We recently connected with Daniel Moors and have shared our conversation below.

Daniel, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

I was first introduced to music at a young age through some amazing public music programs in my school. I learned music theory, piano, and clarinet. When I was 13, they showed me a cool new app called GarageBand. I immediately fell in love with it, and spent a couple years making music on my iPad until I upgraded to Logic Pro, and later Pro Tools and Ableton. I was always drawn to experimental electronic music and spent hours tweaking plug-ins and experimenting with sound design and audio mixing. For most of this time, Youtube was my biggest guide – there’s so much free knowledge out there if you keep looking. Plus, I’m a Read-The-Freaking-Manual kind of guy. This prepared me enough so that when I got to LA, I started working with lots of amazing producers and artists. Working side by side in the same room as someone might be one of the best ways to learn from them. Looking back, I wish I had reached out earlier to other producers when I was growing up in New York, and been more proactive about collaborating. I also learn a lot from working as a music producer and recording engineer at a music studio: I get to see how other artists and musicians approach the music making process from start to finish. But at the end of the day, the best way to learn about your process is just to continue grinding away in the studio, and reflecting honestly on your results.

Daniel, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is danielfromyesterday, I’m a music producer and audiovisual artist based in LA.

I make experimental electronic music, ranging from ambient soundscapes to glitchy breakcore. Each track has an abstract audioreactive visualizer based on organic and distorted geometry.

Being a drummer first, my music is based around rhythm and percussion, but recently I’ve been playing around with vocal samples: I’ve been chopping, pitching, and best of all, resampling them through a granular synth. Granular synthesis lets you create incredibly lush yet glitchy textures by finely slicing the audio files into “grains” and then playing the grains back so they overlap one another, creating a cascade of audio that can be as smooth or abrasive as you like. Using this incredibly digital effect on what’s arguably the most ‘organic’ instrument we have – the human voice – creates a sound that blurs the line between natural and processed. I expand on this same theme with how I incorporate drums into my tracks: I often start with recordings of breakbeats played on acoustic drum kits and then use effects like phase distortion, flanging, and time stretching to warp the sonic texture. I love using Ableton Live for this purpose as its time-stretching capabilities have no comparison (sound quality aside, it wins on efficiency, versatility, and convenience). Aside from Ableton’s innate power, there are countless community-made plugins and FX devices available online. “Time Accumulator” by Iris Ipsum is a favorite. This plugin ‘listens’ and records the audio you feed into it, then spits it back out either slowed down, sped up, forward, or in reverse. Despite having only two controls, ‘time’ and ‘stretch’, it’s possible to create a wide variety of mind-bending soundscapes.

This year I released “EROSION” – a psychedelic journey through trip hop percussion and ethereal soundscapes, showcasing the granulated vocals technique I mentioned earlier. So far, EROSION has been added to over 25 playlists, and has been shazammed on 5 different continents. Will you add it to your playlist? You can find it under ‘danielfromyesterday’ wherever you get your music.

As a producer, I also help other artists take their songs from idea to final product, whether that’s songwriting, production, or mixing and mastering. In comparison to my peers who spent their time mastering their voice or their instruments, I placed a great emphasis on communicating with the machine interface, and that’s become my strong suit as the music production process becomes increasingly computerized. Having mastery over the menial aspects of the creative process allows for more rule-breaking and creativity, and it makes for a fun session overall. This year I had the privilege of producing the wicked double-single “another moth” by experimental electronic performer strangejane. Our process began with a meticulous sound design and composition session. The sonic texture of the main melodic instrument was critical, and we must have gone through a hundred options before being satisfied with a ghostly and harmonic choral sample from the Omnisphere sampler synth. Being that the song is arranged in phrases of 10 measures (as opposed to 8 or 16), I had to fight my rhythmic instincts as we laid down a deceptively simple yet jilted kick drum pattern. Once strangejane added haunting and poetic vocals into the pockets of silence, I knew we had something special on our hands. You can find “another moth” by strangejane wherever you get your music.

I’m also venturing further into visual art: This February, I’ll be showcasing some stills from the EROSION visualizer at The Other Art Fair in LA. The idea for the still images was conjured in reverse: I realized that if I make a visualizer for a 200-second-long song, at 24 frames per second, I’m effectively creating 4,800 still images: each a unique moment capturing how the music impacted the abstract generative animation. Assuming that 1% of these frames are interesting, that means about 48 of these images might be worth looking at. Once I started sorting through them, I found it hard to narrow it down to just a few favorites: the random yet structured aspect of the black and white visualizer yields some incredibly powerful illustrations with a surprising sense of depth and scale for a two-dimensional procedural animation. I found that the nature of the process effectively captured the movement of the visualizer into a frozen moment. Once I felt an emotional resonance with the still images, I knew I had to share them.

For updates on music, shows, and art, you can check out my website listed below, or come say hi on Instagram.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

It might already be clear that I’m a big fan of how digital audio allows us to warp time, pitch, and texture. It speaks to a deeper theme of my music, which reflects my understanding of the world. I subscribe to the idea that our perceived reality is best understood as an illusion. While that kind of claim might sound like something the gas station crackhead would shout at you from across the street, you can find compelling arguments for this case from both spiritual sources like Advaita Vedanta (concept of ‘maya’), and from scientific researchers like Donald Hoffman (Multimodal User Interface theory). This gives way to the idea that the only ‘real’ aspect of our lives is our relationship to some higher source of meaning, whatever that may be for you. Most who have thought deeply about the topic have concluded that “love” is a satisfactory word to represent that concept, and many who have practiced love have reported that compassion and generosity are the most tangibly real goals worth pursuing. So in a convoluted manner, I make experimental electronic music to preach love and compassion. But I think this idea will continue to grow in popularity as our perceived world becomes increasingly digitized, monetized, and artificially generated. On a less philosophical note, I believe that if people learn to recognize illusions in their lives, they will quickly realize that they are being malnourished on a paltry and monolithic media diet.

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

The two best ways to create a thriving creative ecosystem are to seek out art on your own, and to form your own opinion about it.

Today, more than ever, we are relying heavily on curatorial and algorithmic content machines. The benefit of these platforms, from Spotify radio to social media more generally, is that they can quickly feed us content that we will predictably like. This is great, so we can find more of the music we like. The downside is that it will only get harder to find the types of art that we are not expected to like. While this may seem like a minor problem, it is worth calling into question who and what controls the flow of ideas that reach us, and to seek agency over that process. That might take many different forms, from searching up genres that you like, to asking your friends for unexpected recommendations. Although you run the risk of listening to music that you don’t enjoy, it can be worth it when you find that one song that opens you up to a whole new world of genres and styles.

Regarding the second way, I think that the worst possible reason to like art is “because it’s popular.” I’ll spare us a grim history lesson: I’m sure you can think of an example of something that was both “bad” and “popular.” Even though we are social animals, and sharing musical memories with friends is a big part of the experience, I still find it important to critically engage with the art and media we consume, even the media that is designed for “chilling” or “tuning out.” The more we lean on one another to decide what should be elevated, promoted, and funded, the more likely we are to end up with uninspired, cookie-cutter media fast-food.

Find whatever it is you like, and support it fiercely. It otherwise may disappear.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://danielfromyesterday.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/danielfromyesterday/
• Youtube: youtu.be/R9SsmJ0ge3s?si=u7Pt5FRUUc4ayjQE
• Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/danielfromyesterday
• Other: [email protected]

Image Credits

Stacie Carte @shotbystacie