Updated 2 years ago
meets Shapestatic
2007
by Axis Mundi
Who is Shapestatic?
Kri, aka, Christopher Johnson of Asheville, NC
and the Bastard aka Alex Falk of Knoxville, TN.
What is the history of Shapestatic? How did Shapestatic come into being?
We were longtime friends who decided to play their live acts together and
consequently starting writing music together as well.
What are the musical goals of Shapestatic? What sort of sound can we expect to hear from Shapestatic?
We attempt to bring the spirit of the goa trance music that inspired us to be a part of this culture in the first place, while remaining open to the influences of many genres of music and modern music technology.
Who influences Shapestatic, be it musically, worldly, or spiritually?
Koxbox, X-dream, the current state of mass-media saturation in america, the Reptoids.
Where and at which events has Shapestatic performed in the past? Any
future bookings?
US festivals and events like Gaian Mind, Touch Samadhi , 28th Day, Phoenix family, and Fugu to name a few. We are looking forward to making the step from a regional to international ilve act. 🙂
Where can we find some of Shapestatic’s new track releases, and under which labels?
We started out releasing with Geomagnetic.Tv and are releasing our album with Gaian Mind Records.
Describe the current state of the US psy-trance scene through Shapestatic’s eyes, and the direction the scene and its artists are going in?
The scene is growing steadily with many regional families to guide it. More and more music is coming out of the US, the quality is strong and very unique. Many people feel that the underground psytrance movement carries the original spirit of “Rave” parties that was lost to the club vibe long ago.
How involved has Shapestatic and its members been in the growing US psy-trance scene, and what sort of an impact will Shapestatic have upon the scene in the near future?
To our knowledge, Kri is the first psychedelic trance DJ hailing from the southeastern United States, having starting spinning goa trance by 1996 after years of “regular” rave DJing. UTTA Chaos and Touch Samadhi set the seeds for the flourishing trance scene in the region.
We want to change the “status quo” of music that is being produced today by reminding people that trance dance music should be about more than just pushing and pushing to the next “level” of higher bpms and shock value sounds.
Are there any outside artists that Shapestatic has collaborated with in the past, and which artists would you hope to collaborate with to make music in the future?
We both like to work on tracks with our local friends Psyonic and Babar, if Primordial Ooze and Glowing Dragon lived closer I’m sure we’d be at it all the time.
What sort of gear does Shapestatic use to produce with in the studio, and what sort of gear do you use to perform live?
We use dynaudio monitors, intel macs for mission-critical jobs and a sony laptop for mucking around with a ton of plugins. Our favorite software tools are mostly Native Instruments and Steinberg applications while our hardware favorites include the Access Virus and ladyada’s x0xb0x. Alex
also likes search pawn shops and thrift stores for toys and instruments to be circuit bent and experimented with.
Our live setup minimally is a pair of laptops, but we prefer having at least one additional synth so we can both drop sounds, beats and melodies on the fly throughout the set without putting too much strain on our CPUs.
What sort of gear would Shapestatic have in your “fantasy studio”?
SSL and Eventide gear for mixing and effects, perhaps a few walls
of modular synth would be nice with that.
What sort of importance does Shapestatic place upon the use of
hardware in your music production versus software?
Every generation of computer hardware/software puts their capability further ahead of digital music hardware, but it’s still nice to have a dedicated instrument that isn’t trying to download software updates as you are trying to play an arpeggio on the keyboard.
We believe in the best of both worlds — dont go wild with vsts or hardware. If you want to use alot of cracked plugins, try keeping them on a dedicated “instrument” computer so as not to risk damaging your main project.
These days, the technology is increasingly made available for more people than ever to be able to produce electronic and psy-trance music at home, without need for a gigantic professional studio. How do you feel this is impacting the music and the world of production?
It means that there is so much music coming out it is hard to filter it all and find the diamond in the ruff, so to speak.
Here’s a broad question… when in yor opinions did “Goa Trance” become “Psy-Trance” and how would Shapestatic describe the difference to someone who hasn’t experienced that sort of music before?
The transition happened around 98. Goa trance was more organic and free form and psy trance is more refined and processed. But its all techno, right?
Also check out Kri’s interview
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