Rather than simply mastering the elemental forces of the dancefloor, Ryan Lee West - the London-based producer behind Rival Consoles - has spent the last 16 years carving out a space of his own, somewhere between the expansive architecture of electronic and the intimate poignancies that can blossom from both digital and analog touch. His ninth and latest full-length album via Erased Tapes, Landscape from Memory, emerges from a period of creative stagnation which saw West looking for unfamiliar sources of inspiration outside of his typical Hackney studio. The final result, one of his most vivid and multi-layered to date, is full of striking contrasts: euphoric outbursts like "Catherine" and "Jupiter" meet with the fragmented, impressionistic deconstructions heard on "Tape Loop" and "Nocturne", all woven together with West’s signature sensitivity and textural nuance.
Above all, Landscape from Memory stays true to West’s ever-growing commitment to inserting emotion into his synth-centered compositions, forging the restless and the reflective into one singular, invigorating travelogue of sound. We spoke with West about unlearning old habits, the tactile nature of sound, how memory can shape melody and the shifting relationship between image and music in his work.
Do you recall your first memories of being moved by music and art? What artists struck a chord with you growing up?
I have a lot of very early memories of electronic music, because I've got an older brother who would show me weird dance music in the 90s. I was born in 1985, so my earliest memories would be from the late 80s, early 90s. But in terms of being emotionally moved, I think that came a little bit later. I wasn't shown a lot of artistic works, to an extent, growing up. No one in my family has an interest or any kind of background in anything to do with the arts. I think one of the things that really struck me was when I was 12 years old. I started to learn the guitar and instantly became obsessed with Radiohead's OK Computer - looking back at it, it's quite extreme for a 12-year-old [laughs]. I definitely connected to the emotional content of it. I was quite extreme as a young person and immediately got bored of normal song structures, so OK Computer was exciting because it was a big record and yet it had these quite obscure song structures. It was like two things at once that inspired me at a very young age.
I see. So you did have some exposure to electronic music early on.
Yeah, I think that a lot of production and physicality resonated with me, but nothing necessarily emotional. That came a little bit later and, of course, it makes sense as well. You need to be older, in many cases, to understand and identify with emotional resonance. OK Computer is probably a very early memory that was very emotionally resonant to me. There would’ve been things before as well, but I struggle to remember. At the time, I think I was also getting into Nine Inch Nails. There's obviously a lot of heavy emotion in there, almost like teenage anger on The Downward Spiral and other things that I found compelling.
Did those early influences shape your transition from guitar and other analog instruments to electronic production?
I play a bit of everything really, as a lot of people who are interested in musicmaking and production do. For some reason, I never managed to write music on the guitar in a way that felt genuine or ‘correct’, which is a ridiculous word. The opposite is true in electronic music, where I had far less understanding and instantly found that I could express myself in a more valid way. It might have something to do with naivety. I got quite good on the guitar very quickly and it instantly created a kind of block, whereas with production, you can just explore writing in such a strange way that's very exciting, but also problematic as well.
Do you feel a kind of tactile relationship to sound when composing digitally - dabbling in the structures and lineage of electronic music as a whole, but grounding it in something emotional or even personal?
I think I'm drawn to works that are more emotional. I might make many things that are interesting, but I don't care about them over time as much as things that are more emotional, even if they’re not as powerful or well-made. There's always this slight desire in me towards emotional things, and that goes for anything. I'd rather be moved by a film that isn't as amazingly well shot and structured than something that looks incredible, but has no emotional resonance. It’s a kind of prejudice towards being moved, and that ranges from the very subtle to the more extreme.
How much of your work is sculpted from instinct and emotion versus analytical framing? Are there tracks on this new record (Landscape From Memory) that unfolded in unexpected ways, either from film or other sources?
