1.Growing Up
My parents played music, which like any teenager I took for granted at the time. Then I discovered electronic and sample-based music and was instantly obsessed. All I had was one record player and a tape recorder so I’d make funny little tape collages.
2. Inspirations
At the moment, it’s Ryuichi Sakamoto and Haruomi Hosono. Their music is so broad and so uninhibited, drawing on everything from techno-pop to baroque music. Generally though for music, Kraftwerk, Juan Atkins, Debbie Deb, Sophie, Perfume, Michel Redolfi, Mix Master Mike, Holly Herndon, Arthur Russell, ESG… also writers like Ingo Niermann and Benjamin H. Bratton.
3.Your Crew
I’ve worked so many weird jobs around doing music. My first job was mixing bath salts in a cosmetics factory where we’d get these 50 kilogram bags of salt made for farmers and mix it with dried flavour powder, which the brand would then sell for around $100 per jar. Then I was a magician’s assistant for little while. The good thing about all these jobs was that I met so many people who made music, who’d teach me how to program synthesizers and drum machines. Thankfully for the last few years I can just do music all week, which is the best, and my crew is everyone I work with in doing that.
4.The Music You Make And Play
I just want my music to offer something new, for it to offer people a new experience. Even if people hate it that’s fine, as long as they have some kind of reaction to it. I just don’t want people to be like, “OK, that’s deep house, I know what that sounds like.” Growing up in a small country town, music was my doorway to the outside world and I still want to hear new things that challenge me.
5.Music, Right Here, Right Now
The biggest obstacle for dance music right now is that it’s become such a retro activity. Everyone wants to be a DJ who plays disco and house. I think for young people, the world has become so frightening that this music serves as a kind of comfort food, which I get. Thankfully that’s just starting to change again in Oz – there’s an amazing generation of artists who are all really young but will change everything in the next few years.
Lewis Cancut’sIndoor Rainforestis out now through NLV; and he appears atThe Chippo,Saturday December 17, with Air Max ’97, Nina Las Vegas, Swick and Strict Face.
