Having just dropped his brilliant full length LP \”In Space, No One Can Hear Your Boring Stories\”, Australian producer Smile On Impact is in a great place, production wise. The album is one of the most varied collections of work we have heard in the electronic spectrum for some time, and because of this, we wanted to hear more about the creation process from the man himself.
You have quite a unique and varied sound running through your productions, how would you best describe this to someone who is yet to hear it?
The term \”Laser Crunk\” is my favourite, but it\’s not particularly enlightening. It\’s essentially a few faces of bass music. Some moments are between glitch hop & moombah, others are more trap and dubstep influenced. There\’s hints of D&B in there too. Sample heavy, bassy and hopefully sophisticated.
What drew you towards electronic music?
Producing and recording music is what I love to do. By writing electronic music, it means I\’m always in the studio. I started playing around with a DOS program called Fasttracker II, when I was 15. When I was 18-20, I was playing samples and keys in metal bands. This project Smile On Impact has been around for about 6 years in various forms.
Is there a story behind the name of the album?
There\’s actually a loose theme or concept to the album. I wanted to project the idea of being on some mammoth intergalactic spaceship on the way to colonise another planet. I was interested in the vast amounts of time that would take and what the parties onboard the ship would be like. So hopefully that\’s what the music sounds like. There\’s always been a tongue in cheek element to what I do, so hopefully people enjoy the idea.
There are a wide variety of different sub genres of electronic music throughout this album. Outside of the electronic umbrella, where do you take your musical influences and are they present in this collection?
I think most every bass music producer is a metal-head and I\’m no exception – you\’ll hear lots of distortion on my record and sneaky little guitar feedbacks all the time. There\’s a big solid dollop of 70s funk in there and heaps of hip-hop elements. Because electronic music is not limited by the sound of instruments one owns, there\’s a freedom to sound like anything you want. Which is why I try not to rely on trying to recreate vintage drum machines and techno sounds. There is so much more to explore.
Do you have any plans to tour this album?
I\’ll be playing shows in Melbourne but at this stage, no tour plans. Smile On Impact is predominately a studio project. But I do enjoy rocking the occasional club gig.
You can pick up the album here.
