Interview: d'Eon
On making nice music to listen to, the legacy of Hippos in Tanks, the shock of hi-fi.
d’Eon is a musician based in Montreal. Between 2010 and 2013, he released several albums on the influential label Hippos in Tanks, including a 2011 split LP with Grimes. After putting the project on hiatus for the latter half of the 2010s, he returned in August 2021 with a new album, Rhododendron, released on Hausu Mountain. This interview was conducted a few months ago.
How did Rhododendron come about?
Usually I like to get in the zone and write a record over the course of two or three weeks, but this one was done over the course of about a year. I wanted the material that I gave to Hausu Mountain to be a little bit more like diverse. I didn’t want it to just be a single concept or a single process. It’s all good for me personally to upload twelve tone serialist music that’s done on a DX-7 or something, but I’m not gonna give that to a label. I wanted something a little bit less conceptual. I wanted the theme of the album to be nice pleasant things to listen to, nothing too heavy.
You’ve been releasing a lot more music the past couple years.
I did produce music between 2015 to 2018 as well, but it was a lot less. I had a lot of other things going on, but I think my work now is sort of picking up where 2013 left off. The experience of having been on Hippos in Tanks was very important to me and it really colored my perspective on what it means to be a musician.
I’d be really curious to hear more about that.
I think that in North American underground music, there is a thread from the early 2000s to now. I would have no problem tracing, for example, early 2000s noise music and freak folk to things like hypnogogic pop in the late 2000s and early 2010s via people like James Ferraro and even Grimes, whose early music sounded like freak folk.
You also had these noise or noise-adjacent musicians in New York like Daniel Lopatin [a.k.a. Oneohtrix Point Never] and Autre Ne Veut – that scene was this old guard of people, and so I do think that the noise, freak folk, and psychedelia scenes of 2000s underground music can be traced directly forward to things like hypnogogic and all these underground micro-genres that were the zeitgeist in the 2010s.
Hippos in Tanks was this really interesting pivot point from lo-fi to hi-fi. You had Olde English Spelling Bee putting out reissues of James Ferraro’s CD-Rs, and Simon Reynolds started talking about retromania and hypnogogic pop. There was all this talk about chillwave, “It’s a throwback to the 80s, it’s hazy and it’s lo-fi”; and witch house, “It’s lo-fi and noisy and blown-out”; and hypnogogic, “It’s just lo-fi drone music, it’s memories, hazy memories”... It went from that to immediately being punched in the face and forced into the present. With something like Far Side Virtual it’s like, “Wow, holy shit, this is James Ferraro? This is the opposite of what I would expect from an artist that was known to be lo-fi and murky, going into this sparkly, hi-fi, futurist music.”
I was at MoMA PS1 in 2011 or 2012 and I saw HD Boys. It was Aaron David Ross from Gatekeeper, Colin Self, Tabor Robak, Ryder Ripps, and I feel like somebody else... It was a supergroup of New York people. At that time, what I was hearing from my contemporaries, my peers, and my betters was stuff like James Ferraro’s Night Dolls with Hairspray. Ariel Pink had just come out with his new album that did really well because hazy, lo-fi, retro nostalgia was really in. Here I am in at MoMA, and I see the Backstreet Boys, they literally called themselves the HD Boys. That was so shocking to me, it was as if I was hearing noise music for the first time. Around that time Far Side Virtual came out, and you started to get your first inklings of what would eventually become what people called “deconstructed club.”
Not a real genre.
No, I agree. You had like… I think Fade to Mind was also part of that pivot point in American music. I would say Hippos in Tanks was a real pivotal moment in a total aesthetic shift in American underground music [from lo-fi to hi-fi], but was also a logical continuation of what had come before. Far Side Virtual is a completely logical continuation of all of Ferraro’s other music. If he’d recorded some of his other CD-R releases in Logic or something, it would’ve sounded like that.
