Alexander Panos discusses his background and approach to making music.
Alexander Panos is an electronic producer and songwriter hailing from northern Illinois. I came across his music last year when he released his debut album Nascent, and I was immediately floored. The masterful sound manipulation, impeccable pacing, seamless control of dynamics… This was not what I was expecting from a debut album from an artist I’d never heard of. It actually made me so happy I couldn’t stop smiling and laughing. As I’ve lived with Nascent, I’ve come to appreciate so many of its meticulous intricacies, recurring sounds and hidden melodies. I was lucky enough to sit down with Panos to discuss his creative process and experiences making music. You can find our discussion of the specifics of Nascent here, and you can read about what brought Alexander Panos to where he is today below.
David Feigelson: Firstly, I would like to get to know you better. I listened to Nascent because a friend recommended it to me, and I’m a huge fan. I have a lot of specific questions about the album, but before I get to them, I’m curious about your background, how long have you been making music, producing, etc. What brought you to this point?
Alexander Panos: Sure, so I started making music in like 2008-2009, when I was about 12-13. My family isn’t very musical — my grandma played piano but it was never a big thing in my household or community — so I was very much discovering it through the internet. I started on this website called newgrounds.com, it was an old site oriented around flash animations/flash games, but they had a music community. The artist that got me into writing electronic music posted his stuff there.
DF: What artist was that?
AP: He goes by the moniker Dimrain47, very 2005! I had never heard electronic music like that before, all these crazy, blazing synth solos, and it really drew me in. Almost immediately I knew I had to figure out how to make this kind of music.
DF: Was it also very sound design-y stuff? Or did that come later?
AP: Not really, that definitely came later. Sound design was only something I really started exploring in the late game. At least compared to how quickly most people progress now, given the abundance of online tutorials and resources; that wasn’t as big of a thing when I started.
DF: How did you learn?
AP: It was really just trial and error. I didn’t know many people who made music. I had friends who were in orchestra or taking guitar lessons, but nobody was really creating their own stuff. So I was a little alone in that for a while, but eventually I stumbled across a few musicians that were parts of online communities that I was brought into. I’m a firm believer that when you’re surrounded by people that are as good as or better than you, you start improving so quickly. So that was definitely a large part of it.
DF: Have you met those people in person?
AP: Yeah, so the first person I met who was a music friend was actually from Texas. We just bonded really quickly and very deeply, and he was my first internet friend. It was actually through him that I was introduced to a lot of the music communities that I’m a part of right now.
DF: What communities are you a part of?
AP: There was a net label that existed from like 2014 through 2018, called Surreal Recordings, and I was a part of that for a while. One of the labels associated with Surreal was a more bass music oriented, neurofunk oriented label called Upscale Recordings. I got to know one of the owners of Upscale really well, on a personal level. Over the course of writing my album I got closer with him and was integrated into the community through that friendship. Now I’m pretty strongly associated with Upscale. They helped a lot with the promotion of Nascent, and I just played a few shows around the states because of Upscale.
DF: With other artists from the label?
AP: Yeah, yeah.
DF: Where’d you go?
AP: I did a special guest set at Driftmore Festival, which is a bass music festival in Wisconsin. I played Infrasound Equinox, which is a larger scale bass music festival in Minnesota. Upscale also actually curated its own crazy multimedia event in St. Petersburg, Florida, and that was all of us, all the major artists on that label. It was a ton of fun.
DF: What does multimedia festival mean?
AP: Oh, like there was more than just music. Like we had live visuals, DJs, dancers, people spinning fire, there was a record shop built into the venue, food vendors, clothing vendors, live painting, etc. It was a whole immersive experience. It’s really interesting because the music I make isn’t bass music, but it’s just through this association, because Upscale has their roots in bass music, that my live presence is in that scene. But it’s actually really great because in that particular music scene, good quality sound reproduction is very important, so I actually got to play my music on very high quality sound systems. If the system wasn’t meeting that level of quality, a lot of the details in my music wouldn’t translate very well. Plus, the community is generally very open minded and welcoming so I’m pretty grateful to be in that space.
DF: When you play live, is it like your studio stuff, or do you do more DJ type sets?
AP: I haven’t had enough time to really figure out a live performance environment, because I released Nascent and then immediately started playing shows. It’s less live than I want, but it’s basically myself with my computer, a keyboard, some MIDI controllers, and a microphone. So I’m singing, playing along with these stemmed out versions of the tracks.
