“I’m being super goth,” James Whipple deadpans over Skype from his Berlin apartment. “I can’t go outside.” He’s squinting in the bright rays of the heatwave outside his window, and plays with his hair constantly throughout our call while cracking self-deprecating jokes. You’d get the impression he was a bit shy, if it wasn’t for the brash Hollywood sheen of the productions he releases on experimental label PAN, or the rowdy DJ sets he plays at touring club night Janus, under the name of M.E.S.H.

Californian-born Whipple has been in Berlin for the past six years. After graduating college in New York and sticking out the city’s bustle for a year, he realized he “hated it” when a two-month vacation to visit friends in Berlin turned into a one-way trip. “In Berlin, there’s this feeling of sparseness, people can kind of isolate themselves,” he relates. It’s been good for him honing his own practice as an artist—he released his debut EP for PAN, Scythians, in 2014—but it hasn’t all been isolating. Alongside Houston’s noisy expat Lotic and Swedish mash-up lover KABLAM, Whipple also found himself co-founding and acting as one of the key residents of Janus, Berlin’s most unpredictable club night (the regular night ended in 2014, but the collective still occasionally host one-offs at clubs around Europe).

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Janus is perhaps one of the few experimental spaces that would have given a home to a producer with a background and a palette like M.E.S.H.’s. After briefly dabbling in pop-punk bass guitar at the age of 13, Whipple moved on to making a mixture of noise, musique concrète and drum ‘n’ bass on Fruity Loops as a teenager, developing a sweeping collage style that can be traced all the way through to his idiosyncratic productions today. “I grew up in a place [Santa Barbara] that didn’t have a heavy electronic culture, so I was receiving things years late,” he explains. On his debut album Piteous Gate, out July 17th on PAN, he brings together everything from brittle hardstyle riffs to piercing trance motifs, classical samples, and an approach to hip-hop beats that’s like when you watch a movie on a screen so wide and hi-def it’s practically distorted. Add to that the record’s coating in blockbuster-worthy SFX and the fact it’s named after a place in a 1990s science fantasy novel by cult author Gene Wolfe, and you’ve got an intricate web of reference points that come together to form something uncannily familiar: the perspective of a introvert whose world is huge, thanks to the fantasy worlds of the 90s and the online worlds of the 00s.

In the midst of Berlin’s heatwave, The FADER caught up with Whipple to find out how all these things are related, and what solar eclipses, Prometheus and Renaissance instruments had to do with the formulation of his sound.