Paula Temple's awe-inducing techno is shaped as much by technique as it is by personal history and world view. Mark Smith hears how she does it.
Paula Temple has never had this problem. The music she's released since 2013 has often been unmatched in its field, thanks to an intensity of personal feeling that comes through in her work, most notably on her debut album from this year, Edge Of Everything. While she shares certain hallmarks with many of her contemporaries—a huge sense of scale, kick drums like a boot to the jaw, a preference for end-of-days atmospheres—few match the emotional heft of Temple's work. For her, this sound is no fad. It's a deadly serious means of self-expression, and a way of reflecting on the myriad ills of the world today, which she feels with a sometimes paralysing gravity.
Temple has had a keen eye on music technology ever since she first became interested in making techno in the '90s. A friendship with Gerard Campbell, developer of the Notron, an obscure but prescient landmark in hardware MIDI sequencer design, led her to help develop his next strange tool, the MXF8 DJ controller, which presaged many of the digital DJing techniques that became standard practice in the 21st century. At Temple's new home studio in Amsterdam, we got an insight into the years of experience that built up to her current scene-leading sound as well as some of the key techniques and tools powering the new LP.
Tell me about the period between when you became a music lover and when you started making music yourself.
This would've been around age 16 or 17, although I'd started to learn how to DJ before making music. As a kid I begged my parents to buy me this cheesy Yamaha keyboard. They made my dream come true but once I had it I didn't know how to use it so it ended up being neglected.
I did actually learn to read sheet music before then. When I started high school at age 11 they were offering music classes, but I didn't have an instrument. No one in my family did—we weren't exactly musical. But the school had this room full of abandoned music equipment and they said, "Take your pick."
So, I chose the biggest thing in the room, which was a baritone. I was this little girl, I don't know why I chose it. I would practice for hours, torturing my parents and neighbours, but I got good quite quickly. Within six months I went from nothing to Grade Four. I was teaching myself from the books.
That's pretty serious, doing that under your own steam so quickly at that age.
I was Grade Five within a year and could read new music pretty quickly. Then I was asked to join an orchestra. I was the youngest person in it. It was overwhelming and I couldn't really handle it. I realise now as an adult that being in group situations like that triggers a sort of social anxiety. So there I am in the middle of this adult orchestra being like, "I can't follow this." Then they asked me to play something solo, probably because I was out of tune and not following everyone. So I quit. I could not handle that type of limelight. That was the end of classically trained music for me. I dropped all that and didn't consider it anymore.
Can you recall the period of discovering the tools and process behind making electronic music?
I was particularly infatuated with LFO. I read an interview with Mark Bell and he mentioned the Roland SH-101. So, guess what, my first synth was an SH-101, but I didn't fully appreciate it because I didn't really know how to program it. I'd just turn the knobs and get strange bleeps and super low basses out of it. But this was a long way from being put into the context of an actual track. I was just recording bits of bleeps and noises. I actually have archives with tonnes of stuff like that from back then.
I had heard of the 909 but it was completely unobtainable for me because they were already rare and expensive. So I got a sampler, the Akai S3000, which admittedly was still pretty expensive. I was swamped with Zip and floppy disks, just making my own kits.
Techno enthusiasts would share samples so someone would give you the 909 sounds and you'd stick them in your sampler. I remember being blown away that you could have the kicks used on the Red Planet records, proper Detroit kicks. Then you'd process them again and again to put your own spin on it.
Were there resources or people around you that could help show you things? Or were you figuring it out mainly through trial and error?
Mostly figuring it out myself. If I had the resources available to us today back when I was 18, it would've been so much easier and quicker. But there was nothing. Now there are university courses for electronic music production but there was none of that back then.
Apart from that, I was too shy to be in a network of people, let alone ask them about this sort of thing. So the main resource I had was magazines. Sound On Sound ended up being the best one for learning stuff, they would properly explain synthesis and production techniques. It would still take me a while because I'm not really the best at reading instructions. I never really read the manual, I just ignore it and get straight in there.