DF: So the guitar is prerecorded?
AP: Yeah, things like that. And there are just some things that you really can’t accurately recreate in a live environment that are just better left to the computer to handle. There are some things humans can’t do, musically speaking.
DF: You talked about learning electronic music and coming up, but I know you also sing and play piano and guitar on this record as well. How did those things come to be? They sound very proficient too.
AP: Oh, it’s funny you say that because I can barely play the guitar. For piano, I’ve sort of built up the skillset simply as a byproduct of composing music. I can improvise pretty well on piano, but guitar is a different story. A lot of that is happening in post-production, where I’m just recording the same take a trillion times and then splicing together each note individually to at least create the illusion that there’s a sense of proficiency.
DF: It does sound very good. Certainly not stitched together in the way some of the glitchy electronics do, they sound like fluid takes.
AP: That’s good, glad to hear that, it’s a relief.
DF: At the end of “Cycles,” is that just guitar or is that a different string instrument? It sounded a bit like a mandolin to me.
AP: Oh yeah, that’s a nylon string guitar. That was actually the first guitar I ever bought, it was like sixty bucks off Craigslist. It’s kind of like this shitty beginner guitar, but because I’ve just written so much important music with it, I’ve developed this relationship with the instrument, and it just ends up everywhere in my music.
DF: Cool, one last big picture question, what would you say your influences are for this album?
AP: Yeah, so Bon Iver is probably the biggest inspiration.
DF: *shows my 22, A Million tattoo*
AP: Wow, that’s fantastic. Dude, I met somebody recently with a 22, A Million tattoo as well. Yeah, that album changed my life, in so many different ways.
DF: Please tell me more about that, I love hearing about other people’s experiences with that album.
AP: Yeah, absolutely. So, I guess it’s worth touching on, because this will come up later — “CRΣΣKS” came out in 2016 and I was totally blown away by that whole concept, and what was happening with his voice. I found out he was using something akin to a vocoder, it sounded like one but it kind of wasn’t, and the more I listened to it the more I developed an idea of what was happening. So I spent the next few months developing a prototype of a harmonizer to emulate what he was doing. That harmonizer, which I developed on and off for the next three and a half years, ended up being the staple in my album. It’s that artificial choir kind of sound. It takes a monophonic input signal, like a vocal, or a synth or something, and then for every note that you play on a keyboard, it clones that input signal once per note and then pitch shifts each clone to the pitch of the notes that I’m playing. So you can sort of emulate this really big vocal sound. I found it to be such a visceral extension of my own individuality and voice, and I learned that from 22, A Million. That album has done so much to influence how I think about vocals and how I think about integrating organic sounds and poetry and songwriting into my background as an electronic music producer. I spent so many hours walking through the natural spaces I live around, listening to these albums, and just deepening my connection with his music, his work as a songwriter and a community builder. It’s life changing but it happened very gradually, you know? It’s funny, while I was writing Nascent, I always told people I wanted my album to feel like a Bon Iver album. [Nascent] isn’t gonna sound like it, but what 22, a million does to me when I’m in those natural spaces, like at the lake or in a grassland or something, I want that feeling to come across through my work.
DF: I would say that about my own music too, that’s a really good way to put it.
AP: That’s awesome, yeah.
DF: When you design your harmonizer, is it just a plug-in chain? It’s not hardware is it?
AP: No, it’s all software. It’s designed in this programming environment called Max MSP, which is a node-based programming environment. It’s like basically connecting objects to each other via patch cables, where information flows through patch cables, and each object will process that information, whether that’s audio, control data, video, whatever.
DF: Do you have a programming background, or did you just pick that up as you needed to?
AP: No, so I studied music composition and sound design at university, and it was there that I was introduced to Max. The first draft of my harmonizer, which sounded like shit by the way, was submitted as the final project for one of my classes.
DF: I understand the technical routing signals and pitch notes, but how do you change the tone, from it sounding like shit to getting it where you think it should be?
AP: Yeah, so that’s why it took about three years on and off. There were a lot of things I didn’t understand. It was just about deepening my knowledge of DSP, listening more deeply to what was happening in Bon Iver’s harmonizer, and slowly putting the pieces together. So things like getting the panning to work properly; how it spreads each re-pitched voice across the stereo field, that was a big thing. And also figuring out how to process the formants of the harmonizer. Basically, I managed to create a whole performable instrument. And that’s how I think about it — as an instrument. There are harmonizers that are commercially available these days, but the problem is these plug-in companies are thinking about it as if it were like a chorus or a reverb, like some effect to throw on in certain sections of a song. But you can really do so much with it, and there’s a bunch of sound design that I’ve made using the harmonizer that you wouldn’t expect. The timbral variety is so broad.
