Club mash-up artist gone electro-storyteller. American college student gone Canadian mountain-gazer. Bookworm remained bookworm, and that’s only the surface-level trivia. Former Bostonian Samuel Proffitt is dynamic like the fall of an unexpected bass, even if its moment of impact may no longer fit his style.

After leaving EDM’s noise in 2013, Proffitt has written his way into a genre far removed from dance floor friction. we caught up with the songwriter himself to discuss then AND now alongside his debut EP Blue Notebook No. 10, out Tuesday Jan. 27th.

Allston Pudding: So let’s start off with locations. You’re a Boston native, right?

Samuel Proffitt: I’m actually from Houston, but I went to university at BC [Boston College]. Then I was there for a bit over a year after I graduated.

AP: I heard you headed West recently. Has the change of setting been good to you?

SP: Right now I’m about three hours outside of Vancouver. I was just getting a little too comfortable in Boston, I think. So I decided that I was gonna come work with a musician friend up here and write, and work on music.

AP: How’s the weather?

SP: It’s really fucking cold [laughs]. It’s unbelievably gorgeous though. We got 20-something inches [of snow] a week ago. The house that I’m in sits on the side of a mountain overlooking the town, which is in a basin, and there’s just a huge range in the background. It’s really beautiful.

AP: That’s sweet. So I hear you went through a big transition from EDM to indie electronic recently. Could you tell me more about that?

SP: Oh yeah. I can from like a singer/songwriter background. I used to write with one of my friends when I was at BC. I’d play guitar and he’d play piano and sing. So, I’ve always loved the songwriting aspect.

When I went into electronic music, I was searching around, experimenting and trying to find another way to show my voice I guess. Eventually, after doing the whole mash-up thing, I decided to work with one of my friends and we just started making all different kinds of stuff: dubstep, electro, etc. It was something new and fun to try, and we actually did quite well. We got some really good exposure, but I still wasn’t very fulfilled, I guess.

Because the thing with EDM culture, and I have a lot of friends in it whose music I love, is that everything is disposable. Nothing lasts. One of my degrees is in Russian literature so almost everything I studied and everything I wrote about is from hundreds of years ago. I am not one of those people that think everything new is the best. I’m the exact opposite. So, I just didn’t like the idea that things that I would pour my heart and soul into would be forgotten about in four days… because that’s just how that works.

All these feelings just kinda built up, and then I worked on another project called FLXXDS. It was doing unbelievably well, and we were talking to all these labels. Then the group ended up splitting, which was unfortunate.

Around mid-September of 2013, my roommate, who I lived with when I came back to Boston after graduation, ended up getting really sick. Then, on September 3rd, my long-term girlfriend and I broke up in the morning, and three hours later I called his dad to talk about subletting the apartment for him, and I found out that he had passed away from some sort of infection.

AP: That’s a lot.

SP: Yeah definitely. It’s one of those things where I can hands down say was the worst day of my life. It just really shocked my system. For the next four or five months, I really struggled and wanted to find a way to express myself in a way that I deemed fulfilling. Making dance-floor songs wasn’t doing it for me.

So then I just started writing by myself, which I hadn’t done before in electronic music. I didn’t originally make it to be another project. It was just an outlet.  And then I had three…no…four songs for my EP that were relatively done and I asked myself, “Why don’t I make a solo project?” Something that’s indie electronic and not EDM. I would never expect anyone to play any of these songs in a club.

But yeah, that came together, and now we’re here!

AP: Would you say the narrative of your newfound storytelling is reflective of all these hard times? What’s the point of view within these new songs?

SP: It’s a bit of a tough question because I’ve been writing for a really long time, and one of my other degrees was in interdisciplinary philosophy. So I wrote a lot of fiction and nonfiction. When I couldn’t make the music that I wanted to make, it was the perfect relief.

With this project, it’s a huge reflection. Everything on it is directly affected by what happened, but it’s also a mix of everything that I had studied, written on and experienced, which is why there’s a heavy narrative throughout. But, it’s not necessarily connected in a way that you would expect a story to be.

Some EPs, when they tell a story, it’s cohesive: chapter one, chapter two, and it flows. Right?

AP: Definitely.

SP: This, to me, is more jumping around with little snippets. When I write a short story or anything like that, what I always try to pick out is an initial feeling, and then I try and write around that. It’s like a 360-degree camera view of that one feeling.

AP: Would you say that “jumping around” is pulled from your background in Russian literature? I took my first class in the topic last year, and I feel like there was a lot of that.

SP: Yes it definitely is. I’m obsessed with Russian literature, and I have been for years. I was actually in grad school for Russian, but I left because of music. Everything I write is either affected by experiences or by literature.

AP: In terms of music taste, who’s your Tolstoy?

SP: [laughs] So, I love mostly everything. I can list off a few though. I’ve been obsessed with Miles Davis for I don’t even know how long. Anthony Green and Dallas Green. Oh, and Death Cab [for Cutie]. I guess those are some of my main “mains.”

I think the reason that I love all of them so much is because of the way that they are able to tell stories. For Death Cab, if you listen to the “Transatlanticism” demos released for the 10th anniversary of the album, it’s so cool to me to hear what Ben came up with when he was writing the album. The structure’s there. The story’s there, but it’s so different than the final product.

AP: I like the appreciation. So for Blue Notebook No. 10, could you explain what’s behind the title?

SP: Yeah. So, my thesis was on Daniil Kharms, and he is a 20th century Russian absurdist. One of his works is called “Blue Notebook 10.” He creates this character, the red-headed man. Then he takes away his hair, so he shouldn’t be called a “redhead” anymore. Then he starts taking away his spine, his stomach, his mouth, his nose, his ears, and, eventually, there’s nothing left. And then he writes out that we shouldn’t talk about this anymore.

So it’s about really looking at how we define character, how we define stories, how we define a lot of different things because we take for granted a lot of different things. We take for granted what a character actually is within a story. In a lot of Kharms’s stories, he would introduce a character at the end who would have nothing to do with any part of the actual story, or he would purposely confuse them by calling one character the other character and vice versa. It’s a deconstruction of language and, I guess, literature as a whole.

AP: Wow that’s a lot more though-out than a lot of EP titles I’ve come across.

SP: [laughs] Thanks.

AP: What other albums and artists do you hope these new tracks get played alongside?

SP: That’s tough. I’ve actually had a lot of problems trying to figure this out because when I first put out “Sladky” five months ago, I was asked to put it into some sort of genre category, and I couldn’t. I put “indie electronic,” but that’s a broad one.

Let me think. Obviously stuff like James Blake. That’s a given. SPACE CAMP, Wet,  maybe Slow Magic, Little Dragon, Ryan Hemsworth would all be great. The thing that I aim to move a little more towards, and you can tell from listening to the EP since there’s three songs on it that contain no electronic elements at all, just piano, strings and vocals… I would really like to be in that company.

AP: Last question: With all the heavy beats and EDM behind you, what have you found more room for?

SP: Silence. That’s like my favorite part about this whole thing. It doesn’t have to be full of loud sounds and a lot of drums. Everything is substantially more thought out, Whenever I would do EDM I would be writing the lead line and the guy I wrote with would be doing bass and drums, filling it out.

Filling it out was never really my focus because I just wanted to focus on the actual musical compositions. I feel like with this I can do that… It’s subdued. That’s who I am as a person, and I feel like I can finally express that and have myself on a Soundcloud sound-wave.