ill.gates :: exclusive interview

Ill Gates is more a mentor than a musician. His outlook on life and music is so supportive and encouraging it instills confidence in me and many others who chose the chromatic scale as their desk-job. A well established and versatile DJ, producer, VJ and all-round music guru Dont Party had the absolute pleasure of interviewing this figurehead, and what began as a short interview turned into a 1 and a half hour phone interview! So let’s get to it:

Dont Party presents

the ill.gates interview

DP: I was introduced to you and your work through Bassnectar [click for our interview with him], and have been an avid fan ever since. You and him collaborate quite a lot together, how do you know eachother and how did bond between you and him form, are you guys from the same areas?

Ill: No, we live totally far apart. I live on the east coast of Canada, in the north where it’s cold and snowy all the time, and he lives in Berkeley, San Francisco. In 2002/3 I put out a record called ICE 9 and he liked it and played it when he was a breaks DJ. He then sought me out. It was really funny because I was producing some kind of psychedelic, tripped –out sort of breaksie stuff, and so was he, so then we got to talking and found out that we saw eye-to-eye on pretty much everything. He came to Toronto and stayed at my house and I’d stay with him when I was down there. This then leads to us doing tunes together; I even VJ’d for him for a while. It was a lot of fun, he’s probably my best friend.

DP: You said that you used to VJ for Bassnectar. So do you VJ for artists? And how do you incorporate all these elements into your shows?

Ill: Well I don’t actually VJ and DJ at the same time anymore; it’s either one or the other. You get what’s called ground-loop interference when you have two separate circuits for the audio and the video, therefore, you have to bring a ground-loop phase interrupter which is yet another adapter to lose and that much more to set up. I just hate it when night after night you are there in the beginning of the night to set up and at the end to clear up. I just taught myself how to do it because I wanted to have a little bit more control of the visual environment. But in the last couple of years music has really taken over, I don’t even have enough time to do my own web design or graphics anymore.

DP: In terms of your shows, with VJ’ing and DJing, creating more of a complete environment for your gigs, do you see these elements as really important to create a performance in a club? Do you still see visual work as really important in a gig?

Ill: Well I see it as very important, but it’s more important not to fuck it up. Basically everything has to be either excellent or transparent, if any element is noticeably bad it can ruin your whole night. As long as there are no fractal, screen-saver buddhas or its not set up like you’re watching a TV it’s all good. But I really want to set up more of a live performance because right now I play DJ sets with all of my material and have some pieces of songs I’ve singled out, but I want to have it that each element in the track has a video element so I can manipulate the audio and the video at the same time, but I have to wait for it to be more stable.

DP: What equipment do you use to DJ/ perform?

Ill: I use a Macbook Pro and Ableton with 2 outputs into the DJ mixer and a trigger finger to control effects and stuff. There’s a DJ mixer at every gig so it’s pointless using all your knobs and faders to try and emulate what a mixer can do when one is there all the time. There are lots of times when I’m at a sketchy after-party or a festival or something and I don’t really want to leave my bag lying around, so you gotta be able to carry it for extended periods of time, from plane to plane, on a bike in the desert, so I keep a very minimal setup.

DP: A lot of times I’ve heard clips of you playing D n B and Breaks etc, and you used to make breaks under ‘the phat conductor’, so my question is how do you mould, merge and blend these genres in sets?

Ill: My whole M.O. is that when I’m writing I try to write something that doesn’t sound like any song that I’ve written before. One thing that bothers me is that a lot of people find a certain style that works and then they just do the same thing again and again and again because there’s a lot of pressure from labels, promoters and stuff to be predictable and follow trends and to do a set that always sounds the same so that they can put a little sub-genre next to your name, etc. But in the long term that is not a good idea, because genres and trends come and go, so you don’t want to be left in the dust as an artist when the genre you’re pigeonholed in eats shit. So I try and build a fan base from people that just trust me to play good music of all genres. I have different ways of doing tempo transitions that work and all the styles I play are music that I like and most of the people that come to see me just like my music period. So I can change genres all I like, it just keeps things interesting.

DP: So you basically want to avoid being pigeon-holed. In SA if you have a guy who makes breaks and also some glitch-hop stuff, there’s always 2 different pseudonyms’ for him. Do you ever worry that a guy who hears a glitch track of yours and is like ‘he’s cool, but not my thing’, meanwhile you produce in a plethora of genres and maybe people won’t give your other stuff a chance cos of that one track?