DF: One of my favorite things from Bon Iver, and specifically 22, is that he’s manipulating all of these very human sounds — voice, acoustic guitar, etc. — and distorting them, blowing them out, putting them through all these weird processes, but the end product is so emotive and human. I hear some of that in your work also, and that’s definitely in line with that use of the harmonizer.
AP: Yeah absolutely, that’s definitely what I try to do. All the technical shit, as complicated or uninteresting as it might be, is all in service of the pure emotional expression. I’m really just trying to get that across, and all of that stuff is just how I elevate that expression.
DF: So I know for Porter Robinson, Nurture was almost born out of listening to 22, A Million, it helped him get out of a dark place. I hear some Nurture in Nascent as well, I don’t know if that was as intentional.
AP: So I get a lot of Porter comparisons, but the majority of the album, like nine of the ten songs, were started and were well into the writing process months before Nurture was announced. I’m aware there’s an overlap in our visual styles. You could attribute that to the shared influence of Bon Iver. That said, I have work dating back to my years at university which is in this style. But honestly, I don’t think the two albums sound very similar. Like, what on Nurture sounds like “Dream Extinction”, or “Equinox”, or “reasonsnotto”? Now, that’s not to say that I dislike Nurture, I think it’s a great album. I think “Trying to Feel Alive” is such an incredibly powerful message.
DF: At the festival (Second Sky 2022) he actually said that song was really underrated and he thinks it’s the best song he’s ever written.
AP: I would agree with that. Music about writing music is what I’m most interested in these days. I really resonate with that theme because the process of creating, the years that making an album takes out you, with that level of vulnerability, it just wipes you out. You sacrifice all these parts of your life for the music, and there’s self-doubt and a plethora of mental health problems to boot. All you want to do is this one thing, the thing you were born to do, and there’s all these obstacles. And when you write music, you typically tend to pull from lived experiences. So when you’re writing an album, and you’re having all these problems writing the album, the album ends up becoming about writing the album. There’s a good deal of that in Nascent — the consequences that came from enduring its writing process.
DF: Let’s talk about that, because you have a few quotes on your Bandcamp about this album that I thought were very intriguing. I read them before I even listened to the album, and it made me that much more excited to listen to it.
AP: I appreciate that.
DF: So you say “Nascent is about becoming, the desire to become a better human being, longing to actively participate in the world around you, striving to actualize your potential, and finding meaning in this process. Over the past four years, these have all been things I’ve struggled to bring to fruition, due to my own shortcomings. Nascent is the embodiment of all the emotions which emerged from this struggle.” What was the struggle, and what happened in your life over the course of making this album?
AP: Yeah, there are a lot of things that contributed to that. I graduated university in 2018, and immediately became very lost in life. When you’re a musician, your life path is usually atypical compared to the societal norm, so a lot of my personal friends from high school or university moved on at this particular rate and advanced their lives in certain ways, and I always felt behind the curve because I’m pursuing this thing. The more time the writing process took, the more I became painfully aware of this fact, and it was just like, I’m still writing the album. It turned into a thing I hated to tell people about. It’s just like, “How have you been?” “Well I’m still doing that thing I told you about like 6 months ago…” It’s difficult to feel proud or convey the accomplishments that you have made in the process, because sometimes they’re just too personal, or really technical, and sharing them wouldn’t necessarily be very meaningful to others. So on that particular note, I never felt like I was meeting the expectations I had from my family, my friends, and society as a whole. But, despite that, I knew I had to write this album. Even as much as it hurt living through that judgment — which came from both sides, I would be judged by others and judge myself, so there was a lot of shame involved — I knew that it would be worth it, to have done this thing. As I mentioned online a few times, Nascent is about becoming a better person, and wanting to participate in the world around you. I always told people that writing this album is the first step in that process. Through its creation I’ve learned so much about myself, and I’ve grown a lot because of it. I think that would be one of the many ways to respond to your question. I don’t think it’s a great answer.