Those magazines were also full of adverts for the next best thing. I was constantly distracted being like, "I need to have this new synth in order to be good." Of course that's not true at all but you don't realise that at the time. So I was buying stuff I didn't understand. I remember buying a Roland XP-50 because it was a workstation that supposedly did everything. I never used it, it was a total waste of my money. Then I got a Roland JP-8000 and hated the sound. It was super trancey. So there I go again blowing all my money on something I didn't understand.
Speaking from the present, I want people to understand that you don't need much to make music nor feel pressure to acquire gear. A lot of what I'm doing nowadays is in the box, it's all available in one program. When I was first starting off, I was bombarded with, "I need this and this and this." At the time it was kind of true because you didn't have good computers so you needed all this external hardware. But now there's tonnes more flexibility.
Back then when I was learning all this, I'd pick up on production rumours. Things like Jeff Mills getting his extra click on the kick by overdriving the mixing desk. Or downsampling your kicks to make them extra crunchy and bassy—those types of things. By then DAWs were getting better quite rapidly, too.
My favourite outboard piece at the time was the Nord Modular. I ended up having two computers, one PC that was the modular editor for the Nord so I could make my own patches. The other was a Power Mac 7600, which was my music-making computer.
What was you day-to-day creative process like back then?
I wasn't gigging so much and I'd just moved to Sheffield. That's when I decided to start focussing on music full-time, at least for a period. Then if it didn't work out I'd cry and figure out another way to exist. I'd saved up just enough so I could survive for a few months.
My brain couldn't switch into a creative mode until nighttime started. My magic time would be between 10 PM and 3 AM. If I went over that it'd be quite pointless and I'd be dead the next day. I think it was quite an isolating time. I didn't really have weekday friends.
I wasn't really connected with the people I'd meet in the clubs. Of course, I was friendly with some of them. I spent most of my time with the inventor of the Notron, Gerard Campbell. He got me involved with one of his new inventions, the MXF8.
Just to be clear, the Notron is a strange, almost cult-classic-level sequencer and the MXF8 is like a MIDI controller for DJing, right?
Yep that's it. The MXF8 is a MIDI controller but in a DJ/live crossover way.
The MXF8 is a bizarre looking thing. It almost looks like a boutique stomp box or something. The Notron is also clearly one of the strangest sequencers ever made.
The MXF8 is a similar build to the Notron and it has Gerard's sense of humour. For instance, there's the Nothing button. It's just a kill switch, which is nice because when you kill everything you've got your effects trails tailing off. Then there's the question mark button, which is like a function or shift control.
Gerard had a fascination with motorbikes so he built everything to spec as if it was a Harley. We ended up hanging out every week. He'd come to all my gigs in the UK. We'd spend a lot of time setting our machines up and recording over-the-top noises and giggling like Beavis and Butt-Head.
It must've been great getting to know Gerard given how interesting both those machines are.
We met through Claude Young at The Orbit in Leeds. Gerard was interested in what I did and asked if I'd like to buy a Notron. Again, I had no clue. I had no interest in getting a sequencer!
You already had two computers!
Yeah I know, I still had no idea at the time. But then I really got into the Notron. I was making all my music with it. With the Notron, you can go with whatever you're hearing and feeling, the connection is immediate. I could set up multiple sequences that would all be sent to the same synth. Then I'd make the sequences all different lengths. One might be a regular number, like 16 steps, while another would be, say, seven, so you'd get all these overlapping, evolving sequences. Then you can move the little wheels around to change the pitch of an entire sequence or just an individual step. You could also sequence chords and each sequence can run in different directions, too. Combine all of that together and, before I knew it, I'd have a really interesting selection of chords and sequences.
Are there modern day equivalents of what the Notron can do?
People tried to make software versions in the 2000s I think. A lot of what it did has become standard practice for hardware sequencers. I had a BeatStep Pro for a while, which could do some of it, but I was pretty bored with how basic it was so I got rid of it. I would be really nice to have something like the Notron again.
MIDI is obviously widely used but the idea of having a standalone MIDI sequencer isn't exactly in vogue. People are obsessed with modulars and control voltage but connecting something like a Notron or an Elektron device to a well spec'd rackmount synth can be so powerful—it's easy to forget that a simple little MIDI cable can send so much more than pitch and timing information. Maybe it's time for a revival.
