Machinedrum on Going It Alone, Working with Tinashe, and Not Clearing the Dancefloor

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Here's what's cooking today: I first interviewed Machinedrum's Travis Egedy waaaaaaay back when around the first Sepalcure record for Pitchfork, so today marks a very sweet full-circle of sorts. I've followed Travis' work ever since, of course—from the landmark record Room(s) to his wealth of genre-fluid collabs across the last 15 years. All roads have led to his new EP Bl00ms, his first independent release after parting ways with Ninja Tune that also stands as possibly his finest work in a minute or two. I had a great time hopping on a call with him last month for an hour-long chat about his career and all sorts of other things, check it out:

You've bounced around a lot in terms of sound over the years—but this new EP sounds very much like a return to the style that you became well-known for on Room(s) and Vapor City.
A lot of the feedback I've been getting is that it sounds like a return to that sound. It wasn't necessarily intentional, but what's interesting is some situational similarities. When Room(s) and Vapor City came about, I wanted to take a break from features—working with rappers and singers. When I first moved to New York in 2006, my main goal was to work with as many rappers and singers as possible and cut my teeth as a producer. I made a lot of amazing connections, and some lifelong friendships.

But there was a certain point when I was getting a bit jaded by it all, especially as I was getting closer to managers and A&Rs. A lot of that stuff was starting to suck the life out of what I was doing. A lot of the initial excitement that I had when I set out to do experimental pop—that fire had started to to die out. There was also a bit of angst about the scene—not just in NYC, but in America in general. The initial rise of EDM or whatever, it was definitely not for me, and nobody knew what kind of parties to book me at. I was definitely having a hard time thriving. So I took the opportunity to move to Berlin, and that solidified a switch of direction at the time.

Over the past 10 years, after moving to L.A., there was a similar arc from when I first moved to New York. I started surrounding myself with more music producers, singers, songwriters, and rappers, and I grew more as a producer in a newfound approach to working with artists. I definitely had a bigger confidence than I had before when I was in New York, not really knowing what the hell I was doing but working with a lot of amazing people—a "faking it until I make it" kind of thing. In L.A., I had this newfound confidence that led me back down another path of genuinely wanting to explore working with singers, songwriters, and rappers again.

There were some periods where that was heavier, and some periods where I backed off a little bit. Obviously, the pandemic limited the amount of collaborations I could do that weren't virtual. But I was attracting artists based off of my previous work with Azealea Banks, Theophilus London, and Jesse Boykins III, and people were discovering my music through Human Energy and hearing my work with Dawn Richard. There was momentum, and I'd been following it. Even with 3FOR82, initially I was wondering whether to have features. As I was making the tracks, I found that I had this natural ability to create pockets that could be filled by a vocal. My music has always had that, and in the past, if I wasn't working with a feature, I'd do some vocal cut-up thing—taking R&B a cappellas and filtering them, doing some ghostly Burial-type shit. With 3FOR82, I felt this natural urge to work more with artists and and do a like a final statement piece of what I was capable of doing with features.

I've done so much of that work, especially in the past few years, that I had this urge to separate things. I'm still interested in working with artists, and I still do a lot of session work. But there's more of an intention to separate Machinedrum and all of my production work for artists. At some point last year, I started writing a lot more instrumental music that was coming from me working while traveling. There's a mobile version of Ableton that I started writing little loops on, and there's a certain way that I work whenever I'm using that app that lends to a difference in how the songs were structured. I was naturally creating more DJ-friendly music—which, with Vapor City, that was definitely an intention, because I was starting to DJ more back then and a lot of the songs that I was making at the time were very hard to include in my sets unless I like made some sort of edit. Even 3RMX82 was a selfish way of asking all the homies to turn my pop songs into club-ready tracks.

Let's talk about going independent and parting ways with Ninja Tune.
I had an amazing relationship with Ninja Tune for a little over 10 years. Every step of the way was amazing. and there was nothing necessarily that made us part ways. It was just a contractual thing. I realized I wasn't not signed anywhere, and there wasn't an active push to sign with anyone.

Initially, I was like, "This'll give me an opportunity to start releasing stuff myself." But I didn't think about what that would entail until maybe late last year when I started working with this new company called bside, which presented this model for independent artists to have more transparency, ticket sale data, and feedback from the fans that go to your shows. I was like, "You guys are really cool, I'd like to book a tour with you guys." Them and my agent were like, "Okay, so what are we going to tour for?" And I was like, "I guess I should put together some kind of release to do the tour around." It's funny, because usually I have the music ready and then it's time to put together a tour. It was something that I was putting off. Maybe there was a little bit of fear there—of, "Okay, if I'm gonna release something on my own, I'm really gonna have to figure it out." Fortunately, shortly after my contract ended with Ninja Tune, I signed a distribution deal with Too Lost, and they've been amazing to work with.

