When it comes to electronic music, discount it’s hard to find an act who has done as much with concept as The M Machine. After signing to Skrillex’s acclaimed label Owsla, pharm the group put out Metropolis, a wildly intelligent Fritz Lang-inspired epic that sprawled across two EPs. Sporting a sound that mixed blistering electrohouse breakdowns with moody indietronica melody and introspective lyrics, the project came full circle through evocative imagery in promotional materials and written word chapters to accompany every song. It was a fully realized concept album that felt like a breath of fresh air in a period of middling EDM.
With this success under their belt, The M Machine is looking in new directions. Following the departure of Andy Coenen from the group, bandmates Ben “Swardy” Swardlick and Eric Luttrell decided to explore a more club-oriented sound, releasing the Just Like EP (as well as a selection of remixes which dropped yesterday on Owsla). Though it has an aire of indie dance to it, particularly on blissful middle track “Over/Love,” the songs tend to go for a deeper, housey vibe, hitting a driving but lighthearted groove that would sound perfectly in line with Dirtybird’s recent releases. It’s music for an after-hours parties rather than festival mainstages.
Putting their live show on hold, the duo is setting out for a string of DJ sets as support on their friend Madeon’s much anticipated Adventure tour. In anticipation of their show this Sunday at House of Blues, we chatted with Swardy about vinyl releases, balancing musical influences and having Skrillex as a boss.
Allston Pudding: You guys come from a traditional music background. What got you into production?
Ben “Swardy” Swardlick: My bandmate Eric and I were at UC Santa Barbara and he went off to Berlin his senior year and came back raving about Justice and Benny Benassi and Digitalism and all this electronic music that was different than some of the standard club stuff that you grow up thinking of as dance music. We really caught on with it. Then when we graduated we figured we would take some of the production skills we were learning and apply them to video games. We were thinking about scores and sound effects. We didn’t get far along that path before the music we were writing together started to get a little bit of recognition, so we decided to hunker down and stay the producer route.
AP: Your music has always struck me as having the danceability and energy of big festival EDM but the melody and mood of indietronica. Is that a conscious balance you’re trying to strike?
BS: Well, it definitely wasn’t at first. I think early on we really just kind of wrote whatever we felt like and tried a lot of stuff. We experimented with mimicking artists we loved, and it was kind of a big range there. But especially once we got serious and named the band and had a little bit of interest from people with a little more influence, like Skrillex, we decided that we didn’t need to go one way or the other. People would be excited to listen to a production group that could do both. That was, like you said, the real high energy stuff that you start to recognize as American EDM versus the vocal indie stuff. I don’t suppose it was necessarily the plan outright, but we tried it and people seemed to respond, so we kept doing it.
AP: How has Andy’s departure influenced the group?
BS: It’s been interesting because, for starters, this was a premeditated departure from him. It was something we’d been talking about for a long time. It was not in any way a dramatic scenario. It actually happened a long time before we announced it and it felt really natural and right for us, just because Andy has always spent the majority of his time working on what he’s now doing full time. That’s being in front of a computer working on programming and software, which is something that he did for us. Right now we’ve really been allowing ourselves to dive into a wormhole of club-oriented music again- by that I mean the “Just Like” EP. We’re also trying to DJ more, so we’ve put the live show on hold for a bit. Because of that, I think the timing was appropriate. We’ve always performed as two people when we DJ and we still get to work with him when we need content, whether that’s video content or anything else. He’s still writing the software that drives our video show that we perform from stage. Even though it’s definitely a change not to have him as a core member of the band, life hasn’t really changed as much as you’d think in terms of losing a bandmate.
AP: You told Thump the Just Like EP was meant as “a break from the conceptual and brooding attitude of the music to date.” What brought about the decision to go in that direction?
BS: I have to admit, a lot of it is that from our experience here in San Francisco, we really felt like we had sort of scratched that itch. We like to invent stories and we like to write conceptual music. But another thing we enjoy doing is going out to nightclubs and watching DJs who don’t plan their show and who don’t put on a typical set. They’re experiencing the evening and figuring it out with the crowd and that’s something that we wanted to do as well. The music is different, the truth is. It’s not as appropriate to have those giant ups and downs. Our live show included a lot of that slower indie music, and though that’s really fun in sort of a rock concert venue, at a nightclub it’s more fun to take people on a slightly more subtle journey in terms of the scope of the energy of the music. So we wrote the Just Like EP to sort of facilitate that and it’s definitely influenced by some of the producers and DJs that we love to see around here.
