Guest Mix + Interview – skxllflower - Trap A Holics - Home For Trap and Err-Thing Urban

NYC-based producer skxllflower burst onto my radar earlier this year with the absolutely incredible Sean Paul flip “Scorcha.” Since then I have been nothing but impressed with the level of heat he’s been putting out. With a sound that mixes 140, garage, and grime, he is bringing the UK-influenced vibes in top form stateside. With his debut EP on the horizon, massive collabs on deck, and some serious steam behind him, we thought it was due time to connect with skxllflower for a guest mix + interview.

The mix is an absolute assault of unreleased heaters from himself in addition to IDs from Torcha, Don Jamal, Rakjay, blurrd vzn, Chef Boyarbeatz, and more. As for the interview, we go DEEP. He tells us about his love for dubstep and garage, why it took 15 years for skxllflower to come to life, blowing up off a Sean Paul bootleg, why trying to keep something fun is impossible, and so much more. This interview is a must-read, and the mix is a must-listen, dive in below.

Tell us about the mix. Where are we going when we press play?

Well, you’ll be going to the depths of my wip folders and some unreleased some homies have sent…a tune or two from back in the day SoundCloud, and hopefully a bunch of stuff you haven’t heard before 🙂

Where did your love for dubstep and garage originate? How has it evolved with time?

Without going too deep too early on, I went through quite a dark period during my time in University and was just in all the wrong places at all the wrong times. Actually, scratch that – it goes back even further – I’ve had many starts and stops with respect to dubstep/garage. One of the weird bits about getting older is that beginnings and ends start to lose a bit of their meaning, and experiences are a bit more fluid all the way through. When did I learn about dubstep? Does it count with electronic music as a whole? I had been making music on LSDJ with 1989 DMG Gameboys long before I knew dubstep existed. But, that’s a story for later on, of course.

My very first introduction (that I know of) to any bit of UK adjacent bass music was around 2007 with Pendulum’s drum and bass classic “Hold Your Colour” – it was this album that sent me into the electronic music rabbit hole, coming from mostly an indie rock/pop punk background. My friend had told me about “drum and bass” in class one day, and I remember thinking he was some type of idiot for calling two different instruments a whole genre. Lo and behold, a few google searches away and I was transported to electronic wonderland. Many years later, I’m still pulling that record back up every couple seasons and am just blown away at the depth of storytelling. Could it really be a computer doing all that?

But, you asked about dubstep, not drum and bass.

2010 rolled around, and I was a sophomore in high school. I had been listening on and off to various random internet genres since my encounter with Pendulum three years earlier – I think I was digging a bit too deep though, as I had still missed Burial and was finding much smaller artists to geek out about like Nullsleep, Bit Shifter, Je Mappelle, TREYFREY, cTrix…these cats making electronic tunes on the Gameboy soundchips. Trust me, this may seem tangential, but it’s important to your main question here.

I spent all my pocket change buying LED screen replacement kits and solder, broken Gameboy’s off of Ebay and trying to learn how to make tunes like that with such minimal gear. It was fascinating to me, how you can bend and twist the primitive oscillator shapes on that platform into genuinely emotional music, and I wanted a chance at that niche internet acclaim myself. It was during this time that the infamous Skrillex EP, Scary Monsters and You Know The Rest came out and took over the US’s ears – nobody could escape the growl. My mind immediately went into “how can I emulate this with the Gameboy?”-mode. So, I started to make dubstep. On LSDJ.

It wasn’t great, but it was a grinding period of learning the fundamentals of synthesis from the ground up without a mentor. I had no idea why a sawtooth wave sounded how it did, but I knew what I could use it for and how to manipulate it (to the soundchip’s upper limits, of course). The next inevitable step was moving onto something with a bit more capability – FL Studio 9.0 and the infamous Vengeance sample packs, where I’d pick up more fundamentals before heading off to University with some vague idea of what I wanted to do with my life.

And here we are, back at the beginning – this is why I say beginnings are fluid. I had known what “dubstep” was for years, had analyzed it, written it, attempted to remake it, tore it bit by bit down to it’s fundamental building blocks, and had never realized I missed the most important step – it’s not about “how to bass”, it’s about “how does the bass feel”.