I actually get really excited, nerdy, and granular about the business side of things. I love seeing how certain marketing approaches will affect sales—things I have to adjust in order to make sure my margins aren't crazy. A lot of that stuff has always interested me, but for the most part, I've been very separate from it. But once I started to get serious about what it would take to release my own music, a lot of that fear went away and turned into excitement. I like taking risks, thinking outside of the box, and aligning myself with industry disruptors—people that are trying to do something different, see the problems that are currently going on with the music industry, and actively try to change it.

In the past, any time I'd try to do something that was outside of what Ninja Tune or my management was used to, I'd get a lot of pushback—just straight up, "No, you can't do this." Now that I don't have that, something has subconsciously been going on with my creative decisions. With Ninja Tune, in the past, I'd send through demos of a new album I'd be working on, and they'd give me amazing feedback. But that feedback would do something to me psychologically. Maybe I haven't fully processed how that was changing my decision-making, but I definitely know it was.

There's something to getting paid in advance and knowing that you're part of an ecosystem for a business. Your music is essentially part of the lifeblood of that company, and other people's livelihoods are more or less dependent on the success of your own project. Being a very empathetic and sensitive person, the risk-taking maybe was getting a little—I don't want to say watered down, but definitely affected by me trying to make sure that everybody was happy while my vision was still being maintained. The absence of that back-and-forth has led to a lot of freedom. I can make a lot of last-minute pivots that I couldn't do before. Two weeks ago, I didn't even want to drop the single, but then I had like some interest from some really cool outlets that wanted to to feature it, and I was like, "You know what? I'm just gonna drop it, I don't care." Those things were very difficult to navigate in the past.

I played around a bit with the digital garden that you had created for this release, and I saw the limited-edition floppy disk USB you released, too. Whenever I see independent artists doing cool stuff like this, I'm always like, "What is the financial risk?" How much of yourself does that require putting into this? Talk to me a little bit about that.
With the website, I've been a fan of HTML art for years. It was something that went away, but back in the day I loved discovering websites that didn't seem to have any purpose other than to be an art project. The web 1.0 revival going on piqued my interest, and I started experimenting with different things that could be connected to the world of the music. I've always been interested in world-building with all of my albums, and this seemed like a natural extension of that. I also did some teasers where the only way you could find out like the release date was by deciphering these cryptic HTML puzzles. Whenever Boards of Canada does some weird thing and have all their super fans scrambling to figure it out—Iglooghost is a great example of somebody that does really interesting world-building and creating lore around his releases—I love that stuff as a fan.

The floppy disks came together in a very cool way. I still keep in touch with some people from Ninja Tune that I got pretty close with over the years—specifically, Sean Preston, who's been doing a lot of their manufacturing and packaging design. I've been working with him since Vapor City, and he's always been really cool about thinking about innovative ways to package work. I presented to him the aesthetic behind Bl00ms, and he suggested the floppy disks. Initially, they were hard to track down—the places he was suggesting were sold out. So I went on a whole adventure through Alibaba to source where these other companies out of the UK were getting floppy disk USB containers. That was an interesting thing I'd never done before—ordering bulk USB drives from a Chinese manufacturer, having to translate emails.

At the end of the day, it ended up being pretty cheap and quick to manufacture. The main difficulty with those was wanting to load the USB drives with tons of stuff. There's a very throwback, MS-DOS-looking terminal where you can explore bonus features—visualizers, there's Easter eggs, all kinds of stuff like that. What inspired me to do that was thinking back to the late '90s and early 2000s, when artists would release CD-ROM versions of their albums that would load up an interactive um Flash player that you could navigate. I remember one from Skinny Puppy that almost felt like a video game—you'd click on a weird little door in the background of some creepy room you were in, and it'd open up some rare behind-the-scenes footage of them backstage in the early '80s. That really stuck with me, and I've been missing that. No one has really been doing that recently. It's taking up a lot of my free time that I could be working on music, but at the end of the day, it's an opportunity for me to do things outside of music that still feel creative.

