Prommer monophonic sampler where you would burn the EPROMs for Oberheim’s DMX drum machines. The maximum sample time was a ninth of a second, but you could trigger it with a drum machine so I used to make loops out of that and pitch them right down. It was all amateurish and I took a couple of years off from making music when I went to university.”

What brought you back into the fold?

“About five years later I was walking down Tottenham Court Road, saw a music store with another drum machine in the window and that’s when it all happened, but properly this time. I started buying magazines like Future Music and tried to find out how to make music. Out of my first wage packet I bought myself a little Boss DR-660, and within two or three years started to nail the sound. Back then you didn’t have

YouTube tutorials telling you everything you needed to know; you had to figure it out yourself. That was probably around ’94 or ’95, by which point I had a DAT machine and a tape numbered 15, which is where my first releases came from. We won’t talk about the previous 14.”

Was your minimal sound informed by your limited setup or a music-making philosophy?

“Definitely my setup – and lack of musical ability! You didn’t need to know what scales were to make this kind of music, it was about the sound rather than the notes you were playing. People were probably listening and thinking that the sounds were a little off here and there, but sometimes the more you know the harder it is to create that stuff. If you have an air of naivety and just make what you can without thinking too much, if it sounds good it sounds good.”

How were you recording tracks back then?

“I was doing everything live on the mixer, so I’d do two or three takes, listen back the following day and if it was good enough I’d move on to the next one, and if it wasn’t I’d scrap it and start again. I had no idea about the future – even when I was making records I wasn’t thinking of a goal or career path. I was just making the music for the fun of it and, as you mentioned, I didn’t have a lot of gear so I just had to learn how to get the most from those minimal bits of equipment. The equivalent now would be someone having a PC with a cracked version of Ableton, but for this sort of music you don’t need to have a fully-fledged Neve console, SSLs or high-end gear if the ideas are strong enough and the sound is right.”

Do you remain beholden to a limited setup?

“Limitations are quite important aren’t they? With computers, you’ve got instant recall so you can get really bogged down in the detail and sometimes lose that spark. For me, the key thing is to always finish things as quickly as you can. The great thing about computers now is that you can go in and fix a mix. The way I have my system set up, I’ve got everything running through a mixing desk, which doesn’t have recall, but I don’t take anything off it unless I’m 100% happy, whereas in the old days if I didn’t like how a right cymbal came in I wouldn’t do anything about it.”

Was the creation of your Mosaic label always intended to release other artists’ music?

“By 1995 I was making so much music and recorded a couple of pieces for a friend of mine

called Russ Gabriel who had a label called Ferox. He asked me to do a white label, which became Blue Spirit and that did rather well, so I thought maybe I should start my own. Once I’d put the first record out I decided I didn’t want it to be all about me, so after release four I included people like Aubrey, Mark Ambrose and, later, Mark Broom, but I was thinking more about the label representing music I appreciated than it being a business. It would have been quite boring for every track to be mine, and I knew I’d run out of ideas at some point, and eventually did [laughs].”

Was that the period 2003-2013 when you appeared to take a break from the industry?

“The downward turn lasted a lot longer than I’d anticipated. My distribution company went into administration and I hit a wall where I felt I was repeating myself too much and couldn’t make anything that I was happy with. I took a couple of months off, but before I knew it a year had passed. I was making some things here and there, but nothing that was up to the standard I wanted. When I did start again, the world of Ableton had taken over and I had to learn how to do it all over again. A label called Sushitech approached me about reissuing some old stuff and I told them I’d been making music again, which is when new tracks started to appear (around eight or nine years ago).”

What revitalised your creative process?

“You have to try and make yourself sound relevant, which is not necessarily by listening to what other people are doing because I don’t listen to house and techno when I’m in the studio because I don’t want to be influenced by other people’s ideas. I have a signature sound, so I might set myself a restriction of using one machine to come up with an idea or change my setup every now and then just to mix up how I work. If I’m having one of those days where even my kick drum is sounding crap after four hours, I know I need to change things. I’ve evolved the setup but essentially I’m kind of working how I always have with the Akai MPC as the brain of the operation.”

Do you think that taking a very minimalist approach to production amplifies the difficulty of what you’re trying to achieve?

“The problem with making minimal music is repetition, particularly in terms of your own ideas. Especially with ultra-minimal music, because all you essentially use is drums, bass, a couple of sounds and a few effects and you have to create enough interest to keep the listener engaged. Although a lot of my music is dancefloor-based I still like to do a headphone test and listen as objectively as I can to determine whether it’s doing enough to listen to away from a club. The great thing about DAWs nowadays is that you can overdub extra effects here and there, which you can’t do physically because you don’t have enough hands to put on the mixing desk.”

With minimalism you get the impression that the artist is agonising over every sound…

“The power of minimalism lies in the beauty of making music out of nothing, but it can be incredibly difficult when you’re agonising over reducing the cut-off on a sound just that little bit more. Sometimes you have to say to yourself, that’s enough – leave it, and, as you say, cutting back is often the key and I like to have lots of space in my music. However many tracks you release, your artistic temperament is always saying, that’s great, that’s not so good, that’s crap – I am crap, and then you repeat the cycle.”

Do you treat space as an equally important instrument in your productions?

“It is actually, yes. The gaps between the sounds and how the groove plays together with the harmonies make it a little bit more hypnotic. Too many musical elements can tire out the melodies and riffs, whereas if you just have a bass stab going you’re not really hearing it as music, you’re feeling it as sound rather than a harmonic construct. There may just be a riff, some drums and bass going on for 12 minutes, but how you manipulate the space between with delays and reverbs is the key to keeping the listener interested.”

Your latest compilation, Green Trax, features some quite old, unreleased material. Were you surprised by the strength of those archived tracks in retrospect?

“I had a label called Green that had six releases between ’96 and ’99, so it was a long process of recording everything from DAT to Logic and exporting it all until at one point we had 55 tracks to choose from. Essentially, all those tracks were made on a Roland TR-909, SH-101, Alpha Juno, and a Waldorf Pulse. I hate the phrase ‘take people on a journey’, but we had to make it work as an album. I hadn’t listened to those tracks in years, so it was quite rewarding and satisfying to think, actually, some of these are quite good, why didn’t I release them? I’m not really making this kind of music now, but they inspired me to play around with tougher, more banging sounds where there isn’t so much space in the groove.”

We read you’re a fan of sequencers like the Akai MPC and slightly more recent Native Instruments’ Maschine?

“The Akai MPC2000 was the hub of my setup from ’98 until I stopped making music, and when I started again all I had was Maschine and a laptop. Then I moved towards using an Akai MPC