One lonely evening in a cloud of God-knows-what, outside the Honors dormitory that I did not have the grades to be living in, I was parked on the front steps with my headphones in, scrolling the Soundcloud feed. I came across a tune called “Moodswing” by an artist from Bristol, UK named Sorrow. I’ve mentioned this tune before in another interview with my good friends over at MendoWerks – but, it’s a tune I’ll mention every chance I get. The profundity of the songwriting, the depth of texture, and organicism of the sonic palette that it consisted of left me awestruck. I had been a fan of computer-based music for nearly 8 years at this point, and had never heard something that had sounded like the trees themselves were singing to me.

I may be exaggerating here slightly, but from where I was sitting at the time of first listen, I could not give it more applause. It had hit so close to home – at the time, I was heartbroken and lost, had no idea where I wanted to end up, who I wanted to be, not even what kind of artist I aspired to grow into. Everything in my life was hazy, and felt as if there were too many possibilities to pick any one of them and commit to it, with the carnal awareness that time was passing by as I waited to make a choice.

That tune sparked something in me – I knew that if I tried hard enough, I could practice and train my way up to making a piece of art that would strike someone else the way Moodswing (and the rest of Sorrow’s 2013 LP Dreamstone) hit me.

Discovering Burial followed extremely soon after, and I had realized that this is what dubstep is – It’s not only the loud and overbearing commercialized sensory overload I had grown to love and appreciate – it was also the subtle, darkened gloominess of the fog on a field somewhere in the British Isles; dubstep was the rumble of the metro, the unfinished mp3’s shared in long-closed Skype rooms, the heartbeat of entire cities – just as much as it was the pop-culture explosion of 2010-2013 and the notoriety of NI Massive and Serum tutorials flooding Youtube as producers tried to one-up each other with the most intricate sound design in the scene.

If Burial, Sorrow, and Skrillex could mark their own chapters in the Dubstep canon, then what am I here to add? My years of learning and practice and caffeinated nights awake in the studio reading old forum posts and spectral analysis have given me a pen, and the blank pages of music history are always available to be written on. Maybe skxllflower will be just a footnote, but since that night hearing Moodswing, I made it my life’s goal to make it into the books in some shape or form.

once skxllflower started to materialize, I think I had just matured enough to stop caring so much about audience perception, and realized I just wanted to make tunes and share them at the end of the day. It’s not truly as serious as I used to make it seem to myself.

You replied to one of our tweets saying that you had been producing music for almost 15 years before you started releasing it. What took you so long to start releasing it?

With that lengthy introduction out of the way, I’ll be a bit more breezy with the rest here – What took so long to release? Well, earlier tunes I had released under a few different aliases before settling here on skxllflower. I had a few records out under Frostbyte back in my chiptune days, which are still up on the internet somewhere if you fancy a dig (please don’t).

I had some dubstep tunes come out under “dakun” – notably, God Will Let Me Know in 2017, as well as a remix of Kotei – ICHI on a now-defunct label (as far as I can tell). I was lucky enough to have that pressed next to MOREOFUS’ remix of the same tune that same year. But, that was mostly it – I had a teaser for an EP called Pariah up on SoundCloud that had gotten some attention in the Future Garage scene as well, that I neglected to release. I think the majority of it came down to never feeling good enough, I hadn’t hit my personal standard of feeling comfortable with something being a permanent mark on my artistic record. If I released something that I could out-do in a month, how could I live with something publicly available that I know nowadays could have been executed better?

Unfortunately, this mentality had sent me into a spiral, and I ended up being completely lost as an artist for nearly 6 years – I had retreated into the behind-the-scenes work, focusing primarily on working as a beatmaker or mixing engineer, looking for contract jobs in the technical side, and had actually done pretty well for myself there. But, once skxllflower started to materialize, I think I had just matured enough to stop caring so much about audience perception, and realized I just wanted to make tunes and share them, regardless of ever-developing skillsets. It’s not truly as serious as I used to make it seem to myself.

