20 Questions With Eprom: On the Bass Music ‘Renaissance,’ His Love of Happy Hardcore & Why Dance’s Biggest Problems Are ‘Rooted in Capitalism’

[Brand]

The Portland-based experimental electronic producer today (June 9) releases his first album in nine years, Syntheism.

 

 

Eprom

 

 

 

 

For more than 15 years, Eprom has been delivering some of the dance’s sphere’s most heavy-hitting, left-of-center experimental electronic music. This textural, nuanced and often very hard output has placed him alongside peers including G Jones and Alix Perez, scored him slots at both major festivals (Electic Forest, EDC Vegas, Electric Zoo) and prestige clubs (Los Angeles’ Low End Theory and Hamburg’s Golden Pudel), grabbed the attention of designer Rick Owens (who’s used Eprom’s “The Cat” to soundtrack marketing materials and fashion shows) and impressed Aphex Twin enough that the electronic icon opened a 2016 show with Eprom’s “Samurai.”

Much of this music has been created in the backyard studio from which the Portland-based producer, born Alexander Dennis, speaks with Billboard via Zoom on a sunny May afternoon.

The occasion is his new LP, Syntheism. Out today (June 9), it marks the first Eprom album in nine years and finds the producer at the height of his powers, with the 15 tracks taking surprise left turns, sometimes embracing melody and sometimes ditching it completely in favor of distorted, rapidfire beats that hit the neocortex like a sledgehammer.

The album is conceptually tied together by an alternative history that imagines what reality would be like today if the drought that preceded the collapse of the Akkadian Empire — the first ancient empire of Mesopotamia, located in modern-day Iraq — never occurred. Through this mental exercise Eprom has created his vision of techno-utopian society, with its own culture, languages and beliefs, and with each track on the album named after a hypothetical organization that fostered the achievements of this hypothetical world.

“All my previous projects had been very dystopian in intent, reflecting all the ills of the world,” Eprom says. “I felt like it was time to offer an alternative.”

If this all sounds heady, trust that it will get even headier when Eprom performs a one-night-only show, Syntheism Robotics, at Denver’s Mission Ballroom on July 29. The performance — a collision of music, technology and utopian visions — will extend the themes of the album and, naturally, involve custom-built robots.

Here, Eprom talks about his love of The Prodigy, Primus and Haddaway (yes, Haddaway), the consolidation of the dance music space and more.

1. Where are you in the world right now, and what’s the setting like?

I’m in Portland. I’m in my studio, which is a building in my backyard. And it’s a nice day. This is where I do most of my work, and this is where I made the album and built the show I’m doing now.

2. What was the first piece of music you bought for yourself, and what was the format?

I bought Guns N’ Roses Use Your Illusion II on CD. I was really into it. But my mom worked at the Music Library at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. So at that point she had already made me a lot of cassette tapes of stuff I was into. I could go in there and check out records and listen to them on their nice Hi-Fi setups. When I was nine or so I was listening to the Beatles and Michael Jackson and Queen. When I was 10, I got really into Nine Inch Nails. Major shift, and just that sort of shift in attitude of being a kid to being a tween and wanting to distance yourself from your parents’ aesthetics and tastes. That hit me hard, and I started getting into punk rock and Minor Threat and alternative bands like Primus and Nirvana and stuff like that.

3. Did the Dartmouth library and Primus and Nirvana, or did you have to go elsewhere?

Oh, yeah, they had everything. They had a huge cross section of every kind of music. I remember checking out the Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which is still a majorly influential piece for me. And you could get the sheet music too, so I’d read the sheet music and listen to the piece. I was really into that piece because it was in the movie Fantasia, in the dinosaur part. So I was obsessed with it. It was so discordant and gnarly and scary. I just love that about it. So that was a major formative musical experience growing up, having that library to go to after school.

4. That segues very well to my next question, which is: What did your parents do for a living when you were a kid, and and what did they think of what you do now?

My mom worked at that library. She also worked at the Dartmouth English Library. She was continuing education throughout that time, going for a master’s degree. My dad was a stockbroker, and he still is. He has also played bass in bands pretty much his whole life, and still plays. That was another major musical touch point for me — the fact that my dad was always playing gigs and rehearsing around the house.