I would absolutely love this to be revived, particularly with a USB. This sort of thing creates a direct connection and you're working primarily through feeling. In a way, Ableton's Push has been the best thing for me since the Notron—being able to play with notes quantised onto a grid of pads rather than playing on a keyboard is really helpful. Some things do call for a keyboard though. I loved playing the Dave Smith OB-6, which was a collaboration with Tom Oberheim.
I originally had the keyboard version and I was obsessed with it. It would send me off into this meditative state just playing pads. I swapped it for the desktop version because there's a good chance we'll be traveling with it for live sets but I regret not having the keys anymore. There was something that I couldn't get with an external keyboard, an extra layer of expression with the aftertouch that was very specific to the circuitry maybe.
It was actually the Stranger Things soundtrack that led me to it. I read some interviews and they were mentioning the Prophet but when I was checking those out I came across the OB-6, which to me actually sounds darker and in a way more emotional. The Prophet sounded more classic to my ears.
I think it's preset number seven that sealed the deal. I don't care about any other sound it makes, I'm willing to pay the full price just for that patch. It's very Boards Of Canada, very bendy and melty, just the lushest thing. I had no idea how it was going to fit into industrial techno. When I'm using the OB-6, I usually detune the oscillators against each other to create that uneasy feeling, that sense that something's not quite right.
Speaking of detuning, those modern-sounding, hoover-style patches you use on "Raging Earth," "Joshua and Goliath," "Futures Betrayed" and so on are a signature of the album for me. Could you talk about what sort of thinking goes into those sounds?
There's much more synth work on the album than the EPs I did on R&S. I love synths in general, not just the OB-6. There's a VST that I use to death that's on almost all my productions called Waldorf Largo. Those hoover-y sounds on "Raging Earth" are from the Largo for instance.
The Waldorf Largo looks pretty old as far as VSTs go.
Yeah, it's dated by software standards, I think it came out in 2009. I have to write to Waldorf once a year crying because something like an Ableton update makes Largo break down. I'm like, "You can't do this to me! I need this synth, please help!" Then they help me through it. It's also pretty prominent on "Deathvox" as well.
The deep, croaky sort of vocal sound in it?
Well that's my actual voice tuned down and run through Grain Freeze in Ableton. But the synth part from the beginning is Largo with its own distortion being pushed to the edge. It's cranked up so high that the synth almost disappears into the fuzz. On its own it sounds completely unusable, but if you create enough space in the track it actually becomes the highlight.
Even when something is over-distorted, sometimes I hear something in it that can be useable. It may be bordering on pure noise, but sometimes there's a narrative thread you can latch onto without it being over-the-top. If it does become too noisy then it's impossible to have a relationship with as a listener.
Largo's got three wavetable oscillators. Maybe I'd do a bit of detune between them, but the main thing for me really is the two filters. You have a drive curve, which is where you get your really interesting distortion and overdrive tones. So I'll play between these different drive curves and often use the comb filters.
The other synth plug-ins I use are much better maintained than Largo, like Native Instruments Reaktor and the FM8, which I use to death. I recently started using Razor, which I used a lot on "Cages." The great thing about Reaktor is that it's always evolving. For a long time, since the early 2000s maybe, it was Reaktor 5 with its thousands of patches and samples. It almost felt infinite. Then finally Reaktor 6 came out but I keep going back to 5. I don't have the time to figure new stuff out. It would be nice to get into in the future when I'm not gigging so much.
Do you think you'll realistically be able to have more time in the not-too-distant future?
Two approaches could work. One where I'm playing less but I'm still in touch with the gig environment and what it means to feed a crowd and feel connected to their response. So that'd be as minimal as possible but still a regular thing. The other idea is to be like a band where you're off for six months. That's your time to rest, recover, get in the studio, have a specified amount of time to make something new and then tour it. On for six months, off for six months.
But the DJ world doesn't work like that. Once you're in this circuit, you've got to be on the go all the time. It only takes two months and then you're forgotten about. That's how it seems. And that's a shame.
You must get along OK with working in airports and planes then.