Ill: Basically in the beginning I was just learning what I was doing, my second tune ever got signed so I was just cutting up samples in Acid and I’d just pick sounds that I’d like and put them in an order that made me feel something. All I knew what to do is cut and paste, and pick sounds, and arrange, so all the normal problems you’d be dealing with from a mixing perspective, I’d be dealing with just from a Sound choice. And when I got signed and was talking shop with the guys at the label and I was like “I just cut up samples in Acid” they were shocked, so then they insisted that I have to learn logic and I have to learn MIDI and compressors and sampling and all that stuff. So I did learn all that stuff, but it really slowed my work flow down and became really frustrating as I was now awash in a sea of possibilities and it really bothered me. I was really young , thirteen, when I first started DJing and was nineteen when I got my first record deal. I would consider myself really lucky to put out records because when I started DJing it was my dream to put out a record and hold my own record in my hands. That was the end goal of me DJing! So I consider myself so lucky to still be able to do that. I used to DJ hip-hop, b-boy breaks and weird psychedelic music and the label was like ‘that’s not what style is right now, what style is right now is the UK style nu-skool party breaks and electro’, so I thought, well, these guys are much more experienced than me in the music business so I should listen to what they say and adjust my style to suit them, but once I was more confident in my own production and confident to make the music that I wanted to make I started Ill Gates. I don’t produce any electro house or anything breaks under ill gates. It’s all dubstep, glitch-hop, experimental, dancehall, drum and bass, stuff that I can stand behind 100%. Also Ill gates translates a lot better, when I was the Phat Conductor in France they’d keep putting my name as ‘le gros conducteur’, and I was like no ‘it doesn’t translate;’ besides everyone knows who Bill Gates is, although when I met Bill Gates he didn’t know what ‘ill’ was and I had to explain it to him!

ILL GATES :: SPEED LIMIT (mixtape)

DP: When and how did you meet Bill Gates!?

Ill: Oh I dj’d for him at Sundance Film Festival, he’s like my homie now!

DP: Really! How did he feel about the similarities in the name?

Ill: Oh he thought it was funny. I actually really like Bill Gates, the name’s funny because he’s not hip-hip, he’s like the least hip-hop dude ever right!? But it’s ultimately like a big-up to him, because I think what he does is really admirable, and he’s in kind of a unique position to affect large-scale socio-economic change. When you get to the top levels of power it’s kind of this old boys club that basically got together and then decided that the 3rd world won’t be able to develop to the same standard of living as the 1st world; so they’ve kind of made a conscious decision to keep being as racist as they have always been. They go to countries such as Jamaica with the IMF and the World Bank and say ‘hey do you want to borrow millions and millions of dollars from us’ and the corrupt leaders are like ‘sure!’ and then borrow the money and basically fuck off with it, then the IMF and World Bank restructure the economy In such a way that they are actively impeding its development. I mean a lot of people at these organizations’ lower levels are well intentioned, but at the highest levels the game plan has always been to control the development of these 3rd world countries and prevent them from achieving the standard of living that we enjoy. Whereas Bill Gates, yeah he is the richest guy in the world, but compared to the Rothschild family, the Rockefeller family or the IMF he’s small potatoes. But he’s in a unique position: he is at those high levels of power, and he does have the ears of these leaders and is privy to all kinds of information that we just don’t get. His vision for the Gates foundation is to not only help us in the 1st world to make our standard of living a little bit more palatable from an ecological perspective, but also to provide better education, housing, water, food and cure preventable diseases to inevitably decrease the birth-rate so that in the next 50 to 100 years both our standards of living will be kind of equal. I thought that was a pretty cool concept that he is working with, and he’s not brainwashed by that kind of boys-club ignorance that most major powers in the world are. I mean he could just be sitting around and shaking a fistful of money at everyone but instead he dedicates his time to something he believes in and something that is actually good. I mean he doesn’t have do that, he could generate the same kind of PR buzz by dumping a whole bunch of money into a charity while he’s skiing in Aspen, but instead he is dedicating all his time and energy into the Gates foundation. So I do have a lot of respect for him and I am really glad to know him and also consider myself lucky to have been able to hangout with him.

GET SOME FREE ill gates tracks HERE [click]

DP: Back to music, I see that URB rated you in its top 100 musicians that you will know in the years to come. Does this affect your outlook regarding your work; does it evoke a conscious thought or an element of added pressure that this kind of thing put on you?