Talk to me more about all the work you've done with people over the last 15 years. When it comes to "this is a Machinedrum track" versus "this is for someone else," what's the criteria?
There was a time where, sonically, there was definitely more of a separation. I got to give a lot of props to Tinashe for shaking me out of that habit. We've been working together for the past three or four years, and I noticed this pattern where, any time I'd play her things that I made intentionally for her, she wasn't interested in them. In those first initial sessions, I was getting a little worried, and at a certain point I was like, "Whatever, I'm just gonna start playing her these weird little tracks that I've been working on for myself"—and she would fuck with them. She'd be like, "This is amazing. Do you have anything more?" So I was like, "Alright, I'm gonna come back to our next session and I'm gonna have a bunch of stuff that's more in this vein ready for you." And that'scontinued to this day. Any time we do sessions together, I have to really challenge her with some of the stuff that I'd never normally play for pop artists of her level. She's definitely one of the bigger artists that I've ever worked with, and there'd be artists in the past where I'd play some of my more leftfield stuff and it wouldn't necessarily resonate. They'd be like, "This is really cool, but I don't know what to do with this."

Working with Azealia Banks was similar to Tinashe, where she'd gravitate towards any of my beats that I never imagined a vocalist on. I'd be like, "Wait, how are you gonna write to this?" And she'd be like, "Just let me do my thing," and then she'd write and record and I'd be like, "Holy shit, this is amazing." I've realized over the past few years that. the more I intentionally try to separate my sonic approach when it comes to working with artists and my own music, the more of a disservice I'm doing to the work. Over the past few years, I've been leaning into letting those two worlds melt together. A lot of the songs on Bl00ms could've easily had somebody like Tinashe on them, or a more forward-thinking artist—but I didn't end up going that route.

When's the last time you spoke to Azealea?
Two weeks ago.

You guys still making music together at this point?
We are not making music together, unfortunately. But from time to time, we reconnect and see how each other are doing.

You've hopped in and out of subgenre a lot across your career, and dance music has often been about people following or actively bucking against trend. Talk to me about what you've observed across the past couple years.
It's been a very exciting time as far as you know seeing where trends are going and what people are resonating with, whether it comes to pop music or the underground. Something happened during the pandemic where all the kids, suddenly, were either going out and listening to faster music or making it themselves. You watch a lot of these TikTok DJs that are playing 150 BPM hard techno, juke, or jungle—and I'm here for it. It took a while for it to finally pop off in the States, but it's very exciting to see this new generation of producers and DJs that didn't necessarily grow up around '90s rave and electronic music interested in reviving it in a unique way.

You'll see some veterans, or whatever you want to call us, that'll talk down on younger producers because they're not referencing the right thing, or maybe they don't know where the music originated. One thing I've noticed that is interesting, is that a lot of the atmospheric jungle that's become popular, the reference point for a lot of kids is Playstation as opposed to pirate radio in the UK or famous jungle nights.

I have noticed that a lot with younger people. They're like, "Oh yeah, jungle—like Wipeout and SSX Tricky."
Yeah, for me, I'm like, however you get into it, I'm fine with it. There's definitely a trend of people wanting to explore the history of things, and there's so much information out there, with younger influencers that are referencing the actual origin points of a lot of stuff, like RamonPang. He's a good example of someone that's really good about, not just fanboying about certain things that he's really into, but really getting into the origin stories of certain things—the narrative arc of where something began and how it got to this point. There's even some younger producers that are literally recreating what it would've been in the '90s to make tracks with an old-school sampler or a sp1200. As a result, any time I'm playing shows, I'm still seeing young 20-somethings coming out to my shows, and that definitely makes me happy that I'm able to keep my music fresh for the 'younguns.

Let's talk about the changes you've observed when it comes to the dancefloor itself.
Well, first and foremost, I'm not clearing dance floors when I play 160 BPM and up. The crazier I get, the more people get excited in the audience. Even 10 years ago, if I played anything that was too left-field, I'd notice a decrease in energy and then I'd feel this pressure to pick it back up. Of course, there's still going to be a bit of that here and there, but I feel like I can take a lot more risks now in my sets—and the more risks I take, the better response I get. Of course, you're gonna have people that are online too much that'll go out to shows from a "main character syndrome" point of view, as opposed to a shared experience. But that's always been around, even if people weren't necessarily on their phones in the past.

I've seen people talk about the idolization of the DJ in current times, and I'm like, "Bro, that has been around so long." I mean, definitely not in the '90s and early 2000s. But once electronic music became part of American culture in the past 10 or 15 years, it's either gotten worse or you've found people having this urge to find venues where the DJ booth is on the floor, which satisfies this need for people to feel like they're getting seen—that whole Boiler Room energy. But from the DJ's perspective, you feel like you're actually connected to the crowd. A lot of times, the 360 setups are still a little elevated, and you feel like you're literally the center of attention—but there's less of a separation of being on a big stage and having that literal separation from people. I've been very excited to see like more parties like that.

