A word with NastyNasty on his 'Hideous Mask' album

NastyNasty returns with his latest album, 'Hideous Mask'. We had a chat with the man himself to gain some insights into his phenomenal sound design & plans for the future.

Aye man! Tell us a bit about yourself.

To be perfectly honest, I'm kind of professionally mundane in my personal life. I'm a bit of a hermit, mostly stay at home making sounds with brief interludes of social interaction. My favourite days are usually drinking coffee and working in Ableton until my ears are shot then having a smoke and either hitting the arcade or 'vegging' out on comic books or anime.

So you just released your new album 'Hideous Mask'. Incredible work, was there anything that inspired you to take the direction you did with this?

Inspiration comes from all over the place really, from other music to illustrations to animal locomotion to skateboarding and physics. My brain kind of warps most of my sensory intake back to sounds so whenever the idea pops up I either hit the speakers or jot down notes in my phone. A big part of this album in particular was a sort of dissatisfaction with the alarming amount of focus on biography, photo-genesis and memory placed on musicians.

I feel like the pressure to produce bangers and attach a shiny graphic to it has effectively sterilised a good deal of expression in electronic music. Our time lines are littered with safe, saccharine music that is inoffensive and ultimately with little replay value. A shiny mask over an endless void of desperation. The goal was to make something that gets better when you peel back the layers, an album with Easter eggs to find on your 8th listen through. I wanted to set a landscape where both my tenderness, my vitriolic wrath and my awe of the universe all had equal footing.

There's a lot of interesting sound design in the album, what are you working with to produce these sounds?

This was my first record using exclusively Ableton as my DAW. That being the housing unit, a good amount of my sounds are re-sampled hardware. I have a Nord Lead 2x, a Moog Slim and an Analogue Solutions Semi-Modular as well as an assortment of Moogerfooger's and guitar pedals. I also borrowed a bunch of gear from my roomies and neighbours and scoured sound libraries across the internet.

Any plans for the future?

I'm plotting out my next few EP's and starting to work on all the collaborations I've been neglecting. Likely on a hefty NA tour this coming spring but nothing I can blow the lid off of just yet, I'll be in Atlanta and Denver in December as well as Salt Lake City for new years eve.

Some tracks you're currently digging?