Lucianblomkamp Goes Guilt Free
The producer of the moment decides to live in it
While his Instagram bio reads ‘consistently inconsistent’, in-demand producer and songwriter Lucian Blomkamp is anything but. The Cape Town-born, Melbourne-based sound alchemist has so much on the go at any one time that even finding space to get him out to Micah in the middle of the school holidays proved rather difficult.
Blomkamp, who has had his hand in everything from Australian indie-electronica gems to co-writes for massive, R&B titans out of the U.S. is the perfect case study for getting Unyoked. Turning off is not a phrase in his regular vocabulary; the dude is, in his own words, “mostly working on stuff all the time.”
“I actually liked it much more than I thought I was going to,” Lucian laughs down his line from his studio. “I went with my partner Rosie; we hadn’t been out of Melbourne in a long time. I feel like we really needed it.”
Lucian, who managed to somehow spin his 100 days of lockdown into even more collaborative work, found himself with a double schedule of his own and other people’s stuff. “It was a matter of juggling personal things and everyone else’s. But then, I’d rather have too much work than too little!”
I think even the partial reason why I make so much music is because I feel very guilty. There's something about not even having the option to use your gear that’s really different.
Lucian, who managed to somehow spin his 100 days of lockdown into even more collaborative work, found himself with a double schedule of his own and other people’s stuff. “It was a matter of juggling personal things and everyone else’s. But then, I’d rather have too much work than too little!”
“I think even the partial reason why I make so much music is because I feel very guilty,” he says, echoing what Jonti also told us recently. “When I'm not making music it's like, ‘Damn, I should do some more stuff.’ And I think there's something about not even having the option to use your gear that’s really different.”
When Lucian started his career, he was big into capturing sounds in nature; his first record Post Nature utilised a bunch of them. “Also, like when I did go to uni for like, one second, there was some programme that this teacher showed us where it was just a database of heaps of field recordings, so I used those,” he chuckles. “I guess now I’m just a bit more minimal?”
Of all the artists we sent to the wilderness, Lucian was the only one who mapped his song out before he listened back to the sounds he recorded. We spoke to him ahead of him turning in ‘Sitting’, a meditative, moody electronic track with some stylistic nods to one of our favourite Radiohead records, Kid A.
“I wanted to go for that granular type thing, focusing really hard on texture. You can make sounds and lots of tiny percussive things out of like [does a mechanic gear shift voice] sticks, grass, some straight up wind and water. Then you have a lot of tones to play with. Hopefully it works!”
(Narrator: It did.)
Spending time off-grid, Lucian says, was a proper break that he never usually allows himself. “I could take the day off now and say ‘I’m not gonna do anything,’ but knowing that the computer and the tools are right there, you end up feeling like you should really be getting back to it.”
“I work a lot but I don’t get a lot done,” Lucian admits of his currently intense schedule. “A lot of my time is so unstructured, but this experience has made me feel like maybe I could work a little smarter.”
Whenever you need another circuit breaker, Lucian, you know where to find us. Thanks for taming those tiny textures for us.
From river-inspired funk to cicada-drive electronica, there's more musical goodness where that came from. Check out everything Field Recordings here.
Looking for your own dose of creative inspiration? Find cabin availability near your city.