At full tilt amidst the circumstances, ascending to dignified labels of bass music, excelling ceaselessly in her music production and evoking respect for her versatile ingenious work. Landing on labels such as DIVIDID, Mautrap5, Overview, and more. Meanwhile, she migrated from Hong Kong to Bristol where she now resides, studying audio/music technology and evolving her production.

Over the course of last winter, she fell in deep with sonic experimentation and personal hardships which in turn cultivated her latest record 'Depths of Winter'. The 7 track release illuminates her meticulous analysis of sound and reflects her inner unrest. Fragments of dissonant dancefloor grooves, perplexing sounds, and lawless compositions maneuver across the record. Knowing no boundaries, gyrofield executes a multiplex of sonic excavation, leaving the listener astonished by the endless possibilities of sound.

How’ve you been? What are you up to lately?

Good, I’ve been working on mostly Drum & Bass which is quite different from last winter. I’ve really been enjoying doing it again. Over the summer I did another DnB project that's going to be out this summer. I’ve wanted to play more minimal DnB tracks, darker, more moody sounds so I made a track to allow myself to go into that territory to have something of my own to put in my sets. I’ve made more of it since then which is also cool. The music I play now is quite different than usual. I started to go back to more contemporary, edgy dancefloor DnB, like tracks on Dispatch and Metalheadz, which is really inspiring me. You should really check out the Grey Code album that’s coming out at the end of this month. It's really good, I’ve been playing it so much, I can’t help it. One of the best DnB records I’ve heard in the last few years.

You started this release around last winter, how did this collection of works assemble?

Mostly between November and January, I was writing demo’s in a very obtuse ambient/ techno-esque vibe. The moment the idea of 'Depths of Winter' came to me was after I started to play with sounds in a more abstract fashion. I had to move past the limit, the feeling of understanding music as a beat-aligned system where everything has to fit on a quantized scale. I started thinking about music in a more loosely connected way just organized by time and that’s when I decided to turn this into a full record. The first track I wrote was 'Need a Hug'. There’s a lot of filtering work done in the tracks, it’s using filters and letting through just the right amount of noise while still having the sort of character with the filter to create tones and blips.

'Depths of Winter' was very different than your previous experimental releases like 'Semantics'.

'Semantics' was about when I first discovered the VCV Rack and I don’t think I actually used it even though it does sound like it in some ways. I’m glad you brought up 'Semantics', I’ve grown to like it a lot more since it came out. It has some really imaginative ideas about using electronic sounds and using electronic processing on sounds. It’s unfortunate it barely received attention but it’s still valuable to me. I feel like at least to some people I’ve brought them a new understanding of how electronic sounds can be because electronic music has become so heavily based on a framework, existing frameworks of how beats and certain elements should sound. Genres like Jungle or Dubstep are very specific in electronic music when you can literally create any sound. It’s definitely a long-time goal of mine to try to move myself away from existing frameworks that I feel and see in music to try to make something that is more intuitive to myself. It’s an overarching theme in all my work and I heavily use my perception.

Did you use any physical instruments in creating this piece?

I believe in some tracks I did use a MIDI controller with knobs to tweak sounds live. During the sound design process, it became a natural thing to do because there’s a lot more to explore, the spontaneous of tweaking knobs live while you’re recording the whole session. It allows you to create more impromptu decisions and may encourage you to be more daring with the way you use the sounds in the end. Otherwise, this record was created entirely in the box and with MIDI controllers to modulate the sound. I do use a lot of noise, it brings an analog feeling to something that may otherwise sound very clinical and cold. I wanted the character of the noise to come through on the sounds and by using noise to create many sounds, you can keep a level of chaos in the final product.

I know you’re passionate about the low-end frequencies, and you have them neatly hidden throughout the record.

It was a slight obsession during the time because it was exciting to me that I was almost drawing and creating shapes with the oscilloscope. It made it feel as if the represented waveform was also a part of the aesthetic of the record itself. In the later tracks, I wrote, I deliberately tried to make waveforms that were strange, and very interesting but also cool-sounding over anything else.

The utilization of subtle dancefloor rhythms and dynamic repetitions really gears the listener to appreciate the outlandish soundscapes.

Definitely is in some ways a new take on Drum & Bass possibly because you can go very far into creating the most abstract, weird stuff and the weirdest rhythms ever but it feels satisfying to bring it all back into something that’s almost familiar.

I enjoyed the title names of these tracks, 'You Wouldn’t Download Your Mom' a definite winner for me, how did these come about?

Most of these titles are simply small streams of consciousness for whatever I was thinking about at the time. It does reflect the very transient nature of making those tracks, I wanted to say whatever comes out of my head.

As you mentioned earlier 'Need a Hug' was the first track you created on 'Depths of Winter'. Can you tell us how it started and how all these tracks came to be?

I first realized you had to be in the headspace, you have to have a little bravery to break out of those rules, the usual structure of beats and drum patterns. Absolutely go at it with something that’s totally noise. The first several demos that I wrote were definitely about getting to know how far I could take a certain idea with a few weird sounds that I created which informed the workflow for the whole record. The record itself was written by doing sound design sessions and keeping things limited to a few elements. There's a certain level of hysteria, you have to be in the right sort of mindset to be able to recognize the fluidity in sound. Create something you wouldn’t normally create, it’s a theme I really tried to do in this record and in some other music of mine before this. Take yourself out of your own perspective and try to imagine how a hypothetical person would make music. It’s a weird concept, taking the control out of yourself, thinking of what it would mean for another person to take control of the art that you’re doing. It results in trying to create something unexpected of yourself, and I feel in that way I’ve made something that was much more satisfying to listen to than trying to make it exactly how I usually want to do something.