Unless I really hate it, of course. Then, it goes in Dropbox never to be played again, until a few years later when I ask myself “damn, why did I never put this out?”

Now that you’re releasing music regularly has it changed the way that you create? Do you still make stuff that you’ll never release?

Is there any artist that lets everyone see everything? I absolutely make tons of music that will never come out – there’s an episode of Star Trek Voyager, where the ship essentially gets cloned, and the Captain of one clone sacrifices her own ship to save the other. Long story short, her First Officer asks her a very personal question about her decision-making at the end of the episode, and she replies something along the lines of “one of the benefits of being Captain, is that she gets to keep some things to herself”. I look at art this way as well – sometimes, being the artist, you get the benefit to share only what you’re happiest with.

I think what has changed, however, is that I’m much more comfortable calling something “finished”. I’ve realized that what I perceive as 80% finished, everyone else will hear as 100% finished – if I can reach 80% to my own ears, anything extra is just a bonus and it might as well be heard by more than just myself. Unless I really hate it, of course. Then, it goes in Dropbox never to be played again, until a few years later when I ask myself “damn, why did I never put this out?”

Did you ever think a Sean Paul flip would be your breakout track? How did it come together and what made it take off?

I had hoped it would – I had the idea while folding laundry one night. I placed a t-shirt in the drawer, and it just popped in my head. “Sean Paul would be insane on a dubstep record, no?”

So I just went in the other room and made it. I had a feeling Twitter would get a kick out of it, and it turns out they did. Twitter definitely likes a bit of cringey nostalgia, but it can’t be too obvious or it’s millennial-coded. If I did Temperature, it wouldn’t have worked. I chose Scorcha because it’s a tune most people would be unfamiliar with, but they’d recognize his voice and probably be able to hear Sean Paul completely recontextualized without a preconceived notion of what a Sean Paul song could sound like. I think keeping the production simple, letting his vocal carry and writing around his energy made it so much more palatable than just throwing the Temperature acapella on any average WIP.

You have to do things with intention if you want them to land, especially jokes and bits. It’s the execution that makes it funny – like the fake Burial Boom Boom Pow remix I did, if I just haphazardly did some foley drums and called it a Burial track, it wouldn’t have clicked. It did a quarter of a million views because it really sounds believable! I made it with all the same tools Burial did, and pulled out all the magic tricks I know from that world in order to really make it land. Well-executed garbage is how I describe those kinds of posts – maximize effort, maximize the ridiculousness, and minimize the amount of filling in the gaps on the listener’s part for them to get the joke.

Sometimes, like in Scorcha’s case, an idea just comes together so well off that you just know it’s going to connect to someone, they’re gonna get the joke and love it – and I’m so glad that it did. Not for the followers, but for the laughs that were shared the few days it was lucky enough to trend.

Your debut EP ARTFORM is on the way. What can you tell us about the project? What was your goal in putting it together?

Well, it’s 7 tracks long – and it’s my first fully complete body of work in the dubstep world. I think of all the genres I’ve worked with in my time, dubstep took me the longest to feel like I could make something I would personally respect. It couldn’t just be something that fits in, something that kept up with the Jones’, although I’m sure everyone thinks and says that. The goal was 80% familiar, 20% “what the hell was that” – that’s the ratio I wanted to hit, and I feel like I managed – at least to my own ear.

You seem to have an affinity for retro glitch art. What drew you to it? Do you create it for yourself?

I do! I’ve been chasing the high of watching late night TV on the CRT I grew up with in my room as a kid. Something insanely warm and cozy about the whine, the colors, the odd bits of flashing light you get around the room as random advertisements play on in the middle of the night. The glitching I guess is a bit of a secondary thing to me, more of a way of creating abstractions in the visual rather than it being interesting because of the glitch – some of my favorite bits of visuals I’ve done actually don’t glitch at all. Just the nature of filming on Hi8 and playing it back through the Commodore monitor gave the scene all it needed to feel like my own.

