Lapalux Wishes He Had Longer Battery Life on His Macbook

It's literally impossible to be nostalgic for the future, but listening to Britain-via-Brainfeeder beatsmith Lapalux, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more fitting contradiction. Much like label boss Flying Lotus, he uses stuttering rhythms and shimmering textures to explore the space between cosmic jazz and hip-hop. It's a style tied to LA's Low End Theory crew and their compatriates in places like SF and Colorado—but today is only Lapalux's fourth day in the States. This evening, he embarks on the North American leg of his tour supporting Nostalchic, his first LP and Brainfeeder debut—he'll be headlining NYC's Tribeca Grand Hotel.

On the album, released in March, Lapalux lends his astral aesthetic to a variety of mostly female singers, chopping and glitching their vocals for an effect both comfortably familiar and unsettlingly distant. I suppose that's nostalgia for you. But in a club setting, Nostalchic's warm, bassy undertones take on new meaning, more hip-swaying than yonder-yearning. Still, don't be surprised if in the middle of his set, a few drinks in, you start to miss your mum. How chic!

THUMP: It's been a year since you signed with Brainfeeder. What's been up with you since then?
Lapalux: It's been crazy, man. I signed a deal with Brainfeeder about September time last year, and then readied the album a few months after that, and it's been quite a quick little turnaround, actually. It's been really good. They've been working it quite a lot on their end. I've just been touring around Europe and the UK for god knows how many days—30 or 40 dates this year.

How has your live show evolved over the course of the tour?
I've got to a point now where I kinda know where to go with my sets, and what works, what doesn't work. It's a lot easier now to play to the crowd instead of having something set up beforehand and really strict rules. I've allowed myself now, with the live set, to be able to ad-lib on the fly and keep going with the strangeness. We've been working on visuals as well, which we're finalizing now. Should be interesting.

You have such a singular sound. How much wiggle room is there for you to play to the crowd?
It is quite difficult. I play pretty much 90% of my own stuff, some unreleased, mostly stuff off albums and old EPs and stuff. I make a lot of edits, pre-edits, so I can take it to the club a bit more uptempo. It's a tricky one really, because it's kind of like DJing, but it's also like ad-libbing different textures over top of it. But it's a boiled down set. It's not as textural and insane, going here, there, and everywhere, even though there is quite a lot of that still. I'll drop some weird shit in there as well.

Tonight, you start the American leg of your tour. What are you anticipating?
I'm just looking forward to seeing different places and feeling different vibes. I've never been to America before, ever. It's quite an experience for myself as well.

Really? When you think of Brainfeeder, of course, you think of Low End Theory and the beats scene. How has not being from L.A. informed your sound?
I dunno whether it's given me an advantage, but it's given me a different approach to it, really. I wouldn't put my music in a genre type or anything like that. I try to expand on all different kinds of ideas. It's basically just hybrids of everything: European music, English music, American music—just a massive amalgamation of what I perceive the whole beats scene to be.

By the end of this fall, you will have seen a good chunk of the world. Do you think your music might change to reflect that, or is it rooted in this specific, retrospective time and place?
I dunno, really. At the moment I'm working on new material for the next album, and it is different because my circumstances have changed and things have happened. I'm not working a shitty job anymore, I'm not having to do this other shit. It's definitely changed—I think for the better, to be honest. I don't want to keep doing the same thing over and over again, just reproducing the old album. So I think moving about and being able to live in different circumstances definitely will change my music, but I want to keep it going as well. I wanna move to different places. Judging by what it's like here, I'm sure I'm gonna love the U.S. So potentially I could move out here for a while. I think my circumstances change quite regularly, so it's always a refreshing thing.

Your album, Nostalchic, has been out for half a year at this point. Are you sick of it yet?
It's cool. I can listen to it again just about, now—not in its full length, 'cause I've heard it literally thousands and thousands of times. I took a while off from listening to it completely, but I can listen to it now again with some fresh ears. I'm still pretty happy with it—well, really happy with it.

I'd be remiss if we didn't talk about the album's title. Does nostalgia always have to recall a sentimental, summery, rose-tinted type of feeling? Your music sounds a bit spookier than your Brainfeeder compadres'.
It's just how I've grown up as a kid, and family things, and social life, and stuff like that. I remember days gone by, and being from Essex, you're outside of London; there's nothing really to do, and it is a lonely kind of existence. I've only just recently moved into London—I'm living in East London right now, in Hackney, but it's such a contrast. Essex is such a small town—nothing going on, nothing to go to except pubs and shit, and that lends it self to a nostalgic solitude and darkness in the music. Even living in London, I like to hide away in my room and not really go out that much and kinda focus when I'm writing music to get that sort of feeling again. So I have to put myself through days of not eating, and not seeing anyone, and losing my mind a little bit. I think it's the best sort of state to be in to make music.

There's a noticeable R&B vibe on this album. That's not particular to you, though—it's a bit of a trend in electronic music writ large.
Yeah, definitely. There's a whole reflux of house records at the moment as well, in London especially, and there's a massive resurgence of all that sort of stuff. R&B is another strand of that, really, it's a very nostalgic thing. I grew up listening to a lot of old R&B and stuff like that. I like to take a bit from every genre, really, not just R&B. I think with my music as well, I try and focus on making it a bit more soulful and a bit warm in just production and melody wise and harmony wise as well. I definitely try my hardest to keep that soul vibe, but then gloss it over with strange instrumentation and other things like that.

How do you find time when you're on tour to work on new music?
It's difficult, man, difficult. I do it quite a bit on planes and stuff like that. I have to be in the right mindset anyway initially, and if I know I've only got an hour to do something, I won't even attempt to start, 'cause I know I'll want to stay in and write music instead of go out and go to a gig. I wish I had a longer battery on my MacBook.

Your sessions must have hundreds of tracks. I'd imagine the CPU just wrecks your computer.
God, I've been through so many hard drives. Ableton does something to the hard drives, seriously. I've gone through 'em and through 'em, it's ridiculous. But yeah, it's very processor heavy. My MacBook is actually a lot faster than my iMac that I make most of my music on. But it's nice to have some boundaries. If I've got all the RAM in the world, and just using thousands of plug-ins and shit, I'll end up going around in circles. So I like limiting myself sometimes. Or, like, just bringing out my old Kaoss pad. It's just got a looping function. The whole of last week, just before I came to America, I just sat about and recorded guitar loops and shit, just for something different.

Do you anticipate doing more full-lengths, or would you like to go back to shorter releases in the future?
Recently I've been thinking about doing a small EP, but I think that the stuff I'm working on at the moment is albumy material. I think I'll probably hold off and release an album hopefully early to mid- next year. I like working on full-lengths a bit more than EPs. It's much more of a statement, and you can definitely open up and experiment with a lot of different ideas and keep it all in the same context.

Is there anything you wish you knew when you were just starting out as a beat maker?
The thing is, people think they're gonna jump straight into it, there's gonna be a massive hit, and everything's gonna go great. I think you have to really think about it, like This is what I wanna do, this is something that I'm gonna slowly, gradually work up to. A lot of the time it's a long, arduous task, and you never really know where it's gonna go. Even now, it could all implode, and it's that that keeps you going and keeps you motivated.