DF: No it’s good as a jumping off point, I have some follow up questions. You mentioned the path of a musician being somewhat different from a traditional career path, has that been scary or exciting or both? What has grappling with that been like? For me, there’s a great deal of excitement in not participating in whatever the traditional career path would be, but it’s also incredibly scary in that there aren’t the same benchmarks or metrics for success that you can be checking to know you’re making progress.
AP: That’s a good way to put it. I feel like people are supposed to change at a certain rate. Sometimes it takes longer or shorter to make that change happen. I wouldn’t say that it was necessarily exciting. It was scary insofar as I was taking a risk, but it was more isolating than anything else. That was one of the predominant emotions. When you work on something like that, at least in my case, it ends up being a lot of time just spent indoors, and even though I started it in early 2019, a good portion of it was written through the meat of the pandemic, which didn’t help at all. So yeah, it was just a lot of being in my room, working on this thing, feeling like I’m hardly living, even though I’m pouring my all into this project. It was difficult to grapple with that feeling for a while.
DF: That makes sense. When you say you’ve learned about yourself over this process, what does that look like?
AP: I’ve become more aware of the things that I need to change, and the steps I need to take to live actively. But most importantly, it’s learning who I am as an artist. The year before I started Nascent, I was totally lost in every capacity. Having just graduated and struggling to understand this new era of my life, I didn’t know who I was, both as a person and as an artist. I thought I could be a bass music DJ, a lo-fi hip-hop beat maker, a modern classical composer, and a pop music producer, all separately at the same time. I was trying to pursue all of these avenues that always left me feeling very insincere with the end result. When I started writing “Cycles” in early 2019, which was the first thing I wrote for the album, it was like this convergence where all of my disparate interests aligned and I saw a path forward. Through that exploration of this sound palette and just being truly vulnerable as an artist, I ended up discovering this style and artistic identity. And you know, even that is a double edged sword, because once you become aware of your own artistic identity, it’s like “okay, I have to make a song that sounds like me,” rather than just letting that emerge naturally. That’s why most of the songs were started in 2019, because I wasn’t attached to any particular identity. I was at the bottom of a fucking pit, but at the same time I had nothing to lose. All bets were off and I could just try anything and see what worked. It was a very creative time period. Then around 2020 I was like okay, I’m the guy who makes these kinds of sounds, and makes these particular decisions, and the album writing process became more challenging as a result.
DF: Why did that make it more challenging?
AP: Because the album has a particular space it exists in, and you’re trying to make music that both fits into that space and sounds like you, without making an “Alexander Panos type-beat.” You want to let the music come out of you naturally. Actually, writing “re:Turning” was the biggest barrier to finishing the album, because I had the most trouble specifically doing this. I just couldn’t figure out how to write it. I knew narratively how it should end, and even sonically what I wanted to do, but emotionally it never felt right. And honestly, it still doesn’t, like I’m still learning to accept that song as part of the whole work. It’s slowly happening. But yeah, that was really tough, I basically have a whole album of scrapped tenth songs.
DF: That’s crazy for me to hear because that’s one of my favorite songs. I feel like it wraps up the album very well, especially coming off of “catch it,” those two kind of go together for me.
AP: I don’t think anybody else would ever be able to perceive the dissonance I have with that song, because it’s literally just how I feel about it emotionally. When I listen to the album, I’m like, “yeah, I did everything I wanted to…” except for this one thing, this one feeling. But I think as more time elapses, and I start to look at it more as part of the whole experience, it’ll sort of settle into place. When I first released Nascent, I would always skip that song. I feel like the last minute ended the album really well, but the first half of that song always had me like “eh, I don’t know, I feel kinda off,” but, you know, it worked out.
DF: When you say you were born to do this, what is “this,” how long have you felt like that, and how has that feeling changed? I know I got way more invested in my music and really only felt that feeling after I had a moment of discovering my identity as an artist, discovering the sound I want to work toward. That filled me with a lot of purpose that I didn’t have when I made music previously.
AP: I would say I particularly resonate with that, like when I came into the sound that I work in right now, it was such a defining time period for me. But I had been writing music since I was like twelve years old. Music has been a pervasive thing in my life since then. Even if I have a really bad week, and I’m down on myself and unsatisfied with my music, if I hear a sound that piques my interest, I can’t help but investigate it. I will always be drawn back to music, no matter what. In that way I would say I was born to do this. In what capacity, I’m still figuring out.
photos by Alexander Panos.
