Sam Waks has been in the game a long time. Beginning in high school with a love for punk and grunge, Waks has progressed along with the inevitable evolution of music where he’s found himself working on a truly unique project, Sound Strider. Melding many elements of EDM and adding his own twists of experimentation, Waks has just released a brand new EP earlier this month with much more to come.

We had the chance to speak with Waks about his Sound Strider endeavor, his history with the art, and his forthcoming projects that we’ll be seeing over the course of the next year. So follow us after the break to get the details from Sam Waks as he goes in depth about his impressive involvement with music that has spanned many corners of the world.

How long have you been involved with music and what genres are you originally rooted in?

For the first half of my musical education I was a drummer. I discovered rock playing in a garage band with high school friends listening to NOFX, RATM and Nirvana, but at the same time I discovered Jazz through my drum teacher, Martin Highland, who had studied in the US with some of the greats. He taught me a great deal about “groove” playing along to recordings of Bernard Purdie, The Crusaders and Art Blakey. When I started to get into producing in the early 2000s, the rock influence was practically dead and I was listening mostly to Hip Hop and EDM. During my years discovering the machines, I produced and recorded a fair amount of rap and could be found spinning Breaks (TCR, Finger Lickin etc.) in Sydney nightclubs. After the Breaks craze died out I found myself drawn to the more underground EDM scenes, psytrance, bush doofs in oz, and hardcore free parties after I moved to France.

To label your work simply as “electronic” would be an insult I think, so what would you refer to it as?

I’m not too fussy about genre tags as I’ve come to accept that it’s always a question of perspective. At least a loose term like “electronic” leaves everything to the imagination, and I think an active imagination is a necessary requirement for enjoying my work. However, the term “Psychedelic Ethno Trigger Funk” popped randomly into my head one day and for some reason I’ve been plastering it liberally over my various bios and social media pages.

What equipment and software do you work with primarily? You have a lot of interesting and unique samples. And do you use any live instruments?

The studio I’m lucky enough to call home is set up as a semi-commercial venture so I have access to a fairly large arsenal of analog gear and microphones, on the other hand I recently received a Push and it’s amazing how much I can get done without leaving Ableton. As a general rule I find that for the creation of sounds (as opposed to arranging and mixing) the analog studio is an amazing tool. One could say run a mic lead out to the forest, record a birds’ nest through a couple of FX units onto an MPC60 and jam out some funky twitter hats. Although I’m not much of an instrumentalist myself, the studio means I come into contact with quite a lot of players and so there’s always live elements kicking around.

What can you tell us about your new EP, Intrepid Travels? Despite having no actual lyrics, what themes would you say flow throughout it musically, and what are the dialogue samples used from?

The thread that weaves the EP together was revealed to me while reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and the samples are all related in some way to Ken Kesey and the Pranksters. I realised that today’s EDM cultures flowed directly out of what Kesey and his merry band got up to in the ’60s; the light games, the aural tomfoolery, and of course the ingestion of psychedelics in a carnivalesque atmosphere. This EP is my nod to those bold explorers and hopefully a timely reminder of some of the challenges they failed to surmount which face us ever more menacingly today.

The album’s cover hit me with a bit of nostalgia. Is that a celestial Magic School Bus? Definitely fits the theme of the title!

Busted! Yeah, it was just the perfect image, especially given the Merry Pranksters theme. Thanks to Adi Fink for the design!

And you have a new mixtape as well, right? How does that differ from Intrepid Travels?

The mixtape is a completely different journey and showcases my DJing rather than production talents. It’s the first in a series of four whose overly ambitious goal is to perform a complete circumnavigation of EDM. The first mixtape, Noon, begins at 0 BPM and reaches about 110 by the end, so it’s very much an ambient downtempo ride a la The Orb. The next installment, Dusk, will be ready soon, and taking off where Noon ends should have us bumping and grooving up to around the 140 BPM mark.

I read about your background in the live atmosphere which sounds like you’ve had some incredible experiences on stages and other unique setups. How do you think you can top some of these events in the future?

