22 - Kai West

Author

Giannis Kampiotis
November 04, 2022

Hello music people πŸ‘‹

Today in the spotlight, Kai WestΒ 

Ξ‘ multi-instrumentalist, living in Ann Arbor Michigan working on his PhD in musicology rediscovered his relationship with music when started working with tape.

He shows us his impressive pedal collection and tells us how they changed his life 🎢

Read Time: 10 minutes πŸ“°

The Setup

Gear List

Two-tier pedal-board with a mono/series first section, a mono parallel second section, and a stereo final section.

Favorite pedals on there:

Other

Amps & Guitars

Who are you and what is your relationship with music?

I'm a multi-instrumentalist living in Ann Arbor Michigan, where I am currently completing a PhD in musicology at the University of Michigan.

I began playing instruments, including guitar, double bass and bass guitar, and drums when I was about 11. I have an extensive background in professional musical performance, as I studied classical double bass at the Guildhall School of Music in London and then worked for about 10 years as a performing classical bassist before switching directions.

When I quit performing and switched gears into studying and teaching music history and culture, I rediscovered the electric guitar and developed a strong interest in pedals, electronic music, lo-fi music, and ambient. My interest in pedals particularly grew as I studied.

In the past year or so, as part of my dissertation research (I'm writing about electric guitar and gear cultures), I began recording and putting out music on Instagram and have since become enticed with performing and creating again as part of my work as a musicologist/historian. When one of my videos got over 250k views, I started thinking more seriously about putting out music.

My relationship with music is thus complicated, dynamic, and constantly changing. I did it for a living and my mental health suffered as a result, then I shifted to studying its history, teaching, and writing about that history for a living, and creating music for fun and research. It has become much more healing as my approach, instruments, and processes have changed.

Making ambient music and working with tape in particular has transformed my relationship with playing and creating music.

Now, although I'm releasing stuff on Instagram and looking at putting an album together, I do it for myself and to connect with other people interested in ambient processes.

What's the one thing in your studio you can't live without?

I have two.

The first is the Telecaster-style guitar I made from scratch during Covid lockdown. I had always wanted to build a guitar and document the process for my research on relationships between people and musical instruments, and finally got the chance to do so in 2019–2020. What I didn't expect was that I would also love playing that guitar. I shaped it to feel good to me and it has all those hours of my own labor in it, and something about it just feels right to play, even though it isn't perfect and quite different from a Telecaster made by Fender (which I also love). Building it from blocks of wood, carving, fretting, finishing, and wiring it, gave me a new understanding of guitars and impacted my relationship with them.

I think of instruments (including pedals) now more as companions and collaborators than as tools.

Second, because I make live layered ambient music using long pedal chains, the VFE Klein Bottle, a parallel matrix looper/mixer, is something I rely on so much, and now probably couldn't live without. Its ability to change signal routing and build up different layers of loops has changed the way I play, and having signal chains routed in both series and parallel is something I don't think I could come back from. Plus it's also a generative instrument because you can create feedback loops among the pedals and generate sounds that you then sample/loop/process.

What's your process?

I often use the guitar as an input signal or trigger to load loops into my pedalboard and then spend much of the time processing them live as multilayered drones that I then record onto tape or into the DAW.

I spend equal amounts of time playing guitar and pedals and think about them all as instruments or one big instrument.

Lately, I often end up building a bed of ambient layers that I then play over with a more guitar-like sound. I will often also use tape loops as some of the layers, recording them live into a mixer and sending that either to a reel to reel track or another track in the DAW in addition to the pedalboard sources. I don't use much additional processing in the DAW beside simple mixing and mastering chains, which I'm still learning.

I would like to build up more knowledge and resources in the way of plugins and mixing processes, but at this stage I'm still a beginner with the production stuff. But what I can do is improvise for hours and produce tracks that feel more or less fully formed as compositions in some cases.

If I am recording digitally, I often run mixes out to my TEAC reel-to-reel, as I have become enamored with the sound of tape saturation and hiss.

I also work with samplers sometimes, and process samples through the pedalboard, or resample drum tracks, although much of my music is without percussion.

How would you explain your style?

I fall into some space between ambient, drone, postrock, and lofi music.

Sometimes I lean more toward traditional ambient stuff with minimal attack/full wet reverbs etc., but lately I have been focusing more on playing guitar melodies in an ambient context, often using lofi textures to color and shape the sound to be imperfect.

There is an element of experimentalism in what I do as well, I often use non-tonal free improvisation techniques and noise in addition to the more traditional diatonic music I make.

I also draw on my background in classical music a lot, sometimes using melodies from the past, or thinking orchestrally about ambient drones. It's funny, though, most of the people I follow and imitate are synth/electronic and tape players and I guess I do something similar using guitars, and sometimes get criticized for it: "Why don't you just use synths/eurorack?" and I'm like "I'm a guitarist and I love pedals, that's why."

Something that defines me is that I use very little in the way of structural planning. I don't really write songs, or if I do, they're improvised. I prefer to play and come up with ideas on the spot and then respond to what the pedals do to those ideas in a kind of improvised collaboration.

Has this journey of building a hardware setup changed the way you think about music or life in general?

Pedals changed my life.

I started off just doing normal guitarist things with overdrives, traditional modulation, delay, etc., and as I grew more and more in love with pedals and creative singal chains, my playing changed. Pentatonic riffs I used to play just fell away and my playing became more exploratory and free, drawing on western classical and jazz harmonies, as well as ambient/postrock languages. This was a function of spending more time listening to what came out of complex pedals like the Chase Bliss and Hologram stuff and learning how to use them as instruments themselves.

I did my 10,000 hours of instrumental practice already (on an instrument I don't even really play anymore lol), and I never practice now. Practice for me now is learning how the pedals work and what they can do to the signal chain. Honestly, I think about myself as part of a signal chain now, not an instrumentalist playing an instrument, but one link in the chain. This is how I theorize what it means to play instruments, which is a big question of the musicological research I do.

Also, working with tape has changed me. That analog medium with all its flaws and quirks and difficulties adds a human element to what can be quite a sterile process. That being said, I am not an analog snob in the least. I use anything and everything and will be just as likely to use a digital tape emulation side by side with real tape.

Since this is the G.A.S. Newsletter, I will also mention that what I have been able to do with gear has led to very high outlays of money. I spent thousands on this stuff, sometimes when I didn't have the money to do so, because I got obsessed with pedals and tape machines. Now I am at a comfortable collection and I am trying to focus more on what I do with what I have than what I might add.

I'm lucky to have been able to build up what I have over time, and feel very fortunate. But I also have had to work hard both to afford the instruments, and to focus more on what I do with what I have rather than what I might add.

What’s your ONE tip on music-production or creativity?

Improvise a lot and approach musical technology improvisationally and curiously.

Even if it's just you working with equipment, listen and respond to what the equipment says and plays. We might be the ones more or less in control of what comes out, but they (and the people who made them) make our ideas possible.

Anything else you'd like to say?

The music you make does not have to be tied to your individual self worth. It can be an important part of your identity without being the thing that defines who you are.

How can people find you?

Bandcamp (soon as Kai West)

Also if you are an ambient guitarist working primarily with pedals and are interested in being interviewed for my research, email me at [email protected]

In Case You Missed It

For jams, knob-twists and pad hitting videos go to G.A.S. Instagram

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