Lowkey Operations launch Concrete at the Brisbane Powerhouse on Friday.
It's been a decade since Brisbane-based electronic music producer Michael Hogg a.k.a. lowkey operations took up electronic music production. In recent years, Hogg has also spent time working lowkey+nude, a music and spoken word project with Clare McGrogran, and nearly ten years working as a professional architect.
On the eve of ten years in the industry, LKO is set to release his second album, Concrete, the follow up to Architectronic, released in 1998. Concrete brings together recent melodic works as well darker material that he's been collecting since Architectronic.
"This album is something you could be immersed in. If you have a lot of energy then it's energetic enough to be danced to, but if you want to sit down and chill out it can do that as well!"
Hogg's choice of album titles highlights architecture as a strong influence his musical productions. He actually started making electronic music when he was studying architecture at university in 1992.
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"Architecture influences the way my music is made, but not in any literal sense. Columns don't mean that they're anything in music, but just in terms of approaching composition and using ideas of experience and layering. "
Concrete, a dominating force in construction, here becomes a 'play on words' on a number of different levels.
"Although the ingredients in concrete are limited, the number of different finishes or textures you can get is varied. On this album, the ingredients are similar, using a small number of synthesisers and computer programs, but the results vary from very ambient to mid tempo and faster crunchy darker tracks. The act of getting all these songs finished turns them in to real things and psychologically that means you can move on to the next stage."
"Overall it doesn't fall into any genre," explains Hogg, "but the musicians I like, are people like Beaumont Hannant, Mu-ziq and Aphex Twin, who have their own individual sound rather than a generic one."
"There's quite a lot of music around at the moment that's not based much on melody. Looking back, music I like is stuff that has melody, and uses noise to combine and have contrast. I find it more difficult to engage with music that's only noise."
LKO has grown up playing a variety of instruments, particularly bass guitar in bands, but found the process frustrating and moved on to electronic music. When he started, he could only record seven seconds of samples, so he could only use three or four sounds at once.
"As the technology has increased there's more you can do. Starting out on old gear was good because you have to utilise the machines to their maximum. It's become easier to make average electronic music because there are programs that already have complete songs inside them. Access to music instruments is much greater, but having more choices makes it difficult to get the choices right, so it's a double edged sword."
With support gigs for the likes of Snog, Carl Cox and Scanner, LKO is set to launch Concrete at Frigid, a regular Sunday evening live electronica night in Sydney, where he's already played in the past.
“I enjoy making music in the studio, and have a reputation for being pretty hermit-like. I don't go out to clubs a lot and enjoy sitting in a studio 10 hours at a time making music. I still enjoy playing live, which is something I'll be doing more in the next six months."