Ill: Yes and No. I’ve always known that this is what I want to do, and always prioritized my life so that nothing gets in the way of music: I don’t have a car, I don’t have a kid, I live in Chinatown. The one thing you can’t buy is your own time, that’s the most precious commodity in anyone’s life, so why would you want to sacrifice your own time for a bunch of shit that you don’t really need, that doesn’t make sense to me. I’ve always structured my life so that I have the maximum amount of time dedicated to music and so I’m glad that they’re on board and want to help me, because I felt this way, way before that article, I’ve always felt that purpose so I’m not stressed out about it at all!

GET SOME FREE ill gates tracks HERE [click]

DP: About your tutoring and lecturing and the seminars you do: What do these entail? Is it purely music based?

Ill: Well the first part of it is my philosophies on creativity and how to cultivate your own creativity and originality because that’s really, really important! A lot of people just want to play it safe and give people what they know that people already like. You know that might get you some gigs, and make you palatable to a larger audience but you’re not going to make any real fans until you’re doing something that’s wholly original. I mean other people should sound like you; you shouldn’t sound like other people, right? So a lot of it is teaching people to find their own voice, how to trust themselves creatively because the rational part of your brain is so very afraid of anything that’s new so when you’re on your way to doing something that’s unique there’s a part of your brain that’s like “this doesn’t sound like a collage of my favourite producers, I don’t like this, this sucks”. So I just help people access the different parts of your brain so that you can create and experiment when being creative and then criticize later, how to make and keep your own deadlines, how to properly promote yourself, how to present your music live well, how to network with fans and build a following, different ways to make money that are not obvious. I don’t nerd out about the technical stuff I just teach people how to FINISH SONGS like one after the other, because that’s what you got to do; the days of being able to build your whole career off one song are gone!

DP: You said previously that you live life in kind of a minimalist fashion, whereby the things you own are the things you need. Does this outlook carry through to the studio and your studio gear?

Ill: Oh yeh, I work with very, very minimal gear, I just have really, really nice monitors, a really nice sub and for checking [the mix] I do this thing that is basically free that I’ve found really useful: I have a friend who worked at a junk removal service and I got him to hook me up with all these crappy speakers and a stereo amp, then I have a second output on my soundcard that goes to the stereo amp, and that stereo amp runs to a couple different kinds of headphones, laptop speakers, ghettoblaster speakers and all these other different kinds of speakers that I have around the studios so that you can kind of A/B between them or have 3 sets of speakers going at once. From this all these different things come out that you would never have heard on nice monitors, cos most people are listening to your stuff on like an iPod or shitty laptop speakers or a home stereo or whatever. To have the access to all these different things to listen on is really important for doing mix-downs so that you can make sure that your mix-down sounds good.

DP: I want to speak about glitch-hop. For us glitch-hop has been a music genre that myself and a lot of people I know have been into for a really long time, but has never really had a mainstream platform, but now with artists like you, mochipet, akira kiteshi, bassnectar etc. Have you noticed this growth of the genre from your side?

Ill: Oh my God yes, it’s huge! It has just been massive! Glitch-hop has been around for a really long time right, it’s not a new genre by any stretch of the imagination and a lot of people who wouldn’t really consider themselves glitch-hop have glitch-hop elements in their tracks. Even in that “Fuk ‘n Rad” (Sibot and Waddy) album a lot of those songs sounded glitch-hoppy or would find home in a glitch-hop set; but I’m sure those guys aren’t like “we are glitch-hoppers’! So the genre has been around for a long time but especially in the last couple years it has really opened up. Also the growth of dubstep has helped a lot because people didn’t really consider music under 120BPM to be club music so dubstep has really opened things up for that. Although lately dubstep has just gotten ravier-and-ravier and I think that people are sick of it and they want to hear what other BPM’s have to offer, which has brought a lot of international attention to glitch-hop, but it’s also because people are tired of the same old thing and it’s not interesting! Glitch hop is really out-there and new-sounding and that is something that is interesting. The idea has basically spread one person at a time and is just spreading on the strength of being good music, and interesting and being unlike every other genre of music and nowadays with the internet there are glitch-hop scenes linked all around the world. It’s funny how you go to all these different countries and these people are playing records that my homies back in Canada made in their garage… it’s really crazy to see how far it has spread and how popular it has become. I think it just gives people hope that if they want to do something new, different or interesting they can become successful with that. It just says great things about the future of musical creativity. It’s really very encouraging.

DP: You have a new album coming out soon. Tell us some more about it?

