We were lucky to catch up with Earth Ephect (Paul Patterson) recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Earth Ephect thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

Growing up I was home-schooled, my parents were wise to lay this path out for me and I am extremely grateful for them. Because of this upbringing I had a lot of freedom to pursue my own curiosity and follow my passions. As a young man I was clearly interested in a few specific things: music, nature and flight. We grew up in a musical household and there were many different instruments available for me to explore like piano, guitar, drums and saxophone. I naturally gravitated towards guitar but I loved each instrument for its uniqueness. As I grew into my late teenage years my interest in aviation increased and I was able to go to my local flight school and begin working on my pilot’s license. As I was pursuing this career path I also spent a lot of time collecting instruments, various pieces of musical hardware and jamming with a good friend in a makeshift basement studio. This open and exploratory phase of music was paramount in building my creative process and developing my ear for sound design. My connection with nature stems from my first memory as a child playing in the creek in the woods behind our family’s home in central Virginia. We moved from there when I was still a boy, but my explorative nature and love of the woods continued in our new home in New Jersey. To this day I am happiest when in the forest surrounded by nature. I have personally studied several areas of ecology and I spend a great deal of time observing, playing and connecting with the natural world. During young adulthood I began an intense journey inward to answer some deep philanthropic questions and to explore and awaken my spiritual essence. In this time I began learning about the inner workings of my mind, the strength that lies within the heart and the field of energy that unites all things. This opened up a multitude of new layers and possibilities within my creative process.
These passions are what I still endlessly pursue today and I feel that they all work in harmony. Honing my skills as a pilot requires discipline and determination, which translates over to my work as a music producer. Creating music involves a deep emotive openness, a certain amount of craftiness and the ability to think outside the box. I am able to tap into these mental processes and use them to solve problems and handle emergencies as I am working as a pilot. All of this is held together by my understanding of the patterns and processes in nature, and my deep spiritual connection with the natural world.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I started creating music as a young man when my father taught me acoustic guitar. Our home was full of instruments but I was never really satisfied with only playing one. My dad soon bought me an electric guitar and I began exploring new possibilities with live looping. This is accomplished with a piece of musical hardware that acts as a live recorder so you can overdub layers of sounds. I started integrating a synthesizer and drum machine into this setup and was absolutely hooked. I was constantly pursuing unique and convincing sounds to add into my looping compositions. It really has been an amazing endless pursuit! Today my studio is setup in a similar way with many different instruments and sounds effortlessly available to me and with the ability to quickly transcribe ideas into a project.

My artist name Earth Ephect comes from a combination of my exploration of the natural world, a pursuit of self awareness and awakening of my spiritual nature, and the realization of our symbiotic connection with the planet through the lens of a pilot and traveler. These pillars are fundamental in my process and are all interwoven into the production of meaningful and unique music. The personal connection I have to music is incredibly deep, and it is one of the few modalities that can evoke such powerful and convincing emotions in myself. I strive to create those same moments of euphoria and deep immersion with my music production. Because of this motive and my complete freedom of creation I am able to produce truly authentic musical experiences.

I met my wife Ann during a particularly intense musical awakening phase and the moment I heard her singing out loud I exclaimed: “we are going to create music together!”. Today she records her gorgeous euphoric and blissful vocals into some of my projects as the artist “Kathryn Ashgrove”.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

I feel that our society here in the US is designed to create consumers who feel that they need something external in order to find happiness. In my personal pursuit of spiritual, physical and mental wellness I have found that the opposite is true. Everything you need is already inside of you. Happiness is about the pursuit of it, it is about exploration and experimentation. It is about un-hindered play and creativity. I learned this on a whole new level when I had my son Aven! His unabated confidence, curiosity, wonder and joy is the example that I need in order to stay on the path of happiness. When I am happy with myself and feel that everything I need is right here in the present moment, everything else falls into place. I am able to be creative, take my art to new levels, and I am able to pursue new interests without hesitation. Of course this isn’t without pain and suffering, without experiencing these emotions you cannot know true joy! Perhaps struggling through something to end up with a “failed” result wasn’t about the result at all. Maybe you needed to learn how to be present and resilient through that experience while embracing love. I tell Aven regularly that his greatest superpower is love. With love you can open up endless opportunities and all of the surface level obstacles quickly dissolve into nothingness. I often find that barriers placed in my path are only put there by myself. The conditioning through our society allows for many situations where you could be open and creative, but it often does not support a healthy mental mindset to do so. As a member of society it is each of our responsibility to change it within, and to share the things that make you joyful, be authentic when you are struggling and spread information that is aligned with love and authenticity. As we raise a new generation of humans who have a greater insight on these things, the systems and processes in place will be replaced with better ones. This will allow for more people to flow easily into their path of creative expression.

Have you ever had to pivot?

When I was first learning how to create songs using my newly designed home studio, I was working on an ambitious project that rapidly grew into an album of music. This music represented my first wave of creative outpouring after finally building out my production studio in the house Ann and I were renting in Florida. Some incredible recordings are on this album and some of my most expressive and unusual sounds were featured. The project was definitely in need of refinement and this was partly due to the fact that I had just begun to explore the space I was in and the equipment that I purchased and collected. I could layer sounds and create amazing and interestingly overcomplicated arrangements but I had no idea how to create good sounding mixes and was making things up as I went along. I became friends with someone who was in the music industry and who had many of the tools I needed as well as the experience to guide me. Together we took the project to a new level and continued the overly-ambitious production of this complex psychedelic electronica album. Time went on and pretty soon a year or two had passed and things weren’t getting to where I wanted them to be as far as the mixing was going and the plan for releasing the album. Additionally, my brother (who was involved in the project) moved from our place back to the northeast. My career as a pilot was shifting gears and I was unsure of what direction to go with it. So I took several months off, focused on my relationship with Ann and we planned out our wedding. After an awesome ceremony out on a remote island in southwest Florida, we began feeling the desire to start a family, and with that came the conversation about moving back up to the northeast to be close to our families. I then started interviewing at some airlines to find a job that could provide stability and a good income. The music project still had not been finished or released and it started to appear that it simply would never be. I didn’t know who else to turn to and this was incredibly difficult for me to face. This uncertainty and lack of a clear plan to move forward began to cause allot of friction in the relationship with my co-producer friend. The fact that we were going to move also added to this. The album was never released and I have had to find acceptance with letting it go, and unfortunately as well as the friendship associated with it. Now I have a new realization of that entire experience: it was important work that helped refine my skills in production and have a better understanding of relationships and the importance of setting boundaries and defining goals within a collaboration. Although that massive pivot of letting go of years of work, moving across the country and starting a family caused allot of pain and hurt, it was necessary for myself as a husband and as an artist in order to move into the next phase.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://earthephect.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/earthephect/
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/earthephectmusic
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@earthephect2552
• Other: https://earthephect.bandcamp.com/

Image Credits
Rachel Grace