118 - Skøgen

Author

Giannis Kampiotis
October 06, 2023

Artist Interviews 🎶 Studio Tours 🎛

Hello music people 👋

Today in the spotlight, Skøgen

Coming from Italy, every time the duo sits down to make music they brake rules and push their limits 🎶

Interview & Studio Tour

Who are you and what is your relationship with music?

We are Skøgen, italian experimental electronic duo that blend ambient and grain synth with industrial music.

We just released our debut "Two Years Later" on Several Minor Promises in both digital and tape.

The project was created in 2020 after Alessio aka Hålbå and Francesco aka Ex.Hale met and decide to join forces.

Skøgen is not our first income, we both have side jobs, Alessio does mixing and mastering and I runa booking agency.

Which piece of equipment in your studio is essential to your production process?

What we use in studio is an hybrid of gear and software, but the main pieces are modular synths, Electron Octatrack and Ableton to finalise and do post production.

What is the least expensive piece of gear that gave you the most results?

We don't have any piece of gear that sounds better based on the economic value. Every piece we have is complementary to the others.

Walk us through your process for creating and producing music.

Usually I do sketches of ambient, drones and sometimes drums and Alessio does his magic putting all together and processing the whole thing. Then the mixing part is obviously up to him since he is an audio engineer.

What is a production technique that you always come back to?

What we always come back to while we produce and jam is the use of granular synth, resampling and extensive use of feedbacks.

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How would you describe your style?

We don't like to cage ourselves in one genre.

We like to define ourselves as noise makers. Nothing more, nothing less.

What is a big challenge you have as an artist?

The biggest challenge for us is to create sounds the satisfy ourselves and push the limits of what we are doing. We aim to create something new and question the actual laws of music, like the usual structure of a song.

Has building a hardware setup changed your perspective on music or life in general?

Using hardware opened a brand new world for us, a world with possibilities that we only dreamt of with software instruments.

This changed also our perspective in life, since after we started buying gear we instantly became poor hahaha.

One tip on how to spark creativity?

Break schemes and rules and try to make your own path in music regardless what the other think and tell.

A book, movie, article, or album that has inspired you?

An album that always inspires me is "Musick To Play In The Dark vol.2" by Coil. For Alessio it’s Simulacrum by Aho Ssan.

But these are not the only ones, it depends on the day maybe, but we do both love Roly Porter, "Third Law", "Star Alliance" by Varg, and artists like Vanity Productions, Croatian Amor, Alessandro Cortini, 111x, Sigillum S.

Anything else you'd like to say?

Always question what you've been told to believe in hahah

Where can people find more of your music and connect with you online?

Gear List

These are some of the pieces we use but the list will be too long.

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