Ill: I’m really excited about it, it is the largest product I’ve launched yet. It’s going to be a free live album that you can just download in exchange for your email address. There are 3 EP’s from the album that are going to be coming out on MUTI music and potentially another label, and then there’s also an online course where it is basically a 12 week boot-camp for producers which launches July 1stand the album releases June 1st. The album is called ‘’The ill Methodology’ and I’ve recorded it at a couple places live and it’s just a matter of picking the best one and It’s going to be totally free; I recorded it when I played for Bill Gates and when I played in Vienna and I just recorded another version in LA that is a bit shorter and it’s going to be totally free!

For me it’s a bit of a problem when I sell people CD’s on the side of the stage, you know ‘Autopirate’ doesn’t really sound like me when I play live. It’s a collection of studio tunes, it’s not a (DJ) set and fans they want a set! They want to have something that sounds like me live that they can put on in their car, or in a house party or something with bangers the whole way through that makes them want to dance and rock out or whatever. The traditional tracks will be available through various music websites, but if you’re a fan and you want something that you can play in your house then it’s a free live mix that contains some bootlegs that I’ve done, some remixes I’ve done for different artists and contains all my favourite tracks that I actually play live.

DP: What about the online course?

Ill: Im really excited about it because when you think about it it’s been found that institutionalized education relies on an extrinsic motivational model; you are doing creative things to get rewards and avoid punishment. This is not why an artist creates: artists create because they think it’s beautiful, or they do it for its own sake, because they feel like it’s an end in itself, or just because they feel like an artist and that’s the kind of thing they do as an artist; this is more of an intrinsic motivational model.

This guy Ed Deci did all these studies and test at the University of Rochester with 3 conditions: 1. A control group where they gave these kids a bunch of art supplies and told them to paint, 2. There was an intrinsic motivational group that they had a teacher that they looked up to and respected that came in and casually remarked that these paintings are wonderful and that they’re all talented artists, 3. Extrinsic motivation group where they offered candy in exchanged for paintings.

What they found was that in the control group there was a wide range of artistic quality. In the intrinsic group they found that the kids painted really, really well. In the extrinsic motivation group it was just atrocious, they were the most half-assed, ‘I don’t give a ‘eff’, give me my candy paintings’. That’s why you get people who go to art school and drama school and then by the time they’re done it’s not fun for them anymore and they go work in an office to pay off their debt. It’s also why the extrinsic motivational is poisonous for creativity, so the institutionalized model doesn’t really work for creativity. So where else do you turn if you’re not going to go to those $20,000 per year audio schools? Well, people will turn to music magazines and all those music magazines, on the front cover, are like ‘best synth ever!’ and will try and sell you all this gear and won’t teach you how to finish a song, because they don’t even necessarily want you to finish a song they just want you to keep buying their gear and magazines and synthesizers that you don’t need.

So eventually I want to redefine the model of electronic music education to be artist driven or promoter driven. I want kids’ first thoughts, when they’re coming up, to be like; ‘what workshops can I take? Who can I apprentice with? Are there any artists in my area that I like that I can get to come into my studio to show me a thing or two? Who can I collaborate with?’ That should be your first thought not what $20,000 a year audio school can I go to, or that they need a Virus TI… because you don’t need any of those things, you just need passion and time and to know what sucks. And if you feel like you know what sucks and that you love music and want to put the time in and the passion to put into music then you’ll get good. But if you’re worried about making mistakes and you need these external ideas of legitimacy by buying gear or going to an expensive school or whatever then you’ve already lost the plot. So the ill-methodology.com is going be the go-to place for artist-centered modeled education. When you take the course you get a login on the message board, and the message board is going to be a place where people can talk about actually finishing songs, promoting yourself properly, making money in the industry, those kinds of things that you can only actually learn from successful musicians. There are also going to be guest videos every month and I’m also going to teach the students to teach others; the subscriptions are going to pay out based on whose videos gets the most number of unique users watching it. So if you’re a student and you can put together a good tutorial that’s going to give you a chance to get known and make some money. The ultimate goal is to redefine the model of electronic music education.

ESKAMON: “Fine Objects” – Ableton Tutorial by ill.Gates from ESKMO on Vimeo.

It’s all unified by this brand the ill-methodology: If you’re a fan I’m going to make sure you’re always getting free stuff, if you’re a DJ you can go and buy the songs, and if you’re a producer then you can join this non-corporate, independent creative educational community and network with producers, set-up tours and go do workshops etc. I’m pretty excited about the whole project! I want it to be platform for other people to learn and to share and network and grow. So yah, that launches later this year!

GET SOME FREE ill gates tracks HERE [click]

• more ill gates: check out his myspace
• or phatconductor.com
• or eskamon.com