Workflow: Slava on the Korg Electribe ESX-1

You may not realize it, but much of Slava’s raw, stuttering music – and the uniqueness of his ideas – is born from a careful selection of limitations. He uses a single Korg Electribe ESX-1, both for recording and performing. Nick Sylvester talked to the house and footwork producer about the freedom of restriction.

How did you decide on the Electribe?

I have been using Electribes since I first started performing live electronic music around 2003. The ESX is super flexible and does everything that I need. It provides fluid access to the control of each individual sound/sample – something that takes digging through menus on the MPC. It also has enough parts to easily make a self-sustained track – something many of the other grooveboxes lack. I did try using a computer and other gear at points, but it was always too cumbersome and didn’t have the feeling of playing a single instrument.

What is one feature of the machine that, when you figured it out, became integral to your workflow?

It’s hard to isolate one feature, but [it’s] probably the way I set up and chain effects. The Electribe has three effects and you can chain one and two, two and three or all of them together and can send any sample into any point in the chain. Figuring out the optimal way to set this up took some time, but now I pretty much use the same setup for all tracks.

What are some limitations of the Electribe that you’ve embraced?

Despite having the capability to have stereo samples, because of limited sample time and number of tracks, pretty much every sample is mono. The longest loop is eight bars of 16ths, which isn’t so bad, but it does set limits. You can’t really do triplets in a 4/4 beat, although you can have swing. There aren’t many options and by now I know them all, so once I have an idea, I can materialize it on the machine within a few hours. With the computer it’s so easy to get lost in a myriad of options and lose track of the essence of the track.

You seem to use vocals in a very interesting, almost aggressively functional way – not as hooks but as a way to glue or fill holes in the mix.

For me the vocal is just another instrument and I treat it as such. But I wouldn’t say they are there to fill holes. The Electribe doesn’t allow for very fancy sample manipulation so most of the time I just leave them as they are.

A version of this article appeared in The Daily Note, a free daily newspaper distributed in New York during the 2013 Red Bull Music Academy.