One thing about dance music is that the culture and conversation around it is like jazz. There's always a level of conversation where it's like, "Is this good for the culture or is this bad for the culture?"
Yeah, with jazz specifically, you read about how certain trends would happen, like when bebop or progressive jazz became a thing, and they'd get pushback from the original heads being like, "This is ruining the culture. This isn't why we did this. You're being disrespectful." But then you had these amazing movements come out of that. You wouldn't have Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, people that were doing things that were against the grain. You're always gonna find that with any genre that's trying to evolve—and sometimes there's actual merit to it, when you see a certain genre being bastardized. Look at early American dubstep, or "brostep," a very cartoonish interpretation of what was going on in the UK.

I in no way think that there shouldn't be critiques or pushbacks whenever certain trends emerge that seem like they're going backwards or sideways. But I think letting these things play out can end up with good results. Even with brostep, you had a lot of Americans discovering electronic music through that. It was developing their ears to appreciate sound design, because a lot of that stuff was about who could make the craziest-sounding bass line. Whereas, to anybody who'd been listening to electronic music for as long as I had, you hear it and you're like, "Oh my God, it's very cringey." But at the same time, you're like, "I mean, that did sound kind of cool." There's positives and negatives of these shifts, but I like to sit back and observe, as opposed to dictating what people should and shouldn't do now.

Let's talk about your relationship to social media. I remember your dust-up with Hannibal Buress in 2013, which was at a time in which artists were starting to engage with social media more directly. Now, there's a lot of fatigue surrounding whether you can opt in or out of participating.
Well, specifically with Hannibal, I should put out there that we're homies now, and our kids hang out.

That's a happy ending!
A super happy ending. He's great. We've made some music together. It's funny how those things work out. But that time period was definitely the Wild West of social media, specifically with Twitter. Even looking back at YouTube comments, the way people talked to each other back then was, I gotta say, way more toxic than now. There was much more of a feeling that you could get away with saying some crazy shit without consequence.

I was a very reactive person online back then. If anybody had any sort of critique—and this boiled down to ultimately just being a very insecure person at the time—I'd insult them or have some crazy reaction, which is what led to the whole Hannibal Buress situation. Instead of being like, "I'll let this one go," I said, "Fuck you, talentless prick," or something like that—and that opened the floodgates open of being publicly shamed.

Of course, there's still haters online. With Twitter, I deleted my account a few years ago, but they're definitely trying to bring back that Wild West aspect where you can get away with anything. But elsewhere—Instagram, even on YouTube—I've noticed much more civility when it comes to how people are talking to each other. In the past it almost seemed attractive to be a hater, but now people understand that, if you're proactively taking your time to talk on someone online like that, it says more about you than it does about the person you're talking shit about. Of course, there's situations where there are people doing terrible things, and the pile-on is warranted to like bring someone to light. But people are seeing through the insecurity of people that are hating just to hate, and it's becoming less attractive for people to do that now.

In regards to feeling like you have to be a part of it now, that's very real. I go through waves of becoming jaded, and then other times I'm motivated to push myself to make myself uncomfortable and do things like putting my face in front of the camera, talking to my fans—doing things that even some of my favorite artists aren't doing. Some artists seem to somehow coast by on posting an album cover and then not posting anything for months, with tons of engagement. There's some weird inner conflicts that I go through when I see that. I try to do the same thing and get much more mixed results. I haven't completely unpacked that to figure out what that really means for me, but I do recognize there's a lot more of an open conversation that people are having about how this is affecting us.

Ultimately, nobody wants to be a part of this, and it seems like there's no end in sight. At the same time, as long as we live in a capitalist society, it's inevitable that any sort of thing that maybe has initial good intentions of connecting people and creating communities is going to get swallowed up by the capitalist machine. It sounds bleak, but that's where we're at, and until the system changes, I don't really see any way out of it. One really great shift that I've noticed is a recognition of authenticity. Being exposed to influencers, especially during the pandemic, people can recognize when people are bullshitting or not. The more authentic you can be, the more people gravitate towards that, and it's definitely phased out a lot of people who were putting on a show in the past. People can see through that stuff a lot more now, and that's ultimately a good thing. If this is the hellscape that we found ourselves in, at least there's some sort of humanity there.