It is a continuum, in my opinion, although there was this sort of shocking aesthetic shift. When I got signed to Hippos in Tanks in 2010, I was making music that was still nostalgic, it was boogie funk influenced, Chicago house, things like that… Dan Lopatin and Joel Ford were making music as Games, and so that was sort of the beginnings of vaporwave.
Dan Lopatin found me on MySpace. He was hanging out with Barron [Machat] who was running Hippos in Tanks, and they told me I should send them a demo. I got signed at a time when music was changing and a lot of things were being born. It was a gestation period of new music, which then fanned out into different scenes, genres, and approaches.
Grimes is also a part of that sort of pivot point. It’s interesting that somebody who is now a pop star had such an important role in underground music.
There was this really fruitful period, maybe 2012 to 2015 with a lot of the artists you mentioned. But after that, at least within the world of what gets called “experimental electronic music,” it started feeling like the long 2015 to me, throughout the Trump presidency –
Oh yeah, exactly.
And to be honest, I feel like a lot of the hyperpop stuff – so, a caveat, I haven’t heard the 100 Gecs album in full –
Me either, actually. [laughs]
But a lot of the admittedly limited selection of things I’ve heard from that zone sound like a less compelling retread of the DIS mag hi-fi aesthetic from 2012, which arrived in a very specific context. Post-financial crash, peak-Obama years, all kinds of shit… I was 20 when that was originally happening, and now I’m 30, so it’s not thrilling to see this stylistic recursion happen with such a tight turnaround. I’m curious what your thoughts would be in response to the claim that the 2012 to 2015 period kind of never ended.
With the pandemic, I feel like music started moving again a little bit. But I think you’re right. In like 2013, 2014, you started hearing stuff like Rabit or Lotic and it was sort of this post-Fade to Mind aesthetic. Then, what seemed to happen, not by the fault of any of these artists themselves, but what seemed to happen was that literally from 2014 up to the end of the Trump presidency, or up until Covid, it was just the same samples, the same types of beats, you know? It was all guys like me, 35 year old, white, straight guys making ballroom music or something. It did feel like people were in a holding pattern with specifically underground electronic music. There wasn’t this massive explosion of genres in very short periods of time like, one year it’s chillwave and the next year it’s witch house and the next year it’s sea punk and the next year it’s vaporwave. You didn’t have that from 2014 to 2019.
With that all being said, I think the one thing that really sort of popped up out of that but was not really of that style was PC Music in 2013 or 2014. I discovered PC Music on Soundcloud in I believe 2013 when I was teaching myself how to do computer programming, so it was very appropriate music to listen to. PC Music has had three, maybe four stylistic shifts, but the earliest PC Music was very digital, very complex melodically. PC Music in 2013 was just the most fascinating thing I’d ever heard in my life. R Plus Seven by OPN came out, and then to me, what I wanted to hear more of in that was given to me by A.G. Cook and Daniel L Harle working together, and Easy Fun, and all those people. It was insanely complex, and also just very hi-fi, like the highest-fi music you could think of. I think that that was the birth of what you would call hyperpop, so to me it’s not surprising that PC Music enjoyed a resurgence and that hyperpop became a buzzword and a Spotify playlist in the midst of the pandemic.
That was a really interesting moment, the rise of PC Music: this meteoric rise, and then it went really out of style very quickly in 2015 or 2016, maybe ‘17. Now in 2020 it comes back up. They have a more earnest vibe about them now. A.G. Cook stuff is less conceptual, less DIS Mag, but in 2013, 2014, PC Music had really taken up the mantel that DIS, Fade to Mind, Hippos in Tanks had started a few years before.
I think there’s a consensus now that hyperpop, like 2020 hyperpop, in retrospect, a year later – you could really discern it as two different genres. You had your Dorian Electra and your PC Music and your Charli XCX – I am a huge fan of Charli XCX.
I love Charli.