There are so many different writing styles on the record in a way, almost every piece is different. I kind of studied music in an intellectual way. I have a part of my brain which is quite analytical, but I move between the two states. When I'm making music, I'm not really that analytical, I'm just trying to improvise, almost like a stream of consciousness. I find that if I'm too analytical, I end up making things that are very dead. They just have no interesting quality to them. Of course, lots of thinking goes on in between making. I spend a lot of time listening and just thinking about music. I might spend a hundred hours doing it and then only do 10 minutes of work because I've been thinking for a long time. Sounds crazy, but I find that it's easy to constantly mess around with sound. I do that as well, but I spend a lot of time just thinking about what’s missing, what isn't working and why it isn't working, and then listening to other people's music and thinking of why that works so well. It's just a constant awareness and sensitivity to things, but at the same time, there are these accidents that happen which are basic and crude. For example, moving a piece of audio from left to right and then dragging in another piece of audio that cuts it off and creates this unusual error that is also quite musical. From the crude things to the very intellectual, I'm interested in the whole chaos of it all [laughs].
Did working outside the confines of your studio in Hackney shift your workflow for this record?
Yeah, I think so. I did a lot of sketching on a laptop (only using laptop speakers). When you work in a studio with big speakers and everything sounds big, you easily think the idea might have more power than it actually does, whereas if you're working in such a small way, you get to focus on the identity of the idea and its compositional structure. It's easy to be deceived by the ways we perceive art. It's not that there's a right way, obviously, but it's helpful to sometimes go against things sounding better, you focus more on other values. That was definitely a big part of the record. I wrote two pieces in Lisbon actually, "Gaivotas" and "Nocturne". There's a limitation to the way that I was working that actually ended up making them richer, ironically.
Speaking of those two pieces, I’ve noticed "Gaivotas" is named after Rua das Gaivotas 6 and the street of Teatro Praga. Did the Lisbon residency at the beginning of 2023 play a significant role in the writing and recording process of the record?
Yeah, I've never done one before actually, which is strange, but it was quite exciting. I made a lot of music with completely different instruments and technology. "Nocturne" is made in quite a crazy way. I took an old recording that I made, a huge improvisational recording of me playing synth live and then created this forward and backward sampling to build this rich, wavelike complexity - almost as if I sampled it from an old record, but it was all me. I would never necessarily think like that at home, but you instantly become more resourceful when you have a limitation like that.
Was it also something you felt the need to do after 2022’s Now Is, given how that album was shaped by the lockdowns and the pandemic?
I definitely wanted to explore different sounds on this record a little bit more than I have previously. With Now Is, I was also exploring more variation on different types of synthesis and combinations (with live drums, for example) and I think [Landscape From Memory] is a continuation of that. Many tracks on the record borrow sensations from different genres and then bring them into a different space. Catherine is quite club-esque, but it's also not at the same time. The beginning of "Gaivotas" is very digital and almost like shimmering plastic materials, but then it’s contrasted by this basic guitar that comes in halfway through. I like the sensation of contrast between bright and dark, shiny and dull, dense and sparse. This record is full of extreme contrasts, I think.
Were there any other specific locations or experiences that left an imprint on these new tracks?
A lot of pieces were sketched out or played with whilst touring around Europe and North America. It's not necessarily a place, but the movement of being in motion which created a kind of sensation on the record. If you make any kind of art in a studio over and over again, you lose a sense a certain sensation of things - well, I do. When you witness an idea in different spaces, it has the ability to change the way you perceive, undermine or strengthen it even, whereas if you always listen to work in the same space, you always think it sounds strong or good. But of course, you could take it somewhere else and it could immediately collapse, because of a new sensation. I think moving around strengthens sensitivity to your own work somehow.
Is there a noticeable difference in how you approach structure or sound when you're working on the move versus in your studio? Do your creative rules and habits differ between the two?
