Photos: Press (Egyptrixx)
„I like to have a bunch of stuff on the go.“ The multitude of projects which he is involved in shows that David Psutka is right. He has been working in collaborations like Hiawatha, Anamai and Limit or solo as Ceramic TL – each covering different types of music from punk to noise to Techno and Ambient. To date, his project Egyptrixx is the most constantly developing one. 2011 saw the release of the project‘s first album Bible Eyes on the British label Night Slugs, with which Psutka showed his own draft of club music between Techno and Bass Music with an experimental approach.
This approach is one central theme that leads to his third Egyptrixx album Pure, Beyond Reproach, released through Psutkas own label Halocline Trance. Besides Techno, Ambient and Noise, the new record also in parts refers to 80s Pop. But it’s not specific genres that inspire the 34-year-old, which is shown throughout this conversation about microplastic, material sounds, club music and politics.
The new album of your solo project Egyptrixx, Pure, Beyond Reproach, starts and ends with sounds of splashing water. Which roles do water or fluidity play for you?
I have an idea and a feeling towards sounds that is similar in its essentialness and its universality to water. All of the projects that I participate in or that I write music for center around this really fundamental idea of sound as a deeply human, visceral, essentialist thing. And I think probably the closest thing it to compare to would be water. This sort of ubiquity or importance of both things make sense to me. I think that’s a fundamental governing idea of all of the projects as well – this centrality of sounds.
Your music often contains sonic expanses that listeners can dive into. Is there also an aspect of trance?
Yeah, definitely. I think that there’s a lot of overlap between all of these different ideas about sound and ways of experiencing sound and ways of transmitting sound. Most of the live performance manifestations of all the projects are kind of formless and free. The idea that we take going into them is really just like transmitting these sounds and letting people just kind of like swim in them and bathe in them and live in them for an hour or 45 minutes or whatever. I still feel like a young artist and I think it’s something that I’ve realized gradually. I didn’t have a crystal idea of that at the outset. But I think as I was making music over the years it’s sort of a self-realization that I had. Now that I understand it more clearly I feel like I’m able to express it better or with more refinement.
Stream: Egyptrixx – Lake Of Contemplation Pool Of Fundamental Bond
The freedom of forms you mentioned earlier in terms of your live sets were also presented in the visual aspect of your work. Your second album A/B Til Infinity from 2013 had a strong visual component which was designed by the artist Andreas Nicolas Fischer (ANF). How important is the visual aspect in your work?
Andreas has done all the of the accompanying artwork for the entire project and I think that we refined the whole kind of scope and feeling of the project collectively. Even though it is in terms of material a music project I feel that the visual dimension can’t be dissected from it. A lot of the inspiration for the project has always come from non-musical things like textures, feelings, colors, shapes, materials, and arrangement of materials. Much of that came from Andreas. I think now we have a really easy working relationship. We have clear ideas of the parameters of the project so it’s kind of effortless for us to generate stuff for this project but the first couple of records we really did a lot of work in clarifying what it was gonna be, how it was gonna look, how it was gonna feel. There’s tons of overlap between the visual and the sonic elements. Maybe it’s a pretentious thing to say but it feels like an audiovisual project. I don’t think that you can really have one side without the other, they feel quite married to me.
Do you think that it was and is easier to get an idea of what Egyptrixx should be because of your collaboration?
Definitely! I’ve been doing this project now for seven or eight years and there was this early phase where I didn’t have a clear understanding of what it was or what I wanted to do. I was playing around and making some songs and releasing them – when people were willing to put them on their label. And it wasn’t really until the first album [2011’s Bible Eyes] and the collaboration with Andreas, which came like maybe a year and a half or two years into the project, where things really started to synthesize, where my understanding became clear of the project.
