little green

AUTOMATIC TASTY: INTERVIEW

By StephenNeale – December 6, 2011

Automatic Tasty is the recording name of Jonny Dillon, who comes from County Wicklow in Ireland. Automatic Tasty’s sound is hard to pin down, he wrestles familiar elements like Detroit techno-electro, House and Acid into an arena that is completely his own. His productions are filled with romanticism, a sense of sadness and lush alienating melodies. It’s the endearing qualities of warmth, soul, rawness, peppered with just the right amount of weirdness that gives Tasty’s productions such charm.

Rather than imitating and flirting with every new musical trend, Tasty evolves a personal sound and takes it into unexplored territory with each release. In an age of digitalized studios and copy-cat productions, Tasty’s vintage sound is a breath of fresh air.

Here are a few tracks from his catalogue to get your earlobes wiggling.  Recommended for fans of the early AFX Analord series, Drexciya, Underground Resistance, Dexter, Luke Vibert etc.

 

 

Released on Dublin’s own Lunar Disko imprint, I Can See Your House From Here, is multi-layered synth excursion that floats atop a bed of crisp 707 percussion.

 

 

A combination of melancholic arpeggios, nostalgic pitch bens and hissing percussion are the ingredients that make the hilariously named, Discount Regretamine, an infectious cut from Tasty’s Big Like Plastic release.

 

 

A jacking house rhythm shaded with gloomy modular synthscapes from Tasty’s Life After Debt release.

Be sure to check out his soundcloud for more.

 

 

The gent himself was kind enough to share his thoughts with Little Green.

1. The majority of DJs and producers have elaborate websites all about themselves with the mandatory cringy profile pic, which has been photoshopped to bits. In your case it’s pretty hard to find anything even resembling a bio, so perhaps you could help formulate the Automatic Tasty tale and give us a brief bio now?

 

Hiya. Do they though? I couldn’t really be so arsed to do that, who would care? What would it even mean? It’s quite unimportant and I don’t have much to say in that regard. The name though came about when I was eating some Koka noodles with a mate while we were quite hungover. I love those noodles, and I was talking about how they act as an ‘Automatic Tasty’ for the brain. I enjoyed those words together.

Then I made a CD with some of the first trax I did for another mate and called it ‘Automatic Tasty’. He said then I should use the name for myself, so I did. It’s mindless and doesn’t mean anything direct, so that’s appealing. My granddad was having dinner with us a while ago and I was explaining about the music to him and he didn’t hear me right and thought I was called ‘Aromatic Toasty’. I felt really silly. Still, he insisted on hearing some and kept asking for a CD. It turns out he really enjoys the acid sound. He thought though that I was playing it all on my guitar, so next time he was out for dinner I showed him all the machines and that. He really loved it all, and wished someone had shown him that sort of stuff when he was young. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when he drove home playing that CD, to see him tootling along down the road blaring some acids of an evening.

 

2. There’s a distinct flavour running through your productions that shows a big love of music from Chicago and Detroit. Tell us about your influences and perhaps some that may not be so obvious.

 

Well yeh, of course I have a deep love for the musical traditions of both of those places, but this question of influence is a weird one. How do we define an influence in a way that makes sense? I used to mostly just hate electronic music, but a few years ago my mate Jones, I think it was, Jones or Conall, they showed me the Railway Raver. His record ‘Drop Acid not Bombs’ just took me away, full of such heartfelt groove and colour. It made me think ‘what is this acid music?’ and want to learn about it. I wonder what happened to Jordan Muscott and why he only made a handful records though?

I heard Drexciya and AFX’s Analord series at this time too, and I was totally done for then.  Likewise the music of Bochum Welt and Bogdan Raczynski and all this came around this time. I was spun out altogether, and a whole world of music opened up. I was lucky too, because my mates had already been listening to all this sort of stuff and more for millions of years, so the general tone when I expressed an interest in something was ‘What!? You’ve never heard this record?!’ and there would commence a twelve hour Underground Resistance session. I’d call up to my mate Chris’ place, and we’d sit there listening to records in his ‘til 7 or 8 in the morning, having beers and blasting records really loud. We couldn’t even converse over the music, like it was background stuff, it was hammered up, and when I’d want to chime in and say something or ask something, he’d have to kill the faders a bit so we could speak, and then ‘What!? You’ve never heard this record?!’ and on it would go.

I was lucky that many of my buddies had been into this stuff for years. We have the same in our buddy Lewi’s cottage; go down there with Adam say, who showed me millions of rave trax and stuff from my first interests, and we’ll listen to loads of brilliant records‘til all hours. We’d go mad dancing to Bogdan’s music in my kitchen when I lived in Dublin too. The music and vision of groups like Underground Resistance, Rephlex, Trax, it is these records and groups and associated artists whose material I have come to love deeply in my introduction to the world of electronic music.

