-mI AM NOT A PRODUCER


(image: Sina Schulz)



SLEEP DEPRIVATION - SYRUP REMIX
The EP Second track of the EP is a remix from syrup of my track “Sleep Deprivation”, that I published on SoundCloud in March 2025. You can listen to the original here: https://soundcloud.com/mncsn/sleep-deprivation After a long weekend out in my favorite place in the whole city, about blank, I was sitting home, unable to sleep but tired. I was in a weird place, somewhere between the joy of the weekend and the awareness of the down waiting for me in the next days. I had plenty of thoughts and none at the same time, memories of connections, of moments on the dance floor, pictures of the club’s garden flashing through my head and disappearing. So, I sat down and started patching the Behringer Neutron, the semi-modular synth I just bought. A modulating drone repeating a motif, turning into a kick drum and back to a drone builds the foundation of the track. Sequences come in and fade away, resembling sounds of the past night. That they don’t follow a fixed structure or tempo reminds me of the moment when two vinyl records fall out of sync during a transition, a symbolic thing that I often feel or remember after such weekends. A massively pitched down recording of a park brings out the noises of insects and nature sounds in a creepy, almost alien way. When I hear that I imagine about blank garden in an empty, nightmare version.

When I asked my friend Boris (syrup) to remix the piece I knew that he would bring out the best of it. Boris and I have an interesting musical relationship. While our brains work very differently, we share a similar taste, and sometimes complementary or symbiotic approaches. His workflow is clearly digital, and he fully exploits the possibilities of the medium. Producing a whole track from a single kickdrum sample, routed through countless return channels that modulate each other, for example. Or remixing his own ideas 15 times, and you wouldn’t be able to tell that they are made from the same material. His way of painting ideas on the timeline leads to advanced structures and a very non-loopy feel, as well as a high level of intention. My approach on the other hand is very much tied to hardware, intuition, and loops. I tend to create interest through live interacting with those machines, like establishing polyrhythms through shortening loops on the drum machine, developing a running patch or sequence and so on. This can lead to very long recordings of exploring the same idea after which I don’t know what to do with the material. But what if I don’t always have to bring the material to a finished piece myself but give it to other people?

Pictures:

1) Cover of the original release

2) syrup and I
©2025Tobias Hausen


(image: Sina Schulz)
 “Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and
strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it [...]”

Karl Marx - The Fragment on Machines