When I'm working in my studio with a lot of the synths that I use, I just record a lot of improvisations. It's quite playful and free, even if I might not necessarily understand the importance of those in the moment. Then when I’m moving, you can start to collage and quickly sketch out how sounds could be used in a structure. They complement each other, because you're not trying to do everything all at once. There's a playfulness in both the moment of recording sounds and moving them around in the same way a painter would collage, it's a similar style. I think many producers tend to collage things together quite a lot. There's obviously a lot of people that take a song that's well written and then reconstruct it exactly as it was to an extent, but I've always been very playful with things, to the point where I could have an idea that I think is the beginning of the song for a year and then, all of a sudden, it isn’t anymore.
That interplay really comes across on the record. It does feel almost diaristic, fragmented in the way you treat sound, sparse in moments, bursting with color in others. How do you approach translating that element of memory into a full track or even a whole album?
Because electronic music without voice is very abstract to the senses, I think it allows the imagination to be more active somehow. Naturally, when I'm making stuff and exploring song structures with electronic sounds, it instantly lends itself to memory and landscape. That word is very suited to electronic music, because without the voice, it does feel like you're witnessing the movement of an abstract landscape over time. And that's not true of just my music, but of all electronic music. "Nocturne", for example, sounds like it's happening now, but also in the past. It’s got a sense of distance to it. The nature of the human mind wants to make sense of things, so it actually adds things that aren't necessarily there. Electronic music is a really beautiful way for the mind to get to become active and the same goes for other mediums as well. You could have a very abstract David Lynch film and the mind just gets very excited versus a very direct film. The sensation is more abstract overall.
I feel like the beautiful part of listening and exploring to looser structures in music (and art in general) is precisely getting lost in the wall of sound and deciphering new elements and perspectives with repeated listens.
Definitely. That's why I don't ever try to make functional dance music. Whilst techno and various genres are incredible and inspiring (and they're in my work), I find that by making something functional to a dance floor, you limit a certain type of creativity and a set of options. I've always steered more towards songwriting with an electronic palette of sounds, just because it allows me to dream more and do things that would be terrible on a dance floor. It just opens up so many possibilities, and I like a much wider spectrum of vocabulary with writing.
I’d also argue it’s a way for you to show vulnerability through your music, moving between some beatless, more abstract pieces and other, more traditionally structured dance music, so to speak – like "Catherine", for example.
Exactly. Although even those pieces, if you compare them to proper dance music, there's somehow quite an extreme distance between them, even if some of the elements are the same. "Catherine" is extremely vulnerable in the fact that it's quite empty, it’s not a powerful, dense piece of music. In the beginning, it's almost collapsing in a very interesting way, which I find quite unusual. It's one of the sparsest things I've ever made in a way. That's obviously something I've done and then asked myself if it works, even on the verge of collapsing. There are several notes with very minimal drum backing, it would be easy to overproduce that idea.
Does that interplay between so many sounds also affect the visual element of your work, whether it’s your experiments with motion media or the live A/V shows? Your music reads to me as very synesthetic and engaged in that connection.
There's a lot of inspiration from moving images. I often sketch and make music to film, just abstract footage of film and landscapes, because a sensation of movement helps me understand what electronic music can be. It can easily be very dead, like it doesn't have a sensation of physical space. A lot of the time it simply doesn't, and that's fine as well. Not everything needs to sound like a violin in a room, but for some reason, I'm drawn to the sensation of realism that comes from something in a space. I try to create or understand that a lot. I do that with footage and, while being on tour, you're obviously writing with real movement.
Are there any specific films or film scores that inspired you during the creation of Landscape From Memory?
That's a good question. I've made the record over quite a long time, so my mind is distorted by all I've seen since. I'm definitely influenced by film and the kind of devices it uses, with contrast being one of the main ones. I love the juxtaposition between two different things, how that happens in film and music, and how that can happen in music against film. I don't need things that are more complicated than the fundamental things in music and film language, because I always find them exciting if they're done well. Because David Lynch passed away, I've been revisiting some of his classic works, including the whole of Twin Peaks, which has been exciting. I just finished watching Inland Empire - what a wild journey that is! It feels like someone's frantically dragging you through their dreams, with such constant momentum from start to finish. I'm also a big fan of obvious films like Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. It's been nice to revisit them, I find his work to be so inspiring and very playful. There's lots of people who make film really well, but you feel like they're making it in the way that most think it should be done. With Lynch, it feels like he was playing with film as if it was clay. I love the simple choices that are made in his work. During season one of Twin Peaks (and throughout his whole career really), he does this classic thing of slowing footage down and playing sound out of sync to create this unusual and yet obvious effect. No one does it nowadays. Everyone tries to do complicated, CGI, overlaid effects, whereas he would do these crude, simple things, and make them seem deeper and more imaginative. I think it has to do with the brain, it sees a problem with sound and image and tries to find ways to deal with them instead of creating other, more exciting solutions.