Yeah, she’s my favorite pop singer. But you have that kind of music, which is like pop with futuristic or kooky sound design, and then you also had SoundCloud rap that had gone in a similar direction but came from a totally different sort of lineage. You had some people who were like, post-Lil Peep who were making what got called rap music but they were really just singing. And the production got more and more sugary and more and more hi-fi and complex, and you had artists like my friend blackwinterwells who went on an unbelievable creative streak in 2020, putting out hundreds of songs with various people. Each one of them is this hugely complex, melodic, major key music all done with really modern synths and really hi-fi production techniques. It was rappers, but they’re really just like, singing emo. And so it was like emo, electronic Soundcloud rap, and that got lumped in with hyperpop, it got put on hyperpop playlists. So, there were two types of hyperpop in my opinion: there was pop music, and then there was basically rap music that was unrecognizable as rap music. And so this Soundcloud rap strain of hyperpop was what I was really into last summer.
In 2019 I sort of remember thinking, “I miss microgenres.” It’s stupid to call them that, but everybody likes it as a shorthand, and hyperpop is that. It reminded me of the days of seapunk and shit like that. I mean, you listen to some of that seapunk stuff, like Unicorn Kid, that sounds like hyperpop to me.
Who were some of the other artists you were into last year?
Okay, let’s think here. A lot of them actually did make it on the real Spotify hyperpop playlist. I’m thinking of people like osquinn, who’s another Soundcloud rapper, she made a really huge hit called “Bad Idea” under the name of P4rkr. She’s one of the more popular SoundCloud rap/hyperpop artists, which doesn’t really have a name except for hyperpop, and so she worked a lot with blackwinterwells, who produced everybody in that scene for a while, for like a year.
Even in between let’s say post-Trump getting elected and pre-Covid, you did have some interesting developments in underground music. You had for example the label 100% Electronica and George Clanton, synthesizing vaporwave with proto-hyperpop type aesthetics, as well as even chillwave and shoegaze – so yeah, there’s always interesting stuff going on.
During the Trump era, there was a little too much conceptual music for me. And hey, I am guilty of being overly conceptual as well. I am the first among the sinners in that respect. But I really sort of got burnt out on conceptual music, especially electronic conceptual music, and I came to really resent sound design. I came to find that things are too hi-fi now. Everything is this sound design wank. People can do whatever music they want, but I mean, a few years ago I was just like, “No. Fuck granular synthesis; granular synthesis should just be outlawed. Nobody should be able to use Abelton; fuck that, it’s too much.” But I’m over that now.
That’s interesting. I would imagine that these super sound design-y synth technologies were not consumer products before the mid-2010s.
Exactly. Yeah. You would have to pay ten thousand dollars to get access to some of that technology. It’s so true. But again, I’m a hypocrite, because in the last year or so I’ve been getting into sound design. I haven’t released any of it, but just enjoying myself with weird sound design wank, so now I’ve sort of become what I hate.
I’m curious to hear more about what you mentioned earlier, the picking up where 2012 left off with your music.
I got a little bit burnt out on music around 2013, and I started getting into teaching myself how to use the Linux terminal, teaching myself a little scripting, I taught myself Python, things like that. By 2014 I had learned a couple programming languages in my free time and I was more interested in programming than in music.
Now it’s sort of flipped, where now in my free time I’m doing music again, because tech is something that’s sort of ambient in the background now; I’ve learned what I’ve learned and now it can be something that provides me financial stability. That was probably the main reason that I wasn’t making a lot of music between 2013 and 2019.
I was in my late 20s and having a one-third-life crisis or whatever. I was doing a lot of partying, so on my weekends I’d be hungover and wouldn’t work on music. I was working a day job, I was a little bit disillusioned. The death of Barron from Hippos in Tanks was very devastating. He was in many ways the arbiter of my identity. Like, who is d’Eon? Barron was the one who was selling d’Eon. And so when he died, I felt a loss of sense of self.