I don't have a choice really. The gigs are the only way to make an income. I don't make anything from the music itself. Maybe ten, 15 years ago I could have. The golden era of selling techno records, when Regis was moving 5000 units per pressing for example, that was when you could earn and not have to DJ. But now your gigs are all you've got.
There was a long gap between your first release and your return to techno in 2013. Was it easier or more difficult to make a commitment to music after the experiences you'd gone through in the intervening years?
In a strange way it was super easy. I'd committed myself to community social enterprise after I stopped music initially. I was set on a path to be committed to that for another five years because the organisation I set up needed me to get it to a point where it could function by itself or have someone else take over.
Then suddenly, I didn't have that anymore. I just asked myself, what is it that makes me happy? And that was making music. It didn't matter if it didn't go anywhere. It was like remembering to take care of myself after all this time.
I'm sensitive to covering this period in your life, in which you'd dedicated yourself to running this community outreach organisation, only to have them embark on a homophobic witch hunt against you and it all culminating in the courts. That must have been a difficult time to say the least. But there was something you once said about coming back to music and realising that nurturing your creativity was important. On the one hand, leaving music is a really strong move—showing that your self-worth isn't tied up in it is healthy. At the same time, honouring your creativity matters for your wellbeing. The viewpoints seem opposed but they run parallel to each other perhaps.
Some of it may come from being from the north of England, being working class, being a woman. So it's about self-neglect. You put other things first. The attitude in England towards being a creative person is, "Get a real job." And so you almost feel ashamed that you're doing something creative because it's not considered real. That was completely different moving to Berlin. There, being creative is real. Everything was in reverse to what I grew up with.
The main part of my work after leaving music was encouraging others to believe in themselves. Creativity and music is one way for them to feel self-worth. And there I am giving this message but I'm not applying it to myself at all. At the same time, all the people that were involved with the organisation were saying, "Paula, we're talking about making role models here. You've got a history in music, you're perfectly placed to do this. Is there a way we can have you take a step into a mentoring role?"
I really wanted to do that. I liked that idea but it felt impossible because I was running the organisation, I'm having to get funding and take care of so many issues. I didn't know how it was going to work but it was an exciting direction to move forward into. And then everything went wrong with the homophobia. Ironically, the idea was turned against me in the court case. That made clear the maliciousness that was going on beneath the surface.
Eventually being free of all of that, I found my music pulse again. I realised that being creative is what made me happy. It was simple as that. I didn't feel like I had anything to prove to anyone. I could make any sound I wanted. By this point I'd no idea what techno was anyway. As far as I knew, techno didn't exist.
Well loop techno made a decent stab at killing it off in the 2000s.
Yeah it did, didn't it? Especially around 2004. So I thought it was gone. What was really different this time from a production perspective was my relationship to noise. I listen to what I was making before and that sound was so clean. If you listen to my first EP, it's pretty refined. What I make now has noisier textures, which adds another dimension that's particularly exciting to me. That's where I've been able to sculpt my own sound.
Technology obviously changed a lot in these years, especially with more powerful, cheaper computers. Was there a period of adjustment for you getting back into it?
The key technological change for me was that Live 8 had just come out. I was playing with the new Glue Compressor and the updated EQ and I just loved it. I'd struggled with Ableton before in terms of mixing because there was a really tiny sweet spot in the virtual gain structure. If you didn't get it exactly in that area, it sounded shit. We would often chide each other, "Did you make this in Live? I can tell." But in this redesigned Live 8, the gain structure was better. It was like there was more headroom. I was finally enjoying being able to set up loads of sidechain compression, just going over the top with it. I had a cracked copy of the Soundtoys plug-ins, too. I'd always wanted them. I'd seen them in a studio and was like "Oh, I love that Decapitator!"
Decapitator on every channel from there on out.
Yeah, not even joking! So there I am Decapitating everything, and I'm just having an absolute thrill with myself in bed in my little apartment in Leeds at two in the morning. So I didn't have much in the way of equipment but I had Live 8 and Decapitator and that's all I needed. That's what made "Colonized." Another key thing was letting go of the details needing to be micromanaged. I was completely free, just capturing stuff and finding what really thrills me.