They’re proud of what I do. My dad loves funk and soul and blues and stuff, but he also has a taste for experimental music, and he has a pretty strong understanding of what I do. He’s come out to a bunch of the shows.

5. What is the first non-gear thing you bought for yourself when you started making money as an artist?

I was a full-time graphic designer and web designer and also doing shows. So I had money at the time from working at this startup company, and music was a hobby. It was sort of a soft transition rather than “all of a sudden I’m making a bunch of money in music.” It was more, “I’m making less money now because I want to focus on music.” I didn’t run out and buy new toys or anything. I spent so much money on gear. But I went out and bought a really dope fixed-gear bike when I was like, 25, to ride around in San Francisco. I was riding all the time, and I just had a beater and wanted a really nice one.

6. If you had to recommend one album for someone looking to get into electronic music, what would you give them?

That’s a really hard question. I think a lot of the backbone of my sound would be encapsulated in The Prodigy‘s Experience, which is from like, ’92 I believe. It just nails that whole rave aesthetic of the time. Not all my stuff sounds like that, but it’s always been a major influence on me.

7. Syntheism is your first album in nine years. Why has there been so much time since your last LP, Halflife?

I made a bunch of EPs during that time. I had a sketch for an album around 2015, and I scrapped it and basically condensed it into an EP, and those tunes ended up in various releases. Now I’ve just had the opportunity to put it together because of the pandemic — I had so much time right here in the studio during 2020. I could just do stuff that wasn’t specifically geared towards the dancefloor and felt better on an album.

I think that’s the case with a lot of music coming out these days. There’s a bit of a broader range of the sonic palette on a lot of the releases I’m hearing, because people generated so much stuff for themselves, or let go of some of their expectations — whether they be self-imposed or externally imposed by what works on a dancefloor. It was liberating for me to have so much free time and so much creative freedom.

8. The album also has a really interesting, I don’t know if you’d necessarily call it backstory, but mythology, regarding the Akkadian Empire. Tell me about that?

I came up with that in collaboration with Jackson Greene, who’s my art director. He and I had some conversations about the first song, which is essentially a series of logo drops like you would see at the beginning of a movie — like the 20th Century Fox logo drop has an associated sonic identity with it. I made those as sketches, and then tied them all together as the intro to the album, like it’s a movie.

Retroactively, we were like, “What could these mean? What could they represent?” And we came up with this utopian alternative reality, in which the the empire of Akkad, the Akkadian Empire, never perished and became the the most dominant cultural force in the world, in a way that the Roman Empire is for us in reality. What if they gave us the evolution of writing? They were the most influential political force for a really long time — what would the world look like now [if it had stayed that way?]

It’s an alternative reality, but it’s also a utopian future positive aspirational reality. It’s asking what corporate aesthetics would look like if they weren’t so driven by capitalism and greed. That gave us a really fertile ground for creating all the visual components of the of the album. The single covers represent products in this alternative reality … and most of the visuals in the live show touch on various aspects of that world too … I didn’t write the album with all that stuff in mind, but it’s helped tie everything together aesthetically for the show.

9. Do you have a longstanding interest in history? Was this already in your repertoire of knowledge?

I have a longstanding interest in art history. I minored in art history. Until recently I’ve never really delved into that rise and fall of empires kind of stuff. Now I’m finding it really interesting. I’m interested in the history of language specifically, and especially letter forms and typography and design. I’m also interested in drawing parallels and finding connections between the past and potential futures, and learning from the past and drawing on everything we have.

10. Does making those parallels, or even doing a history-based project like this, give you hope for the future?

Yeah, that’s the point. I’m imagining what [reality would be like] if we really internalized the lessons of history. How would our world improve? So yeah, it’s a utopian vision. That felt important to me, because the world felt so dystopian at the time, and all my previous projects had been very dystopian in intent, reflecting all the ills of the world. I felt like it was time to offer an alternative. So that’s where I went with the album and the background aesthetics.

11. The Denver show looks insane. What was it like putting it all together?

We found this robotics company in Portland and just loved the stuff that they were doing. We hit them up, and we’ve been building the technical side of the show for a really long time. There’s a whole visual component to the show. Programming the robots, each song has its own sequence of maneuvers the robots do. It’s a lot of moving parts, and a lot of people came together to make it all happen.