Are there instances in your music where atmosphere and melody become more abstract, versus times when it takes on a clearer, more direct shape, to better reflect the emotions you're trying to capture on each track?
There's a lot of thought that goes into all the melodic ideas on the record, ranging from the very subtle to the more deconstructed ones. The melody in the second half of "Catherine", for example, is a very abstract version of the initial melody. You don't necessarily notice it, but it's a reinterpreted version with a different mood and tonality, which is quite a classical thing to do, to try and get as much out of a melodic idea as possible - Beethoven would do that. "Tape Loop" has a whole lot of melody in it, but because it's hidden, slowed down and pitched down an octave, it becomes this very diffused cloud. And there are guitar moments as well. In Reverse, the opening track, has four or five melodic improvisations that I just recorded crudely into the laptop mic and just left. I played each line independently, improvised them and, for some reason, it felt so right with the electronics. There's a sense of where you are in it, but also this strangeness to the fact that you have different melodic lines weaving in around each other. I like doing things like that on a synthesizer as well, so I can constantly play simple melodic lines and make them interact as if it's a chord progression. I prefer to write with melody than chords, because chords often feel like they've made up their mind about everything [laughs]. I try to write with two melodic lines at least and let that actually indicate the potential for a chord. That's probably different from how many write electronic music these days, with more emphasis on immediate production, but I'm quite old-fashioned in some senses and prefer to improvise melodic lines – they end up dictating the potential to go forward. I've never tried to get production to sound amazing as a starting point. If I did that, I wouldn't know what to do with it.
Did you change up your synth and pedal setup in any meaningful way this time around? I know you’ve always had an affinity for the Prophet Rev2 and the ‘08, for example.
Yes, I tried some new tools out for the record. The Moog Matriarch was used on "Soft Gradient Beckons". There are lots of guitar instances used in different ways: crude guitars, acoustic guitar parts, electric guitar parts mangled through various pedals. There’s also an emphasis on digital, glossy, more pristine sounds that then contrast against a more smeary, diffused tape analog sound, to get a fusion of dual sensation, as you hear on "Gaivotas" and the title track. At the end of "Nocturne", there's a kind of destroyed tape synth sound, but you can't tell if it's played in reverse, it moves in and out of itself in a weird way. There's a huge amount of material that didn't make the record, but is actually kind of there within each composition. What I end up doing is creating a huge amount of material for each piece, and if the piece has its own sense of power, I could easily make 30 minutes of material or more just for one song. Because of that, there is a madness to it, you can get confused by the potential of different options. I'm definitely interested in designing and building sounds that feel like they work in each world, and it’s something that ranges from digital to analog and also applies to percussion and drums. There are all sorts of foley recording sounds on the record. Since production is such a common thing in this day and age, I think everyone does a lot of everything. Perhaps I'm still exploring what I think is a DIY aesthetic to an extent, I feel like there's more creativity still there. For example, the production of Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter, while well produced, reaches a certain level where it denies a ‘lo-fi-ness’ sometimes, and there are a lot of creative options in things not sounding big [laughs]. When people get good at production, they don't want sounds to be too much in conflict, unless it's obvious conflict. And by doing that, you end up limiting the language of what music can be. I'm interested in lots of different things, and that includes those that are slightly problematic. I find there’s so much creative opportunity there, no need to limit things from becoming too clean. One of the things I've gotten good at over the years is designing synth sounds, it's an art in itself and doesn't necessarily make a good piece of music. You can get obsessive and fall in love with the designing aspect of a synth sound, thinking about nature and what is actually going on within that action. When you're designing a synth sound, you might implement some of the same qualities as when somebody tries to draw a human with charcoal (you have to ask questions about proportions, for example). You can start to observe nature and think about replacing those things back into your design. You don't have to, of course, but I do that quite a lot unconsciously and it ends up creating an interesting experience. It's almost like designing typography as well, you design something you think is ideally interesting, but also has some kind of functionality within it. It has to fit into a world, a composition.
