Show Notes
BIO: Benn Jordan's career began in the late 1990's as a recording artist most widely released under the moniker "The Flashbulb". A decade later, Benn would become synonymous with artist advocacy after he purchased his music rights back from record labels,formed a non-profit publisher, and challenged the early models of digital music distribution by using peer-to-peer file transfers instead of iTunes. This led to Benn being a consultant for Bandcamp before the service launched in 2007. After expanding his non-profit to carry a music education school and community center in Chicago, Benn moved to the Atlanta area in 2017 and started what has now become one of the most popular YouTube channels in the pro-audio and audio technology space. The channel now exists under Benn's non-profit umbrella and funds data-science and the never ending challenge of finding ethical business models that can make the music business easier to navigate for artists and creators. During this time his unique relationship with audio-related businesses and organizations expanded as fast as his amount of viewers and public reach. Benn Jordan doesn't exactly keep it a secret that he's discontent with the way independent artists have been treated by the tech industry, and he is very proactive about getting ahead of the curve and attempting to help write and set ethical standards for AI audio technology, and holds patents in technology fighting the non-consensual training of generative AI.
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More from The Mr. Bill Podcast
Today I'm talking with Dom Smart, who makes music as Neurodriver and runs the plugin company Devious Machines. He spent about fifteen years doing sound design for games, a lot of it on the Harry Potter games at Electronic Arts, and back in the day he was half of the breaks act Far Too Loud. Then he taught himself C plus plus, teamed up with his business partner Jim Credland, and they made Texture and Infiltrator. I still use Texture all the time. He also just finished a new Neurodriver album after a long break from music, and it's on Alpaka Musik. We get into the granular car engine stuff they were doing at E A, which is kind of insane, and how Texture started as a techno trick with gated white noise under the hi hats. He also tries to explain the Fourier transform to me, which I still don't fully get. We talk about why pretty much only audio software uses knobs, saying no to power user features so a plugin stays easy to use, the sample based instrument they've been working on for ages, and how he's coding with Claude now. And then it turns into a bigger thing about AI and art, and why prompting code feels totally different to him than prompting a song. Hope you dig it. Dom Smart Links
Today I've got AHEE back on the podcast — Chris Adams. He came up through audio engineering and synthesis, and he's spent years pulling dubstep, trap and future bass into one sound, with releases on Bassrush, Subsidia, Circus Records and Wakaan, and support slots for Excision, Subtronics, Shpongle and Liquid Stranger. He also puts a lot of producer knowledge out for free on YouTube, which I respect. Last time we spoke he'd moved onto a farm outside Portland, Oregon. He's still there, still has the chickens. Most of this one is about his new DJ/VJ rig. Instead of DJing with WAVs and MP3s he's DJing with MOVs, running them through Rekordbox with the CDJs as a MIDI controller, so the audio and the visuals come off the same file and the faders crossfade both at once. He turned the camera around and walked me through the whole thing, including where the visuals come from, which is mostly CapCut and InShot on his phone, layering up gifs and old commissioned artwork into what he calls hyper collages. We also get into having far more finished music than you can ever put out, why he's releasing it as the Bass Quest EPs instead of albums, the forty eight albums he made in four years at college, and why he started Zot Records. And then there's a long detour into UFOs, including the time he stepped out of his body onto a ship while holding a field recorder, and what his mate said when he stepped back in. AHEE Links https://soundcloud.com/ahee https://www.instagram.com/iamahee https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNNFPGqrCztLAlfTKIJ1uKQ https://www.facebook.com/aheemusic/ https://open.spotify.com/artist/1gbDc1TANALgP8lLvO5UEf?si=mXUO8maBRzCa2RD3INNfJw https://music.apple.com/us/artist/ahee/688432748 https://www.twitch.tv/iamahee https://www.aheebass.com/
Today we're joined by Tom Cosm, a New Zealand-born producer, technologist, coder, and educator who's been pushing the boundaries of music and sound for over two decades. He's known for pioneering YouTube tutorials that taught a generation of producers, and for building systems that turn things like tree-disease data and biometric signals into actual music. He's currently Technical Director at Telepathic Instruments, where he built the first prototype of Orchid and now oversees its development. We start out talking about travel and jet lag recovery, which sounds like small talk but turns into a pretty real conversation about what it actually feels like to be constantly in motion — the post-travel bounce, the crash that follows, and learning to slow down when you get home. Tom just got back from London, Berlin, and Spain, partly for a Telepathic team meetup and a pop-up where people could come play Orchid in person, and partly for Superbooth, which he describes as basically a Vegas casino lobby for modular nerds — in a forest. From there we get into Telepathic Instruments and how he got involved — Kevin Parker reached out after seeing his work on YouTube — and what the development of Orchid has actually looked like. We talk about what the device is trying to do, how community feedback from their early adopters has shaped the features, and what's coming next. Hope you enjoy it. Please welcome Tom Cosm. Tom Cosm Links https://www.instagram.com/tomcosm/ https://www.instagram.com/telepathic.instruments/ https://www.youtube.com/@telepathic.instruments https://www.tiktok.com/@telepathic.instruments
Today we're joined by David Satori — co-founder of Beats Antique alongside Zoe Jakes and Sidecar Tommy, a trio that came out of the San Francisco performance underground, Burning Man, and the West Coast Circus Bass music scene. He's also co-founder of Dirtwire with Evan Fraser and Mark Reveley, which blends experimental bass music with folk music from around the world. Between the two projects he's co-produced and recorded over 20 albums in the past 15 years. He also co-founded a nonprofit called SunRise Studios Collective, which builds micro recording and multimedia studios in under-resourced communities around the world to give youth a voice through music and production. David and I actually go back to a tour we did together in 2017, so it was good to catch up. We spend a good chunk of this one talking about life on the road — buying and converting buses, what it actually costs to tour as an independent artist, and the tradeoffs between owning your vehicle versus renting. He just got off a two month run with Dirtwire and shares what touring looks like for them right now, including how they run their live setup with Ableton and handle sound checks. Hope you enjoy it. Please welcome David Satori.
Today we're joined by Nicholas Yochum, an LA based sound designer currently working at Blizzard on Overwatch, where he focuses on synthesized sounds to help create effects with a more clean, stylized aesthetic. He's on the heroes team and is currently working on new heroes for the game. Nicholas and I actually go way back to like 2012 in Boston, so it's cool to finally catch up. We get into how he got into the industry — starting out at a third party audio company called Hexany, which he describes as kind of like sound design boot camp, and eventually landing a senior sound designer role at Blizzard, which even he still seems a little surprised about. We talk about what stylized sound design actually means — why game audio has been pulling more and more from the electronic music world, and how listening to stuff like Noisia is basically research at this point. We also get into the difference between working at a third party studio versus being embedded on a game team, and why that sense of ownership and connection to the work ended up mattering a lot to him. Hope you enjoy it. Please welcome Nicholas Yochum. Follow Nicholas Yochum https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholasyochum/ https://www.youtube.com/@NicholasYochum Follow Mr. Bill https://linktr.ee/mrbillstunes