Do I create it for myself? I think the best answer to that is that I don’t make it for anyone else, I don’t think 🙂 It’s like with my music – I respect the audience, I appreciate the listener, and I’m grateful for every second someone takes out of their day to listen to or look at my works, but I make all of this to indulge a personal interest. I’d liken it to training in martial arts – there are many long, difficult hours of practice without anyone present to view, and the rare moments of public display where everyone is welcome to see – but the martial artists are in it for the love of training, whether it be for mastery of the craft or personal discipline. The audience is always getting the manicured glimpses into an arduous journey searching for some abstract artistic nirvana, if it’s even really out there at all.

You’ve produced some crazy successful tracks for artists like Limi, Louyah, and Kota The Friend which are very different from your skxllflower sound. How do you balance between your artist project and other production avenues? How did those placements come together?

The balancing act between work and art isn’t easy to manage – its simplicity is what makes it so difficult. The solution is just to let them be separate things, but when you do the same process for both avenues, how can you avoid the crossover?

I think having the styles be so drastically different from what I make in my own time is a benefit – I feel I’d have a much more difficult time doing ghost production work inside dubstep/garage; there would always be this tear between wanting to keep an idea for myself or sell it off, this uncomfortable back and forth between personal ambition and keeping the client/artist happy with their end result. There’s no Limi track that I would take home as a skxllflower track, so it makes it much easier to let those worlds exist in parallel.

It’s a process thing as well, starting a skxllflower tune usually begins with designing percussion, where starting a Limi tune is more of a dance between instrumentation and where she decides to place her voice – in that world, I’m more of an instrument than an artist. I’m there to hear what she’s doing, and react to it with the production as a supporting character – it’s not about me.

The same goes for any other artist I work with – I’m a professional in that world, meant to deliver to the artist the most effective actualization of their vision as is possible, and make the most of our combined skills. In this world, with dubstep/garage and the like, I’m forever a student with the freedom to make mistakes and work at whatever speed that the music naturally comes out.

One is a game of proficiency and execution, the other is a game of fluidity and mysticism – even though they both draw from the same pool of skills.

To the rest of your question – I hate to call them placements, that part of the industry being so cold and impersonal for me. I have relationships with every artist I work with. I’ve never been one to “send beats” or mass-email people trying to land an opportunity (not that those are bad things to do, it’s just not the game I personally want to play). Every opportunity I’ve had in the industry has come from making friends, owing favors and doing favors, right place/right time type shit, falling in love, falling out of love, buying a meal for someone when the card bounced, showing up and finishing the job when someone else couldn’t. It’s those things that help you get where you’re going, at least in my experience. Be genuine, but don’t let yourself get steamrolled.

You’ve created a YouTube series called Producer Therapy. For those who haven’t watched it, why should they check it out? What have you learned through creating the series?

Well, I think a good indicator would be if you’ve enjoyed my ramblings thus far, you’d probably enjoy the series 🙂

I wanted to speak about some of the less spotlighted bits of working in music, whether it be as an artist or as someone on the industry side doing work-work…There’s a lot of parts of this game that can be insanely frustrating and discouraging, from writer’s block to managing social life in a world where everyone’s starving for their 15 minutes. Having been in this space for long enough to see enough, I’ve noticed that a lot of people that decide to go the YouTube path tend to want to share the “Secrets of Production” with synth tutorials and the sort – and don’t get me wrong, I do want to make more of those technical videos as well – but I felt that there could be a lot more to it than only that.

Production is only 50% technique. The rest is about managing your feelings on what you’re making and not giving up on a project before it starts to sound good. Even this many years into this all, I still experience – with every single tune – a distinct moment where it goes from sounding like crap to sounding “real”. There’s not a plugin or spectral analyser in the world that could tell you why – it just does. It’s like a light switch. And, there’s so many other little mind games like this that pop up along the process of making a tune. It can be so easy to get tripped up by them. Nobody talks about these things, so nobody knows that others deal with them too. I figured I might as well be the one to get on there and talk about it.

Also, I’ve gotten a lot faster with Davinci Resolve. Always new things to learn, and any time I can flex the ol’ brain muscle and learn something new, I’m up for it (as long as it’s interesting, of course).