Let's shed some light on the other tracks on the album starting with 'Comedic Film'!

It's sort of a halfway point between modular electronics and DAW’s. The original sound that I did was a four and a half-minute session of a modular recording. I used VCV Rack, an app for Eurorack emulation and you can get a lot of cool free modules for it that people have programmed. A long time before 'Depths of Winter', this was already something that I’ve used somewhat in doing music. I thought it would be fun to try to reconcile that part of what I do with this new sound that I was creating.

'You Wouldn’t Download Your Mom'

There’s a steady clockwork within it. I wanted to make it feel like every iteration of every phrase of this idea tries to push it further and further. Especially when the big noises come in and they start to really scream at you an element of abrasion and aggression I wanted to create.

'The Baby'

It’s possibly the most typical example of the workflow I had during 'Depths of Winter' where it’s a lot of arranging from sound design sessions. Utilizing the sound design samples as much as possible and in as many ways as possible. The idea of the hollow, empty sort of percussive idea came first, and eventually, I felt like I hit a point with the arrangement that I needed to make a major switch up. One of the earlier ideas that came out was I sampled a malfunctioning Wii and turned that into a very flat-sounding synth lead, actually what plays in most of the parts in the breakdown. The way I wrote the breakdown was just improvising on the midi keyboard and recording everything. It is another way I write melodic parts that I’ve done many times since. Recording improvisation and selecting parts from that, you can always use that for different elements. The track shows the interaction between the two things, the bright synths and suddenly the blippy, punchy bass sounds.

'Showers'

It’s the result of one sound design take and processing it after the recording. A lot of it was recording a live patch that I made. Using a filter with strong resonances, tweaking the controls, changing things like the envelopes that control the filter and the frequencies going through that filter. It’s a short sort of skit almost, it reminds me of stuff that acts like Boards of Canada would do where they would have a very short idea that’s almost repeating, creating this static image. One thing that definitely inspired tracks like 'Showers'.

'Gift'

I tried to strike a balance between what is atonal and what is tonal, I’m really just doing this repeating synth theme and repeating a phrase over and over with some variations to it. The processing that I did is sort of a duplicate of it that has some delay and pitch shift on it. All of the swirling parts are iterations of the whole phrase being pitched up and down. It hides the pretty sounding plucks and synths behind a little blur of a sound which is very interesting.

'PCM'

The main goal was I wanted to write a really synth-heavy almost dramatic-sounding synth piece with a really emo hook. The more flowing composition style came afterward when I did a rewrite of the track. Originally, it was a lot more section-focused than it is but now I’ve split everything into smaller parts to figure out the progression I wanted with it. It starts off with small bells, rises up with this choir into this disfigured lead and bass combination. The lead is created from a very resonant filter, I essentially autotuned a filter and controlled the autotune with MIDI. All the other processing is distorted and makes it sound like an expressive instrument. By controlling the filters of resonance and its cut-off, you can create a lot of different movements and textures. You can almost get it to scream because the autotune is malfunctioning in a way which creates some artifacts. The choir gave it more of a strangely holy feel to it, I just wanted the lead and the bass to sound monolithic and imposing to you. I really wanted to crank up the feeling of awe with the choir and instrumentation.

Thanks for the insight! Do you plan to dive into more physical instruments? I noticed you were working with Subtension quite recently and I’m aware he does.

Yeah, I’m working with Subtension, we met up back in July and we did a session on his little modular rig with a really powerful filter bank on it. We ended up getting enough stuff from it to create a collab, that is in the works. I’ve also got my first hardware synth, a Korg Monologue. What I’ve really enjoyed about using it is how you can really transition between tonal and noisy sounds very easily and seamlessly. I find it very moldable and flexible in the way that it can generate different tones. I’ve been taking it to some jams with people from the university and it’s been really fun.

What styles of music are you currently listening to?

Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of techno and underground club/dance music. It's interesting to hear how other people are approaching club music because in club music you’re just trying to achieve one main goal which is to get everybody to move. Listening to all sorts of dancefloor music right now is what inspires me and gets me excited about trying to find my own ways to replicate feelings that other people have created.

Any stand-out artists from these genres?

I quite like Overmono. The latest single from them was really nice, this housey, garagey fair. I’ve been listening to techno artists like Vladimir Dubyshkin, a Russian techno producer with a really good sense of absurdity and silliness while still making something compelling. Some 140 artists like Ternion Sound, I’ve been playing out their tracks. HØST as well. I’ve been enjoying his new works and his old series Chapters', really heavy and unforgiving dancefloor music.

In today's age of music for the most part, being self-sufficient with your own releases is very important and you have a great balance between self-releases and labels. How is it all working out for you?

Labels exist off of using other people's work, marketing, and publicizing people's work. In order to do a label release and be happy with it, you have to come in and make whoever is running the label understand what you want from the release and make it clear. They should show you that it is possible to do that.

There will be several tracks of mine on a couple Critical Music releases which is pretty neat. The start of me going back into Drum & Bass again.

What are you most looking forward to in 2022?

Really looking forward to being able to do more music with people and have that synergistic relationship between doing music and showing it to people whether it be in the club, like a release, or an online event. That stuff really drives me as an artist right now.