So, maybe that deals with your question in a way, but it’s an unsatisfactory answer too, as there are many pictures and forms that I am moved by. Irish traditional music and sean-nós singing, as well as English language ballads from the Irish, British and Scottish traditions have a huge place in my heart, like wise so many old reggae and dancehall records too. Then there are bands and individuals with whom I have become slightly obsessed on introduction to them, like Crass, or the words and music of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Dennis Bovell, or John Martyn too particularly. I could go on and on, still though, that’s not illustrative of the range of influences that move us. Our influences are formed by our surroundings primarily, the loved ones and friends around us if we’re lucky, the people that make us wealthy beyond measure through our knowing them, or the feeling of being all the poorer at the loss of the people we love, the high pitched pain of grief brought through the experience of death, or heartache too. Even from those feelings can grow tall things of strength and happiness though.

There is so much at play around us all the time, nothing is ever still, everything humming together in a strange circle, ‘too small to see and too vast to comprehend’ that was something my uncle spoke in a poem of his. How we can we identify and categorise the things that move in us with any clarity or focus or clear understanding?

I have no idea what is going on really. I am often humbled and confounded by the total strangeness and hilarious absurdity of the world around. It’s beautiful and endlessly sad too, profound and pointless as well, and I am going to be gone from it one day, and you too reading this now, wherever you are. This sense of the strangeness of things is an influence.

I remember when I was little running into my back garden and asking my folks what life is and what’s going on and why are we alive. Hah! Not the type of question you want to be handed while trying to mow your garden into shape on a Sunday morning. So, does giving a list of records or books or films or paintings we love adequately illustrate the things that influence us? Or how and why we express ourselves in the way we do? I don’t know, but there you are.

 

 

3. How long was it before you started thinking that your sound was coming together and you were really happy with what you were making?

 

I don’t know really. I’m not sure that ever happened. I would’ve been really excited about stuff I’d made ages ago that I hear now and makes me shake my head a little, but that’s only natural when you’re growing along in something, and you have to be kind to yourself about it, so fair play to those early trax, I hope they’re happy.

I have no ideas what any of the stuff feels like for anyone else anyway, I make my music and then listen to it over and over, taking my own thing from it, I love it, and the process means a lot to me. It’s nice, really positive and surprising when you connect with people through it, and to see or speak to someone with whom it has resonated is special and I really appreciate that a lot. There’s a quote from John Coltrane with which I can identify, when talking about music he said something to the effect that communication is paramount and understanding is secondary.

I think it was him anyway, but it doesn’t matter. That’s something that I can identify with. The language of music is one that we don’t understand or experience in the same fashion as with everyday language say. Though both are totally abstract squawks, words and music, they refer to very different departments of meaning. For example I can play a piece of music or be at home recording something and feel all choked up when I’m playing it. You might hear it and it might resonate with you and you might react in a similar way. So we can both be sitting around blubbing away at some music that doesn’t directly ‘say’ anything in the typical sense. Isn’t that weird? In the Irish tradition, in mythology, there was a deity the Daghda, who had this magical harp, and when he played the seasons would order themselves correctly in time.

Long story short, there was this battle and his harp was stolen from the battlefield and whisked away. He went after it for days and nights and when he came to the place where it had been taken to, he called to it. It came to him, and he began to play there amongst his enemies. He ran through a series of tunes, the first was a ‘Geantraí’, a song to make you laugh, and made everyone laugh hysterically and uncontrollably; it was full of mirth and all this. Then he played a ‘Goltraí’, one to make you cry, and everyone began to weep without end and was full of sorrow and loss, then he played a ‘Suantraí’, a lullaby, and they all fell deeply asleep with the relaxation of it. He wanted to kill them all then for stealing his harp, but the lads who were with him convinced him not too so they legged it off home somewhere instead I guess. Later on then in the harping tradition, it was seen that the three types of music that a person should play should be able to make you laugh, cry or send you to sleep.

It’s strange that music can evoke these feelings in us, especially a more abstracted and instrumental form you would think, where it’s mostly colours and palettes organised in a way that doesn’t state anything explicitly. We can’t pour over the lyrics and find the meaning. I like that. I like to make the feeling bleed through the colour, without speaking any words. We are moved by the music and its landscape, and that shakes the feelings up in us.

 

4. You’ve a fair amount of material released, including a few 12inchs, what do you think is the best setting for listening to your tracks?