I read one of your other Art Of Productions with Paul Woolford. That "chair test" that he mentioned, I have a similar thing with goosebumps. If I'm finding the hairs are standing up then I'm on the right path. Or sometimes I'm jumping out of my chair stomping around the room. That's a nice feeling to have. Purely responding to the music and not over analysing it, just feeling the sheer thrill of it.
That definitely came with "Colonized." It's so ugly that track. I remember playing it to my girlfriend at the time. She had no idea what techno was, but she was like, "There's something in this. You should finish it." And so I did, very quickly. That was December 2012. Actually it was New Year's Eve. Two weeks later I sent the tracks to Renaat at R&S.
It's stating the obvious, but your kick sounds are fairly crucial to the character of your music. On a track like "Cages" there are quite interesting textures and layers involved despite it being incredibly forceful. How much time and thought goes into that part of the process?
Sometimes I'll spend a day or even a whole week recording kicks. That'd be my only task. Distorting the shit out of them, doing everything I can, layering them and then compiling the best bits into a new drum rack. Then I tell myself, those are my kicks for 2018—I've set a limit to my selection.
"Cages" was a little unusual because I knew I was making a track with that title before I even set to work on it. It was going to be about the denial of freedom to others and other species. There's Yarl's Wood Centre in England locking up migrant women. Children in cages in America. The new concentration camps. China with the Uyghurs and Falun Gong.
But anyway, I expressed it through "Cages," so clearly it wasn't going to involve a lot of nice sounds. One of the kick layers was originally a stock sample in Ableton but it sounds nothing like the original because of how I've processed it. There's so much character there, it's distorted to hell. I think at the time I had the Elektron Analog Heat, which I had for a week, hated it and sent it back. But I got some good saturated kicks out of it. I've also got this OTO BOUM Warming Unit because I really love stereo distortion although that's not necessary with kicks. But it's absolutely great for synths.
Then there's the Thermionic Culture Vulture. When it comes to drums, it's really nice to record a whole beat pattern with the kick included in the mix with the rest of the drums. Because it's a stereo unit, you can hear the distortion interacting between the kick, snare and hi-hats across the stereo field. I'll mix that distorted channel in the background, which then makes the drum pattern thicker. The beats in Joshua And Goliath were run through the Culture Vulture as a parallel layer against the original drums. Usually I do parallel processing in this case because I'm distorting the shit out of it, so it's losing clear bass and transient detail.
The Culture Vulture can also add a lot of rumbling sub if you put just the right amount of bass in. You can hear it in the first break in "Joshua And Goliath." When I take the kick out there's a low sub rumble in there that's just the Culture Vulture freaking out and adding this low-end hum. When I play that track out, sometimes the tech engineer runs up to me being like, "Is there a live lead humming?" But it's not. I just like it and left it in there on purpose. That throbbing feeling works really nice on the dance floor.
My starting point on the Culture Vulture is to turn everything to the max and work backwards. A couple years ago I was in a studio in Helsinki with my friend SØS Gunver Ryberg. She's an amazing sound designer. We had a couple hours in the studio together, and that was the first thing she did as well—turning everything to 11. I was like, "Oh my God, I do that too!" It flies in the face of convention and sounds fairly awful but that's the best starting point. Start at the most unusable sound, distort it to the max and then work backwards. That's how I usually like to go.
Are you then passing the kicks through multiple stages of resampling?
It depends on the character. Sometimes I get something I like straight away out of one distortion device. Or I just keep going and going, not because I feel there is more to do but I may as well because I've dedicated this session to one task. Don't question it, just collect it. Record it and come back to it later. Probably 99 percent of what I make ends up unused but it just takes that one thing for it to all be worth it.
I imagine having these studio sessions with a specific, limited task is a lot less pressure than working on a track.
It's better that way. I hate that feeling of starting a new project and thinking, "Where do I go from here?" I often fail when I have a specific goal. Sometimes I want to make an anthem, my summer anthem. Never happens. Or say I've heard a track that I really like and I want to make something along those lines. Even though I'm technically capable of making all the sounds, I don't feel it because it's already been done and it ends up bad. But having these sessions that are very specific and broken down, I end up with something that's really mine. Like that strange, ugly kick in "Cages." Some of the layers don't even sound like kicks anymore, it's just flattened-out, grizzly texture. Then I layer it with something more solid.