12. Are you taking this all on tour, or is it just the one show in Denver next month?

We did one show in Portland, and that was the proof of concept. Now we’re gonna bring it to Denver and potentially as many places as we can. It’s super expensive and hard to put on, so we can’t do it everywhere. We can do it where it can be supported. But Denver is perfect, because there’s already a great community and a lot of fans, so it seems like the next logical step.

13. Talk to me about Denver. I feel like the scene there is so unique and sort of singular in its tastes. What you seems very well suited for that city, as does music by artists I imagine you would consider peers. What’s going on in Denver that you perhaps don’t find elsewhere in the U.S., or globally?

I think there’s a confluence of forces there. One is just having a lot of young people there. A lot of them are down to go out and party. I’m not really sure why that is, but it’s just true. [Laughs.] And so every show does well in Denver, no matter who it is. And there’s also a lot of good clubs there. When I started playing shows, I lived in San Francisco, and the first city I flew to to play a show at was Denver, and they were just very receptive. It’s always been a killer scene there.

14. In the day to day work of covering electronic music, so much of what comes across is house and techno, tech house, crossover pop, etc. But bass music doesn’t necessarily pushed as hard or discussed as much. What’s your take on where bass music is at in 2023?

I think it’s having a renaissance There’s a lot of interest in this genre-defying flavor of bass music that’s happening right now, and I think that’s really great. There’s a lot of experimentation. I definitely consider myself bass music, and I come from that world. But also a lot of the stuff on the album is just pure electronic music and doesn’t really fit into that scene exactly. But I do think that scene is better than it’s ever been. There’s so much cool stuff happening. If you look just below the surface of mainstream EDM, there’s so many talented producers and so much cool music right now.

15. Do you have any guilty pleasure music?

Yeah, kind of, but I don’t feel guilty about it. I really like happy hardcore and the cheesier side of ’90s dance and Eurodance stuff. Stuff like mid-’90s dance pop crossovers, like Haddaway, that kind of s–t. Happy Hardcore, I could never get away with playing at a show, but I love that s–t.

16. The most exciting thing happening in electronic music currently is?

The democratization of technology is exciting to me. Computers getting cheaper, kids being able to make the music they hear in their heads with like, a $500 laptop is exciting to me. Music is just going to get better because of it. And the accessibility of knowledge is exciting to me — YouTube and tutorials and the collective knowledge we all have is exciting — because it’s just going to produce more and more interesting iterations of these ideas that have been out there for a long time.

17. The most annoying thing happening in electronic music currently is?

I mean, I try not to be a hater about stuff, but I think that there are some real problems in the scene. The consolidation of festivals and venues is a big problem. And these aren’t aesthetic problems, they’re problems rooted in capitalism, and they’re problems of people not getting the shine they deserve — or of recycled lineups, because of things getting too big and small promoters getting pushed out and small clubs and bars not being able to sustain themselves.

Sometimes those problems create aesthetic problems. A recycled lineup means everything’s going to sound the same, or a bigger and bigger festival means the sound has to be more and more bombastic and more and more lowest common denominator and there’s less room for experimentation. Those are problems in the scene, but they can be overcome. And those problems do sort of create their own little aesthetic whirlpools. You have all this stuff where people are trying to make festival bangers and that’s their focus, and in order to get on a big stage, you have to make a certain sound. You can hear it in the music though, and you can tell when someone’s being authentic or when somebody’s chasing clout.

18. What’s been the proudest moment of your career so far?

I think Aphex Twin playing my music was the most personally validating thing.

19. What’s the best business decision you’ve ever made?

Hiring a manager. I love my manager. He’s the best. I resisted the path of having a team around me for a long time, because I’m such a control freak and so independent, and it felt like capitulating to the demands of the market. Then I finally got one and realized how much pressure it takes off me as an artist and how much I don’t have to deal with all the day-to-day stuff. It’s so much better.

20. What’s one piece of advice you give to your younger self?

Work harder. I have never had much of a work ethic until I was older. I met G Jones and I saw his work ethic and worked together with him. I was like, “Oh my god, this is how you really get some art made in this world. You just have to grind.” If I could tell my younger self that, I would. But you know, I wouldn’t take anything back. I am who I am today because of what I did then, and I’m happy.