How does your own work, past and present, continue to surprise you? Do you find yourself curating, relearning and breaking your own tools and rules to keep your sound evolving?
I have phases of being really excited by and then hating everything. Right now, I'm constantly writing in a way that’s interesting to me, but it could easily be the opposite. When writing, I try not to have any expectations and play with the potential of things. If something happens and interests me, then I can have an expectation about where it could go, but it's more about research and development for me. I just keep a constant exploration of ideas. Since everyone is so integrated into the way a computer affects your decisions as an artist, it's very easy to be overwhelmed by the latest or the most powerful technology – since everyone's using it, then it feels like you should be using it. Most people would probably make better music if they just had three or four tools. It sounds old-fashioned, but it's very difficult - unless you're a genius - to understand the importance of ideas if you're thinking about too many things. You can easily understand the power of something if you're working with the same tool over and over again. There are a lot of dangers in production, and it almost feels like there’s a tool for every single possibility and error nowadays - it just wasn't the case 15 years ago. If you had any problems back then, you wouldn't even think about removing them. Restoring things is one of the many aspects of production, and that capacity to solve each and every issue changes everything. My imagination is so wild that I can already make too much music with a few things anyway. I might have a lot of different processes, but not a thousand tools.
Is there an example on the album of you not trying to use the newest tool or technology and just sticking to the basics?
I often use a weird combination of things. Sometimes it would be a plugin that's 10 years old with another brand-new plugin, but the most basic 6-stock in the world, and then something sophisticated. There's this weird combination of qualities all the time. I'm quite free to play with sound and not care too much in the moment, but when people ask me what made a certain sound, they're always surprised by what I tell them. I think it all depends on the person using the device, why they're using it in a certain role and the juxtaposition between all the different elements. One sound on its own might not make any sense, but make a huge difference in combination with something else. I'm very interested in the relationships between sounds, both in the moment and in a vertical and horizontal structure. It sounds obvious, but it's easy to try and make one sound amazing only for it to have no value in the composition. The opposite is also possible though, so I'm always mindful of that. This is why I mentioned the design aspect. You can become obsessive about it, make something amazing and still not understand how to use it in a composition (and that's fine). To me, that’s the excitement of producing music, when these odd, sometimes illogical things happen that you simply couldn't imagine otherwise. There's a logic in reverse engineering or understanding it, but not in getting there – and that's quite magical. I wonder how I would even think of that, because it's easy to recreate something in hindsight, but not very logical or rational to imagine it and make something the way a human often does.
What’s next on the horizon? Between the album release in July and the tour dates, I imagine things are moving fast.
The crazy thing is I'm actually releasing another record: it's a score I did for a science fiction game called MindsEye. That’s two full-length records within a few months of each other, and I'm always writing on top of that, which often happens after you finish a record, you're free somehow. I'm excited just to write music and sketch it, constantly sketching out ideas and seeing where they go. For a long time, before this record came together, I didn't like making music to the point where I didn't think I would ever care about doing it ever again. It was quite alarming, so it's good that I've managed to naturally get some excitement back. It was quite an extreme burnout, probably from writing too much during the pandemic, but I'm in a very good creative space right now. I’m inspired by a lot of things, from the most basic things to the most complex ones. That's a good sign as well, when you can see the potential growing from the very small building blocks. There's a lot going on and it all seems quite positive.