 

I’ve done fuck all really. The best setting for the music is while walking home at night on the back roads round where I live. Like, walking home from my mate Byrne’s field or from Kilcoole to Greystones, that can be a long dark walk; or the back roads in Delgany, or past fields or on buses too. Generally night time while looking at landscapes is best I think.

Like driving along up the fields around the sugarloaf, that’s a special area by where I live, and I sometimes make a CD of some recent music of mine and drive around up the hills there, take my missus’ car out and go around these tiny back roads that go on for miles. Lame eh? I like that feeling a lot, it’s surreal and otherworldly, peaceful but also quite edgy and you can get a bit freaked out. But that’s night time for you; it’s my favourite time for sure.

There was a tradition saying that if you were born in the night time you could see the otherworld, but not if you were born during the day. I like that sentiment; the feeling of that strange other landscape where music lives as being closer at night. Of course though, it’s also nice to have stuff on vinyl, because of the sound quality for one, and I enjoy it lots also because I am a person who likes tactile things and I love to put the needle on the record and have a mess of sleeves lying around my room and read the words and look for little things in the artwork and that. There’s also the good feeling attached to putting out a record, a little achievement and quiet pride in what you do, but that’s dwarfed by the fact of just making music and growing to express yourself more clearly and cleanly in it. Releasing a record comes as a pleasurable but distant second when placed in comparison with the process of exploring that strange terrain of music.

 

5. How would you say stylistically your music has evolved from ‘Big Like Plastic’ through to your current productions?

 

I don’t know. I can record sounds that are cleaner than when I first started, and make them sit together more neatly. At first they would have been like a choir of kids who had their shirts sticking out, and some of them were looking off to the left and right now and then, or talking to their neighbours and picking their noses, but now they have more tidily combed hair and are paying more attention and sitting neatly together, the little scamps.

I suppose the detail with which a person can paint a picture with music increases as they practice and refine what they’re doing. The reference points might remain largely the same; it’s just that you have a more refined palette to hand. My trax live under rocks and in trees and bushes, or are at this moment lying pissed on the side of a hill somewhere, or under the sea, or are tripping in a river someplace nearby.

Sometimes, too, they are in crowds of people when you’re looking at someone or you see someone go past on a bus quickly or notice something strange happening between people, or you are about to fall asleep or maybe when you’re at the pub with your mates, or having fun and talking shit with someone on a roof in a city. The feeling or landscape you draw from remains largely the same, roughly speaking; you just get better at putting it together as a picture. I’m sure these perspectives will all change with time.

Technically, for example, I feel I can be not so great with my stuff, but I am learning and exploring just getting to talk through what I’m doing, and if something is simple but expressive, then that is most important for me for now. Perhaps I’m a bit lazy in this regard though.

Me and my mate were saying recently, it’d be great to be in a huge band with loads of instruments where everyone was just doing one really simple thing, like brass section and guitars and bass and drums and on and on, with everything just rolling along in this big heavy fog, really simple and bouncing along.

I was also chatting about studios with a friend the other night and saying that if some scientist of audio and stuff came into my room and had a look at my setup, with only one working monitor, and a tired old hi-fi as my speaker setup, they might cry and give out to me. I give no real consideration to those things right now, maybe that will change but there are more important things to focus on at the moment. Like changing round the way I record trax.

I used to get something together that I was feeling, a certain mood I liked, and roll along with it and jam it over and work away going through it all, whatever. Then I’d record one giant 30 minute stereo wav of everything, going through all the pieces in it, different permutations and combinations of voices etc. Then I would edit that into a little track and you would have that same mood, slightly sewn together at certain intervals. Before that it had even less of a resolution, I would just record one track live altogether in one take and that was that.

Now what I do, after getting something that I’m feeling together, I go through all the parts, but I mute other stuff on the desk so I separate all the stuff out, basslines and chords and melodies and this. Then I put all the pieces back together in a computer. I sew up the audio using more jigsaw pieces than before you see? So it can be hard, because you lose the mood you had, and just have all these pieces then, and so often when I start to editing something I’ll think ‘What?! This sounds shit what the fuck was I doing?’ but it starts to come out of the fog again if you stick with it. And the benefit to this method is that you have more refined control over your jigsaw pieces, or little colours, and you can tell them to do small things without interfering with anything else. So because of that, you can go above the bare or raw feeling of the original mood you were drawn to, to another place again, one that it was beyond you to express before. So it’s the same process, it’s just that I’m increasing my resolution, like going from an 8-bit Nintendo to a 16-bit SNES to an N64 and so on. So perhaps I’m approaching a point where technicality will become a thing that I focus more on. I dunno.

