Tracing The Range's Musical Identity From Boards of Canada to Linkin Park

If you were to listen to James Hinton's music without Googling his name, you might not suspect that he calls Providence, Rhode Island, home. Not that the producer known as The Range seems fazed. "I get a lot of people thinking I'm from London," he says. "It's definitely a compliment to me." We're sitting in the living room of his friend's house discussing his whirlwind past year shortly before he's set to play at Toronto venue The Hoxton.

"People so firmly associate your musical identity with your location, which in some ways is correct, but also strange because we're all sharing the same Internet to some degree."

Listening to last year's Nonfiction, Hinton's debut album on Brighton-based label Donky Pitch, it's easy to see why fans might be confused about his origins. The soft piano lines reminiscent of Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada colliding with snatches of drum and bass and jungle. The anonymous English voices sampled and looped from YouTube videos on highlights "Jamie" and "Metal Swing."

There's plenty of influences from his past that seep into Hinton's music, including post-rock bands like Sigur Rós and Toronto's Do Make Say Think ("I was blown away by them having dual drummers and how they treated harmonies") that he listened to growing up in Pennsylvania, and Baltimore club which he was later introduced to by friends. While his mother was a music teacher and he learned multiple instruments, it wasn't until he went to college when he started getting into sampling and using dance music as a framework.

"That began the process of making something, and if you had a show later that night, seeing if you could play it," says Hinton. "It was a different mindset."

At Brown University he would find like-minded spirits in guitarist Dave Harrington and rising producer Nicolas Jaar (who would later form the duo Darkside). The latter would end up offering input as to what songs made Nonfiction. "There's negative context to the word "cerebral," but I think it's important to us that what we're doing is well-considered," says Hinton of the commonalities between he and his former schoolmate's music.

The lineup for the event is a grab bag of DJs including Crystal Castles' Alice Glass and John Famiglietti from LA noise rock outfit HEALTH, but Hinton's used to performing on disparate bills. He's previously toured as an opening act for CHVRCHES and Phantogram, decidedly more radio-friendly bands with fervent fan-bases, learning experiences he describes as positive.

"Those are situations where you're aware like 'wow, this could go horribly wrong' every single night," says Hinton. "Fortunately it didn't and it gave me a lot of confidence, especially with the newer material that I'm playing."

Then there's his mixes, which often allow Hinton the chance to share his friends and labelmates' music, but to show off his love of Top 40 pop and R&B including (but not limited to) Ciara, Jay-Z, and Trey Songz ("I think he's one of the most talented singers that we've seen in a long time"). One particularly notable mix for XLR8R leads off with Linkin Park's "Crawling", a selection the producer explains was chosen for sentimental as well as musical reasons.

"I was feeling particularly nostalgic for Hybrid Theory at the time, I just remember being on a bus to some stupid high school sports match and being really affected," says Hinton. "If you go back, strip away the vocals and listen to the production, some of it is really ahead of its time. The majority of the comments were like 'He put Linkin Park in a mix, what's the world coming to?'"

Not that the 25-year-old producer sees anything wrong with drawing inspiration from nostalgia, citing Charli XCX and acts on London-based label PC Music as examples of artists drawing on '90s and early 2000s Internet culture to make forward-thinking music that goes beyond mere visual aesthetics. "A lot of people view it as this cheeky thing that's not taken seriously, but there's a whole palette of sounds there," he says. "A lot of pop production today is just sheen."

Following the release of his Seneca EP this spring, Hinton mentions he's started thinking about moving beyond solo work, but he's not in any hurry.

"I have a lot of material that's coalescing into an album in my head," he says, mentioning that he'd like to put out a full-length next year. "I have the next five years of where I want to go loosely mapped out and I really want to pursue and grasp it."

Max Mertens is a freelance writer living in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @Max_Mertens

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MIXED BY The Range

IMPRINTS: Donky Pitch