In my mind, the live experiences are going to keep getting better and better. I’ve certainly played in some interesting places in the past but as I grow and develop as a musician and performer the level of interaction seems only to increase. Regardless of the setting, I find myself enjoying the experience more and more as my degree of control is sharpened. This stems not only from my increasing confidence and skill but also the technological revolutions that are rocking the foundations of art. It is now possible, with a relatively limited budget, to create a completely customised, live, audiovisual setup where one can improvise in the free form style of a jazz player, only instead of a trumpet you can have, at your fingertips, any conceivable conjunction of frequencies from the entire perceptible spectrum; 20Hz – 20khz and 430-790 THz. We are only just beginning to understand the implications of this artistically and I think there is going to be a Renaissance of epic proportions over the coming century.

You mentioned moving to France earlier, but you were born and raised in Australia and now live in Germany, right? What prompted such a huge move and how has the new locale affected your work and focus?

I left Australia around ’08 to pursue an opportunity in the Loire Valley in France involving a large agricultural ruin that now hosts such diverse accoutrements as a stone masonry workshop, a rave cave, a cooking school and a recording studio which is obviously ground zero for Sound Strider. The move to Berlin is a more recent one and directly inspired by the cultural explosion that has been going on in that city for the past decade. The two places make for a great balance; when the countryside gets too quiet there’s nothing like a 48-hour session at the Berghain to feast the ears. On the whole, my move to Europe signaled my final break from the 9-5 world so it’s obviously had an enormous effect on my work ethic. Being responsible for your own rhythm may sound like a dream but it’s actually bloody hard. It’s been a long, strange journey but certainly one that has taught me a lot about dedication and focus.

How would you say the music scene differs in Germany than it did in Australia?

Well if we restrict that question to say the EDM club scenes in Sydney and Berlin then the differences are pretty massive. On the one hand, take a city with half a dozen venues rarely allowed to stay open past the wee hours and guarded by packs of egotistical ignorami in suit and tie who are ready to start a fight over the length of your legwear. On the other hand, a city where new venues appear every week (and in fact every empty lot is a potential venue) where the only closing hours lie somewhere in the murky depths of Tuesday afternoon and the gates are guarded by a wise old band of punks and freaks whose only job is to kindly remind anyone who thinks wearing a suit and tie to a 3-day techno bender is a good idea that they would probably have a better time at home.

Have you ever been to the US or plan to come out this way in the future?

I’ve traveled to the US half a dozen times but never actually performed there. Funnily enough, my cousin, Miriam Waks, a singer who I’m collaborating with at the moment, is on the verge of making a permanent move to NYC and so there’s a very strong possibility that I’ll be coming out some time next year.

It looks like you just recently joined the Twitter universe. How do you think social media will help in progressing this project along?

To be honest, the last time I paid proper attention to social media in relation to artistic pursuits was back in the Myspace days. With Sound Strider I’ve thrown myself into a world which feels at least two degrees more complex than what was around a few years ago and so it’s very much a learning process. What has amazed me is how democratized it has all become, for a handful of 10/month subscriptions I have access to tools and analytics that used to be the exclusive domain of marketing professionals. I lived through the first great opening of the music industry when digital technology put advanced audio production gear into every bedroom, I think we’re now seeing the same thing happen on the marketing and distribution side. It’s certainly an exciting time to be pursuing a truly independent project. I look at friends who got involved with major players and old jealousies have been tempered somewhat by the stress, headaches, and downright thuggery that often seem to ensue.

So now that the EP is out, what are your plans for the short remainder of the year and 2014?

This winter I’m hibernating in the studio. As well as the next Sound Strider EP and mixtape I’ve got two other projects shaping up to launch sometime next year, and we’re also putting on a New Years Eve party in the rave cave. Next summer I want to take Sound Strider on the road and do the European festival circuit. I’m also looking into launching a monthly night in Berlin, and if there’s time, a trip to the US possibly via Cuba to visit my sister and do some recording.

Written and conducted by: Brian Lion – Follow him on Twitter

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Brian Leak

Editor-In-Chief. King of forgetting drinks in the freezer. Pop culture pack rat. X-Phile. LOST apologist.

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