6. To what extent do you improvise during your live performances?

 

I’m not sure that there’s any ‘improvisation’ as I would understand it. Jazz men improvise, I write sheets and sheets of A4 pages with scribbles all over them to tell me what to do when I’m playing, reminders of how many triggers a drum pattern is sending to my 101, so I can write a bassline or something, or what patterns and things to chain up etc.

I love those pages, there’s a lot of work put into them and I’d be upset if I lost them. I’d have lost my map. I draw pictures on them too. So in playing live I’m trying to be very rigid and find my way around. It’s like being the conductor of a shambling orchestra of rebellious old dears with short attention spans.

Another strange and difficult thing to come around when playing live is the fact of ‘body memory’. I noticed it when I changed my setup around, or played live the first few times. When I’m at home and have my setup, my gear is all arranged in a certain arrangement in space, and so my hands go to certain places to play chords, certain places to press run or stop, other places to work a drum machine etc.

When you play live you have to cram an amount of stuff into an often small, but always different space to your own at home. And your body isn’t used to it and so sometimes my hand will go to the wrong place for a second, say, to press run or stop, or I’ll feel a bit confused as to where things are, even when I can see them. It’s strange as well because it’s taking a very private and singular affair and placing it out of its usual context, so that instead of just being at home making some music at all hours of the night, I’m in a basement somewhere with lots of sweaty ravers flailing around and a plug has just come out or something’s fucked and it’s pitch black and you don’t know what it is and you’ve got to get it sorted super quick smart, cos people are going mad.

The last gig I played I thought I’ll avoid the whole darkness thing and I brought one of my mum’s lamps to the party to help me out. It was brighter, but a plugboard or something still managed to unplug itself at some point. Anyway, sometimes it works well and is pleasant and feelings run high. I keep my head down, leaning over my pages and playing chords and writing basslines or something, I don’t ever look at anyone really, I have lots to think about anyway, but I don’t have it in me to be waving about or anything, I’d be too embarrassed to look at people. I found it a little harder the few times I just played with an MPC because I can’t hide away behind stuff.

One of the first times I did play on the MPC in Dublin, I wanted to play under a blanket that was there.  I’ve played some really special parties that I’ll never forget though, that’s for sure.

 

7. How did you get involved with Lunar Disko?

 

Those assholes? Pfff. Don’t get me started. Did you know that last year they incarcerated me in their ‘Lunar Disko Basement’ on McMahon Street and told me in an unreasonable tone to ‘record some hits’ before they’d let me out again? I was invited over there under false pretenses, on the assumption that we were going to ‘Have a laugh’ and ‘Shoot the breeze’. When is that ever mentioned on the forums? Never, that’s when.

They could hear my progress as I churned out classics and Andy would shout horrible stuff like ‘crap bassline!’ and Barry would jump in with ‘totally rubbish chords!’ and they’d flick the light on and off really fast when I was in there. Have you ever tried to program a drum machine while someone flicks the light on and off really fast? It was really hard, and there were awful cowbell sounds everywhere in the track afterwards, and then they’d fly into a rage again, about the cowbells. Everyone’s so afraid of them. We appear all friendly when we’re out, and they come across so laid back and nice and that, but I swear I’m terrified of them, I’ve been ridiculed about it in the past but the truth needs to get out. I just hope they don’t bloody read this, or I’m fucked.

 

8. What is the best advice you’ve received with regards to making music?

 

Nothing really. When placed in comparison with just listening to music that is really inspiring or moving, details like that fall away.

I think it just good to do what you do and be quiet enough about it; there’s a pleasure in grazing on the more remote pastures. Just follow your heart and don’t pay undue attention to people who might give out about or criticise how you express your art or music or whatever, and likewise the same applies in the sense that you should probably avoid finding reasons to congratulate yourself over nice things people say. If you engage too much in that sort of thinking then you’ll have a warped set of reference points that will define an idea of success that rests on someone else’s perspective, which is nonsensical.

Just don’t go around like a silly wanker, basically. Here is a moving sentiment that was passed to me once some years ago – my godfather, my auntie’s husband, was a prolific jazz musician and amazing character too, and as he was towards the end of his life and quite ill I remember I rang my dad to see how everything was, and I said to pass my love to him before he passed. Anyway my pa came back home the next day with one of my godpop’s albums, and he had written to me on the sleeve inside saying ‘Chords connect us to music, and music is life – we are connected.’ And we are you know.

 

9. What can we expect from Analogue Tasty in the next year? Do you have any news or signings to a label you can tell us about?

 

Nothing, I’ve decided to pack it all in.