What’s the last piece of art that truly impacted you (can be any medium)? Why did it resonate with you? What made it special?

I was lucky enough to go to the Banksy Museum with Limi for my most recent birthday and had a wonderful time with plenty of thoughtful conversation about his work, so I’m tempted to say that.

But, I’ve recently been introduced to Saul Leiter’s photography – he was one of the first to do street photography on color film with long focal length lenses, making use of image compression to give his shots this almost “painterly” feel – his photos are absolutely devastatingly unique. Some don’t even look like photographs. A lot of photography blows past me, so many perfectly composed rule-of-thirds style photographs with nice depth of field, gorgeous bokeh, all that. Just shots that look “right” but don’t really have a distinct character that distinguishes one human with a camera from the next.

But seeing Saul’s works throw traditional composition out the window and show these odd moments in time hit me in a way that made me think about what I use my camera for a bit deeper than I had before. There’s some incredible shots he took that others would have never seen, and nor would I if not for Saul being in the right place at the right time.

If you’ve ever gotten lost in your head, looking for the most forgettable, liminal place in the restaurant while you’re at the family gathering, shying away from the conversation at the table, I’d imagine you’d find something of value in Saul’s photos.

If it’s not fun, do something else. Trying to keep something fun is impossible – fun is abstract and out of your hands, not a process that can be controlled.

How important is enjoying the process of creation for you? How do you keep it fun?

If it’s not fun, do something else. Trying to keep something fun is impossible – fun is abstract and out of your hands, not a process that can be controlled. And it’s a very binary thing, at that. I’ve found that I’ve made some of the technically “best” tunes while having the worst time and hate them the most, and made some of the worst, sloppiest, disorganized heaps of shit that sound amazing when I was having the time of my life. Guess which ones you all get to hear by the end of the year? 🙂

We don’t have a lot of time to live – there’s better ways to spend a day than making a tune you’re gonna bin anyway. Try again when you’re not enjoying it – at least, that’s how I do it.

Is Fetty Wap underrated?

At large, I think Fetty Wap gets memed on quite a bit – but you have to remember, he had a string of hits that were absolutely record-smashing, because he was able to stand out in a rap scene that was relatively stylistically stagnant in the mainstream (I was a very casual listener at the time, so I heard only the biggest of biggest or smallest of smallest). Of course, you had some artists that were also experimenting with more outlandish vocal styles at the time, notably Young Thug, but I think Fetty was able to execute it in such a cohesive sonic aesthetic that was both recognizable and familiar, yet different enough to land in a pop sense.

He hit that ideal ratio of familiar to “what the hell” that I was talking about with ARTFORM, and he hit it at the perfect timing for it to snowball into massive commercial success with a lasting impact. I think artists like Young Thug introduced the idea of these wilder vocalizations and highly melodic flows, and Fetty Wap was able to take that to the average listener a bit further away from hip hop’s epicenter.

I’m no rap historian though, so I may be totally wrong on the timing of all this, but at least from where I was standing during that era, Fetty Wap kinda had a similar moment for hip hop that Skrillex had with dubstep – lots of love and lots of hate all at once, and I’m sure it was difficult to deal with. I think we can thank Fetty for his contributions, and I really hope that he gets another round of renewed love at some point. I’m going with currently underrated, with a chance of being properly rated in the next few years if he wants to make a run at it.

Create to create – if you’re doing it for anything else, you’re gonna run out of steam.

Any final words?

Create to create – if you’re doing it for anything else, you’re gonna run out of steam. Make sure you like what you do. Double check that you’re making what you want to hear, not what you think others want to hear, or you’re gonna cringe at it later and wish you made something else. Listen to ARTFORM if you get a minute, go for a walk, have a swim, go to sleep late and share a joke with the cashier. Be a human, and don’t forget the pants tag goes in the back? I flew to Europe with my boxers on backwards by accident. Learn from my mistakes.

ARTFORM, October 2024 (i think)

with love,
skxllflower •,•

skxllflower TRACKLIST FUXWITIT MIX