Thinking Outside the Box |_-|

John Lillis talks to the Barry Lynn a.k.a Boxcutter before he brings his music made of space, time and something heavenly to the first of a trio of parties presented by Tweak.

One night about three years ago, I found myself at the Irish kick-boxing championships in Clare watching two girls wallop the shite out of each other.  This was a new experience for me although ultimately not a very rewarding one, so I decided to slip out mid-fight and walk the five miles or so home along a quiet rural road.  Taxis were out of my financial bracket at the time. The trek turned out to be a far more interesting experience than the kick-boxing as I blasted Boxcutter’s ‘Glyphic’ album through my ear canals for the first time and surveyed the clear sky and shining stars above.

I’d heard a lot about this young electronic producer from the North and knew he was making seismic waves across the bass community in the UK with labels such as Hot Flush and Planet Mu picking up on his monstrous sound.  Here was music brimming with intelligence and a profound sense of wonder only enhanced that night by gazing into space and letting one’s imagination run asunder.  Sound and vision intermingled into shapes under the grand theme of space.  Either that or I was trippin’ balls in the Clare countryside.

Turns out I wasn’t too far off the mark, as I discovered when we started chatting for this interview.  Space – be it the spatial quality of music or the cosmos itself – plays an essential role in the arrangement of Boxcutter’s work.  Now with four albums under his belt (three as Boxcutter and one under his own name of Barry Lynn), he’s extensively explored the realms of sonic environments using the techniques of electronica and dub culture. Barry explains more, “One of the things your ear is constantly doing is helping the brain build up a picture of the area it’s in, it’s really sensitive to acoustics. So I like messing with sound so that it confuses the part of your brain that deals with spatial information. Originally got the idea from dub reggae, which I’ve been heavily into for a long time.  I think electronic music has been tangled up with ideas about space (as in astronomy) for as long as it’s been about, and I’m into both, so it’s cool, and pretty easy, to get one to evoke the other.”

There’s no point in trying to pin down Boxcutter’s music, because it doesn’t really sound like anything else.  He’s spent most of his years consuming music from various eras and crates, so much so that his approach to production is one informed by the medium of sound itself, not just the stylistic trends associated with certain genres.  He tells of how a life spent listening has blurred the lines along which he treads. “My parents are into music so we always had a decent stereo at home when I was growing up.  My Dad had a sizeable record collection so I heard a lot of jazz rock and fusion from the 1970s, with less interesting stuff from the same era mixed in, nearly always with a heavy slant on lead guitar. But he was always into Brian Eno too, and some Kraftwerk. I never went out much in my teens so I heard everything in isolation mostly, did a lot of digging and taught myself about different music. I have spent a lot of time in clubs since then though, and would definitely agree that proper bass isn’t something you’re gonna get at home. Northern Ireland isn’t exactly a hotspot for soundsystem culture. I’ve been heavily influenced by producers like Aphex and Squarepusher, and they opened the door to a lot of other stuff for me too, older acid house, electro, electroacoustic music, the Radiophonic Workshop, jazz funk, loads of stuff. But dubstep, grime and 2-step are very important too. I think the confusion about what genre I’m in comes about because I’ve made both DJ friendly tracks, and stuff for playing at home, and then presented it all together. I leave it to the listener to decide what fits where.”

One of the most exciting electronic musicians on the live circuit, Boxcutter will bring his low-end frequencies and cavernous echoes to the Shannon Rowing Club in Limerick on March 26th, courtesy of the good people at Tweak.  Now in its final year, the interactive-media promotors will be hosting three events over the coming months in the run-up to the annual festival in September.  Lovely stuff.

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