It's about dealing with creative blocks and coming up with new ideas through experimentation. I can quickly feel creatively bored if I'm doing the same things I've always done. That's when I'll give myself a little challenge, which I call rules. It's also to limit myself so I'm not drowning in possibilities. A rule could be something as simple as only using Ableton synths. Or explore every distortion you've got. Mix hardware and software distortions. Make different distortion chains. Then see what comes from that. I've found new effects chains like this that end up being a key character on a drum kit or synths.
Another reason for doing these small experiments is that, since I've got limited time, the idea of making a full track often feels impossible. Having mini-experiments is doable within the few hours I've got each week. I know all of those experiments aren't wasteful and that they'll become useful at some point.
It's interesting also to see that as you've been showing sounds to us you're touching the speakers to feel the bass.
Maybe I don't have the right ears to hear the bass properly. But it makes a difference when I feel it this way. Being on the road so much, I've actually really gotten a lot of use out of this Basslet, which is more or less like a wearable subwoofer for your wrist. People in Berlin say it's a pointless invention—for me it's fantastic. When I'm on the road with headphones on, all I need is to feel exactly where the bass is hitting. Is it late, is it early, is it sustaining for too long, is it too punchy. With the Basslet I can also feel if there are other parts, maybe a bass or synth line, that's interfering too much with the kick because if I'm not feeling that clean punch I know I need to clean up the mix.
The studio I used to work out of in Berlin had a fantastic sub. I think it was the Adam Sub10 or something. But still, when I needed to be specific with a sub frequency, I'd put my toe on it to feel where it is hitting exactly. Then I'd get leg cramps from being there for hours with my toes stretched out on to the sub. So the Basslet for me is fantastic. I want another one in case I lose it.
Another thing that sticks out to me in your sound is putting distortion after spatial effects rather than the more typical choice of placing it before, say, a reverb, which then of course applies distortion to the space you've just created.
Yeah, I do that often. I'll put something like the Strymon BigSky pedal between the OB-6 and the Culture Vulture, which creates this amazing, wide distortion that moves around in the stereo field. So it's cracking up your spatial environment. Sometimes it's just too much though. Then I'll put the reverb after the Culture Vulture if I want it softer.
Do you think it's this type of thing that gives your music such a large impression of space?
I get that feedback all time: "Your sound is massive." But the thing is, it's just perception, really. Perhaps I've made the track really sparse but there's one sound that's really big, so the contrast gives this sense of scale. I rarely have basslines in my tracks, but often there are synth parts that cover a lot of different frequencies. I'll carve my drums around it and give it as much space as possible so it can do what it needs to do. Another thing for creating size is having compression after reverb.
Maayan Nidam said the exact same thing actually.
Well there you go. If done smartly, it can really make things massive. It's more or less like having the room, or in this case the reverb, kind of racing back toward you after every kick drum. At the same time you want lots of space between sounds so you can hear those very light tails of reverb. That helps the impression of hugeness. I also move the reverb around a lot. These are really simple techniques but blooming out wide and pulling it back in tight again is something I love, especially doing it quickly as it throws the listener around. I do that a lot.
Are you happy with your work rate as a producer?
I'm a really slow producer for many reasons. One, I'm tired all the time. I think I'm an easily tired person so I have very short windows of energy. So that makes me slow. When I've been a co-producer in other people's projects, it's made me quite nervous knowing how slow I am and knowing I need to respond to someone else's wishes and demands. So normally I'll say just leave me alone for the afternoon and let me experiment. I'm not so much a traditional producer, I need to explore in a completely different way rather than going straight for something that you know works. I pay more attention to the character of something rather than the technical specification. That takes time to explore.
Do you feel bad about being slow?
I did but now I accept this about myself. This is a really busy time for me right now and probably will continue to be for the next two or three years. But I want to reach a point where I can take a tonne of time off.
In two or three years.
Yeah, gosh, I don't know if I can physically make it!
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