On top of that, after I put out the album called LP on Hippos in Tanks, I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to like, make an LP2 that was more grandiose and more ambitious. I wanted a string quartet, and I wanted it to be the most earth-shattering moment in music history, and that was such an egotistical thing to think.
The thing that sort of got me unstuck creatively in 2019 was losing that attitude where I wanted everything to be earth-shatteringly amazing and groundbreaking. Like, I can just make music and put it on Bandcamp and talk with my friends and have fun. I’m not the world’s greatest genius, I’m just a guy making music and uploading it; it’s not that deep. That really helped me stop putting pressure on myself artistically. I just want to make some nice songs that hopefully sound nice to people and maybe someone will enjoy it. I really had to force myself to stay in that mindset.
I’m honestly not super familiar with their work but Orange Milk and Hausu Mountain seem like they’re kind of latching onto a certain 2012 vibe and trying to push it forward.
There is absolutely, no doubt, a certain aesthetic continuity between some of the artists on Hippos in Tanks and some of the artists on these labels. However, I do think that – and this is not a value judgment, I don’t think either is better or worse – but I do think Hippos in Tanks was a little more of its era in terms of being heady and conceptual, whereas I think people are very burnt out on that type of over-serious, postmodernist attitude now, like, “Okay, this is about y’know, fucking consumerism and Dubai and currency exchange and the virtual marketplace.” Those themes have been explored and were thoroughly explored in 2012. I think Hausu Mountain and Orange Milk and the artists in that scene are more interested – and again, I don’t speak for everybody – but I hear a lot more of the sound palate and the process continuing from 2012, but it has shed the baggage of over-seriousness. It’s kind of quirky and cute, and just kind of – not all of it, but I find that it’s less self-serious in its presentation, which I like.
You did a split with Grimes back in the day, and now she’s like… a very specific public figure. Are you still in touch? What’s it like knowing someone who went from underground to actual A-list?
It’s fascinating. I was in the right place at the right time and now I have two degrees of separation from the richest person in the world. We are still in contact – we don’t speak at length, because she is very busy, but hey, we still talk from time to time.
Barron spoke very loftily and he treated all of us as though we were already Rihanna. He would talk to James Ferraro and Dean Blunt and I and all the other artists on Hippos & Tanks as though each one of us is the most important artist of the century. He would talk that way about Grimes as well. In the back of my head, when we’d have these lofty discussions, like, “We’re gonna change music, we’re gonna change the face of music,” I sort of thought, “Oh, yeah, that would be great, but who are we kidding?” But when you think about it and look back on it ten years later almost, it seems like in many respects a lot of that did happen. I don’t think that I personally changed the direction of music but people like James Ferraro certainly changed the direction of music. Grimes changed the direction of music and the ways pop stars are viewed. Grimes specifically, it really is unbelievable to see my friend from house parties in Montreal doing noise shows and stuff ascend to the highest heights of pop culture. It was a moment of like, “Wow, it really is possible to change culture if the circumstances are right.” It really is not that much of a stretch to think that someone can just completely change everything or put an aspect of culture on its head. With her situation, and in a different respect with people like James Ferraro, there’s sort of a butterfly effect, where a little moment in time can amplify into the future in really unexpected ways, which is kind of amazing.
One thing I would also like to mention in this more general discussion is the cultural impact that Yung Lean and Blade and Ecco2K have had on culture, especially for Gen Z.
After Hippos in Tanks put out their last record, Barron wanted a little bit of a change of pace and started doing tour managing for Yung Lean and Bladee. I remember those guys coming to Montreal with Barron and just hanging out, these little Gen Z kids who were up and coming. Barron really believed in them. He was like, “You guys are gonna change the scene, you guys are gonna change the culture, you guys are the stars.” He ended up being totally right about that. It’s interesting that we share the same sorrow of the death of our friend Barron. When I listen to Bladee and also Yung Lean, I hear a lot of pain; their best friend died. That was my best friend, too. Their pain – they’re singing about my pain, too.