AP: Who are a few of those?
BS: We’ve really enjoyed getting to go see Maceo Plex, who performs in San Francisco pretty often. Justin Martin is a staple, really the whole Dirtybird crew- Claude Vonstroke and Ardalan and Justin Martin. Those guys put on really good shows. and most of them are San Francisco-based as well. Some of them are more musical acts who pull off a similar thing like Todd Terje and certainly Kidnap Kid, just to name a few.
AP: Do you think future releases might have some sense of concept, even if they don’t go as far as a full story?
BS: I think that’s definitely a valid question. We write music like that all the time. We haven’t released anything in that vein in a long time, but we’re certainly going to always allow ourselves to write whatever we feel like, and that’s something that both Eric and I love to do. I don’t necessarily have a plan, and we certainly don’t have a release that sounds like the Metropolis-era music, but are we completely uninterested in doing something like that again? No, definitely not! We could absolutely go back to that direction, but for now we’re having a really good time cutting our teeth in the DJ world. It’s something that a lot of our peers did early on when we were focusing on that live show, so it’s good for us to get that under our belt as well.
AP: How has working with Owsla influenced your growth as an act?
BS: It’s been really interesting. Number one: they’ve been wildly supportive. Not just in terms of promotion and helping us to produce the kind of music that we want to do, but just as people. Tim Smith (Skrillex’s longtime manager and Owsla part-owner) is definitely one of the most encouraging and thoughtful people. Skrillex is the exact same way. Just as concerned about our music as he is about us. The other thing about that is they have a sound that we don’t necessarily play into and that’s never been a problem either. I think they kind of look at us as some kind of weird cousin that’s allowed to come to the party but is expected to act differently! That’s nice for us, because we live in San Francisco and we don’t necessarily even try to conform to that Owsla sound. We just got really lucky that we’re allowed to be strange and try some stuff and that they’re encouraging of that. It makes us feel like we’re home!
AP: So Skrillex is a pretty cool boss, then?
BS: He really is. You hear a lot of extremely nice things about him and they tend to be very, very true. He’s just got so much energy and it’s all positive. It’s excitement. It’s almost overwhelming to hang out with him. He’s at an 11 in terms of energy at all times but he’s also super down to wormhole into whatever chat you’re stuck on. We owe him a lot, is the truth.
AP: You guys clearly have a penchant for official remixes, with Metropolis Remixed and now Just Like Remixes. How involved are you in assembling these products?
BS: 100%. All of the remixes are people that we specifically go after, and usually try to create some kind of personal relationship with before. In this case that’s true of Manila Killa and CRNKN and Kazimier, who is Bill, who is one of the performers who plays with Chrome Sparks when they do their live show. The two that were slightly more cold calls were Evil Nine and Worthy, who’s a Dirtybird guy here in San Francisco. We play a ton of his music and are really big fans, but we never really connected with him until we asked for the remix. That was pretty exciting when he came through on it. The same can be said about Evil Nine. Those are old school dudes who we don’t know at all, but you just shoot the email and hope for the best and they came through!
AP: There’s been a lot of requests for a vinyl issue of Metropolis. Is there any reason why that hasn’t been released?
BS: Certainly not for lack of desire on our part, and in fact Owsla has agreed that it’s the right thing to do and we need to make it happen. I have to admit, I think it has been pushed back a bit because it’s expensive and we’ve just been waiting just to make sure that demand is enough that we feel good about printing it. That said, I would say there’s very little chance that that won’t happen. Everybody is into that idea. I think especially if we could put it out as a double vinyl with the liner notes printed and all the imagery that we put together for that release, then it would be silly for us not to make that happen. So it will, I’m sure.
It’s good for us to be reminded that people are still interested in it. There was a bit of a grassroots push to get Owsla to get on that awhile ago. Our internet fanbase took the reins and started spamming them for a whole day. That was really good- it’s cool to see the fanbase taking things into their own hands!
The M Machine will be opening for Madeon this Sunday, 4/26, at House of Blues. Floor is sold out, but you can still cop mezzanine tickets here.