Gunnar Haslam on House, Techno and Particle Physics

Gunnar Haslam is sitting in a crowded Berlin café, forcefully pressing his palm against the lip of the tabletop as he explains his prior career in particle physics. The anonymous electronic producer, born in New York but raised in a Connecticut suburb, has earned acclaim for his few but memorable releases, and though Haslam has never spoken about the overlap publicly, the thoughtfulness and attention essential to his research manifest themselves musically. Whether he’s making panoramic techno or foggy ambient, the music is likewise inspired by the same excitement he evinces for particle physics.

“With any force, such as the electromagnetic force between my hand and the table, you have particles of matter in the table, in my hand, and then an electrical force keeping the two apart,” he says. “The way that force is being exerted between the table particles and my hand particles are little photons going back-and-forth, carrying this force, and I just find that incredible.” Far from being used as a genre signifier to represent some vague musical sensation, for Haslam, “deep” seems to carry subatomic significance.

Haslam began his physics career in earnest while still an undergraduate at New York University, where he contributed to the ongoing ATLAS experiment linked with the eponymous subatomic particle detector constructed as part of the Large Hadron Collider. Housed at the Swiss headquarters of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) is a central node for heady, challenging work, with the 7,000 ton machine capable of creating enough data during high-speed proton collisions to fill 100,000 CDs every second. Unsurprisingly, this academic work didn’t afford Haslam much creative freedom, though he still speaks of his contributions with pride. “At one point I was looking for missing energy vectors,” he explains. “As particles collide they start spraying out in all different directions. Since their collisions are direct, all of the momentum radially needs to sum to zero, but sometimes there’s missing energy.”

The discipline necessary for contributing to projects of international significance in particle physics feeds into Haslam’s precise productions, hinting at constellations of detail within a less immediately graspable smear. As a DJ, he prefers to buy records that blur the line between dancefloor functionality and home listening, and that taste for flexibility shines through in his productions. Haslam’s output to date on labels such as L.I.E.S, Mister Saturday Night, and Argot is addictive, with subtle but exciting re-inventions between each release occurring without sacrificing textural continuity. Their overall impact is transportive and meditative, even when occurring alongside a four-to-the-floor kick drum or clattering effects and grittiness.

By the time of his graduation in 2011, Haslam had become disillusioned with physics and the single-minded pursuit necessary to forge an academic career in the field. “There used to be a big gulf between my day job and music, and now that’s getting smaller and smaller,” he says. He eventually chose to pursue a masters in music technology, with a particular focus on signal processing. At the time, Haslam was also a devoted record buyer at A1 Records, where he came to befriend Ron Morelli, the irascible founder of L.I.E.S and the first person who released Haslam’s music.

That LP was Mimesiak, an assured debut. Individual tracks are alternately mesmerizing and hollow, while whispers of emotion peek through resonant loops. Haslam asserts that the title refers to mimesis in a self-referential way, saying, “I see it on two levels. In a very obvious way, it’s sample-based music. That album is heavily based on samples, so the idea of mimesis and samples and making something new out of vaguely familiar and perhaps half-remembered material is certainly related.” The title also refers to the classical mimesis of Plato, or, as Haslam explains, “the idea that everything we know is just half-remembered ideas of an ideal world that we came from.” This sort of inspiration is what first drove Haslam to produce, as he first tried to replicate, then blow up, previously consumed ideas. “At the time, the thing that inspired me to make music was that I was listening to music and just so inspired by what I was hearing,” he says. “It made me want to hear what my own music would sound like and what I could do myself.”

Beyond Plato, Haslam’s work has incorporated extensive literary references to date. The surname “Haslam” is derived from the protagonist of the Borgés short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and the Bera Range EP is named for a fictional mountain range in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. “Kenosha,” his contribution to Mister Saturday Night’s Brothers & Sisters compilation, is a nod to the Kenosha Kid, a sodium amytal hallucination of Tyrone Slothrop in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. If it’s not literary inspiration with Haslam, it’s geographical. Whether referencing the Culver Viaduct, Anatolia, or Gragnano, there’s a rootlessness that contributes to an evocative sense of exploration and disappearance. His latest release on Mister Saturday Night, the Let A Hundred Flowers Bloom 10-inch, is the latest example, named for a Maoist campaign to destroy artistic and political dissidents in the Communist regime and successfully capturing that paranoia.

Trained in particle physics and consumed by signal processing, it’s a wonder that Haslam has been able to maintain the loose and lo-fi nature of his productions to date. Despite the education in theory and engineering, he avoids significant technical refinement, saying, “Music is a document of a moment. There’s something special in leaving it as-is, and I think when music gets overworked you’re losing a lot of context.” His sense for the best of those moments is what makes Haslam such an exciting and identifiable producer, though it means pushing against the natural inclinations of his personality. “You can’t force yourself to be loose,” he says. “I tend to be quite a rigid person in all other aspects of my life. Music is the one place where I can do whatever feels right, and just let it all happen.”