Emancipator

Electronic musician Doug Appling, who performs as Emancipator, in his Montavilla apartment on March 20, 2014.

(David Greenwald/The Oregonian)

Doug Appling does not look at the Bandcamp charts. The 26-year-old producer doesn't need to: Appling records under the name Emancipator, and for months, his instrumental, organic-meets-electronic albums have been among the online indie marketplace's most popular Portland releases. On a given week, three of them are in Bandcamp's top 25, with his debut -- released on the service in 2009 -- often top five. Given Bandcamp's ubiquity among Portland's independent acts, from hip-hop producers to trendy synth-pop acts, that's no small feat.

Neither is a show at the 1,500-capacity Crystal Ballroom, which Appling, now performing with the four-piece Emancipator Ensemble, will headline on Friday. Off the top of his head, Appling says he sells about 20 albums on Bandcamp a week, and similar numbers on iTunes -- not quite the Billboard charts, but for a local musician with a quiet Montavilla apartment and a healthy touring schedule, it’s a living.

Appling grew up in Virginia. He was encouraged musically by his parents: he studied violin from ages 4 to 12, before he felt the pull of rock ‘n’ roll instruments: electric guitar, drums and bass. He learned them all, and played drums in a post-punk group in high school that won their prom’s battle of the bands.

“That was our epic accomplishment,” Appling says over coffee at the Bipartisan Café, blocks from his home studio. He shades his eyes against the morning sun with a baseball cap, and looks less like a high-concept EDM producer than a quiet kid who probably spends too much time indoors.

His taste for electronic music came from his father, whose eclectic collection ranged from ‘70s innovators Kraftwerk to the ‘90s sounds of acts such as English duo Orbital. His dad also shared Boomer classics -- Appling loves Fleetwood Mac -- while his mom, who’d volunteered in the Peace Corps, exposed him to African thumb pianos and sounds from beyond the Western palette.

Appling played in jam bands in college at William and Mary, but he was at work on something else: “Soon It Will Be Cold Enough,” a wintry, beat-oriented ambient collection drawing on his instrumental skills and his discovery of digital recording software. He self-released the downtempo album as Emancipator in 2006.

I met Appling for the first time in New York in 2007. We had a mutual friend, and he handed me the album as a burned CD-R: I didn’t think about it again until seeing the same release pop up as a Bandcamp hit seven years later.

That summer, he had yet to be big in Japan; neither of us knew then we’d end up in Portland. He moved to the city in 2009 and has made a living on music ever since, following jobs waiting tables at a Turkish restaurant in New York and washing dishes in Williamsburg, Virginia, his college town, while he plotted his music career.

In those days, he says, “I was selling (the album) from MySpace and hand-delivering packages to the post office every week.” That’s until he was discovered by Japanese label Hydeout, which re-released “Soon It Will Be Cold Enough” in 2008. Through Hydeout, he was able to play his first live shows: a Tokyo tour sponsored by Puma. Having to take the stage meant switching from Acid Pro and Reason, his previous recording tools, to Ableton Live, the widely used software better situated for both production and performance work.

“It took a few years to really get the same workflow to the place where I was at in Acid Pro and Reason,” he says. “It’s such a beast of a program.”

Thanks to evolving technology, an expanding instrument collection and a curious muse, Emancipator’s palette has expanded considerably since his debut. The vivid swirl of 2013 album “Dusk to Dawn” includes violin, acoustic guitar, Moog synthesizers, vocal samples, the airy notes of kalimbas and enough drum layering to carpet a rainforest.

After coffee, Appling shows me his bedroom recording set-up, which looks like Mumford and Sons and Kraftwerk sharing a practice space. His banjos rest next to analog synthesizers, but the most important instrument is Ableton itself.

He scrolls through audio files in a work-in-progress, each track a different color. It looks like a Lego fortress. There are 157 tracks on the song, “The Key,” today, a good chunk of them percussion. The track’s nearly done, and Appling says the pressure will set in if he doesn’t release a new album this year. Usually he waits three years between releases -- he might work even longer on his tracks, and still has songs from college he’s toying around with. Watching him glide through the Ableton interface and pluck out drum loops or chopped-up violin recordings, it’s easy to see why.

The hard part, he says, is realizing when the composing is done and the producing -- fixing compression on a drum track, perhaps, or adding reverb to a keyboard -- begins.

“These days, half the process is writing a song, half the process is the technology behind it, the audio engineering aspect of it,” he says. “I’m learning more about being a producer. Previously, I was kind of just clicking around in the dark, doing what sounded good.”

Appling might spend hours -- or days -- coaxing out the perfect sound or focusing on a few seconds at a time. Technology and talent—both his and his collaborators’, including violinist Ilya Goldberg -- means his options are essentially limitless. It’s a good problem to have.

“It’s like looking back on video games on Super Nintendo,” he says of his earlier recordings. “It’s a lot more in-depth these days.”

The four-piece Ensemble finished a successful seven-week tour already this year, and Appling expects the fusion of live instrumentation and electronic elements to become the norm for performing producers. Given his project's particular fusion of beat-making and live musicianship, the approach is more "honest."

"It changes every night," he says. "We can have good shows and bad shows. It keeps us on our toes."

More good than bad, it seems: an early two-piece version of the band, with Appling and Goldberg, notched a positive review from the New York Times in 2012, and back at home, Emancipator's Crystal gig could reach twice the audience of the Wonder Ballroom show the act headlined a year ago.

Emancipator's building attention has helped Appling expand his umbrella, signing like-minded artists to his own Loci Records and bringing them to his grassroots audience. A label compilation will arrive this spring, with an Emancipator remix collection on deck next before another studio album. In the meantime, his catalog keeps selling, and each week another few dozen join the Emancipator faithful.

“I love to see the response it has on people,” Appling says. “Hearing their comments, seeing their faces at shows -- it reaffirms that I’m actually making good use of my time by doing this.”

Emancipator with Slow Magic and Nym, Crystal Ballroom, Friday, 8 p.m. doors, 9 p.m. show. Tickets: $18-22.

-- David Greenwald