Objekt’s Early Electronic Experiments and Production Pivots Beyond the Club

An Oxford graduate who’s made his home in Berlin for several years, TJ Hertz has never conformed to genre convention. His earliest efforts as Objekt – a series of self-titled 12"s and his celebrated Cactus/Porcupine record for Hessle Audio – humorously riffed on dubstep tropes while referencing classic rave and IDM sounds, and his sound palette has only expanded from there. While his singles tend to at least linger someone near the dancefloor, his 2014 debut album, Flatland, which arrived via vanguard imprint PAN, impressively bucked expectations while piling up accolades with its ultra-precise and wildly innovative rhythms.

A similar spirit colors Objekt’s work as a DJ, where his long-form sets often find him comfortably playing high-speed electro and ghettotech alongside sharp-edged techno and noisy blasts of bass. Taking notice of his unique talents in the booth, the vaunted Tresor label signed Hertz up for an installment of its Kern mix series in 2016. In this condensed excerpt from his Fireside Chat with Aaron Gonsher on RBMA Radio, Objekt discusses his musical youth, discovering techno, his pursuit of artistic independence and overcoming production insecurities.

Was your family musical?

My mum was a composer. Basically up until I was born she was a professional composer in Manila in the Philippines. I was born in Japan, and she kind of slowed down a lot with that when she had me, and then retrained as a psychotherapist.

I was definitely encouraged musically growing up. We had a piano at home, and I expressed an interest in learning to play the drums. I think that’s often a fork in the path with a lot of families: Do you let your kid play the drums or not? My mum and dad were pretty encouraging, although I’m sure their hearts probably fell when they realized that I wanted to learn the drums and not continue with the piano. I learned piano as a kid, and was quite good at it, and then gave that up at about 11 to pursue the drums and also the bass guitar, which I had developed a keener interest for by that point. My mom still had her small project studio set up at home, so I was tinkering around with that as well.

What was in the studio?

It was all sequenced off an Atari ST, which, you know, elsewhere in the UK, people at the time were probably using to make jungle and techno, but my mom would have been using to make library music and jingles, and the occasional film score. There was that, running an ancient version of Cubase. I think the computer was older than I was. She bought it in 1988, I think. A sampler, a couple of sound modules, a 16 channel mixer, and a couple of keyboards.

What she was doing as a commercial composer?

I’m not exactly sure how the setup worked, but she was primarily recording library music which would then be used in commercials or films. Actually, most of the time she would be recording the demos at home, and then she would go and record with an ensemble or an orchestra or a vocal group or something in a studio. She would occasionally get commissions for specific angles, like bespoke commercial music. She did a couple of film scores for Filipino movies. Actually, a piece of library music that she wrote was used in Donnie Darko, I think, and some other film that I can’t remember. She’s very good. She went to Berklee, studied composition there and also is a very good pianist.

Do you remember if there was something specific that made you want to move away from piano into drums or bass?

I started playing drums when we visited a family friend who had a kit set up in the basement. I just remember him teaching me to play the first drumbeat that I learned, and feeling a sense of physical excitement that I didn’t get from playing the piano. I really liked playing the piano, and for a ten or 11-year-old I was getting fairly good at it, but I think it was still something that my mum had introduced me to, and wasn’t really something that I felt that I had discovered myself.

Did you have non-musical hobbies at this point in your life?

Oh God, yeah. I was definitely a boy. I made Airfix models, I built model rockets and kites. Remote control cars were a thing at one point. I was definitely the kind of kid that you would imagine would go on to study engineering, which I did.

Are there lessons from that period when you were really studying music that you still incorporate in your work today?

Learning to play the drums meant that I was able to fall into writing rhythms electronically without thinking about it too much. Playing the drums is a pretty solid foundation when it comes to writing electronic music that has drums. (That sounds fairly obvious, but it’s true.) As far as the piano is concerned, I don’t know. On the one hand, the years that I spent learning to play bass and guitar – which I was never super good at – the fact that I was mostly self-taught meant that I developed my ear quite a lot, so I think I’ve got quite a good ear for pitch and listening to what’s playing and comparing it to what I’m playing, and being able to hear the difference. On the other hand, I also kind of feel like maybe I learned enough theory to do a bit of damage, but not enough to actually use it in an intelligent way. I sometimes wonder if I would have been better off not learning that at all, because then some of the happy accidents that I might be making could come out more interestingly.

At what point did this musical training transition into you making music sitting behind a computer?

Throughout my teenage years I was playing drums in bands, playing bass in a couple of bands and gradually learning how to record. My mom had an SM-58, and I borrowed a few microphones from my school and saved up and bought a couple of really basic ones for myself. I spent quite a lot of time struggling uphill to record my drumkit in my garage, which as anyone who’s tried to record a drumkit in a garage will know is an exercise in futility a lot of the time. It was a learning experience. It was good training. I would initially record drum solos and then bands that I was in, or other people’s bands, and figure out on my own and with help from the internet how to do mixdowns and how to place microphones, that kind of thing.

Everything that was recorded at that point certainly wasn’t professional. It was like me dicking around in the garage or someone else’s garage or in the school hall recording a band for personal use or to use as a demo. Actually, I recorded a couple of demos in studios working as an unpaid engineer. This was when I got closer to 18 – I would occasionally work as an assistant in a recording studio. It was only ever super local stuff… Some of it’s probably still on the internet somewhere.

What did your earliest experiments in making your own music sound like on a computer?

There were kind of three phases of this. The first was when I was maybe like 10-13, when I was still playing the piano and I would use my mom’s studio in the most basic way possible to record songs. I had a very basic grasp of how to record a pattern onto the Atari and how to assign that to one of the samplers or sound modules, and how to make it louder or quieter on the mixer. I would occasionally record covers of songs that I liked or a couple of my own songs, all of which were, without exception, terrible. I still managed. It was helpful in terms of starting to learn how to find my way around a mixing desk and learning about signal flow and that kind of thing.

Then, as I grew out of that in parallel with some of the more guitar-y music I was listening to at the time, I was also getting into the more accessible end of IDM, I guess. The first more legitimate track I tried to make entirely on a computer – I actually found it again a couple of years ago – was like a liquid drum & bass track. It was about 45 seconds long, I think, and it sounded pretty generic, but it sounded unmistakably like liquid d&b.

There was that, and then after that I think I wasn’t really making much electronic music at all throughout my teenage years. There were a couple of attempts. That drum & bass track was probably the most successful of them, and then the rest came out pretty bad. It was only when I was about 18 or 19 and had started getting into going out, going to clubs, listening to dance music, that I then opened up whatever it was I was using and started trying to make electronic music in earnest.

Can you talk about how you got into throwing parties when you were at Oxford, and peripherally, what you were doing at Oxford?

I was studying engineering. I think I’m one of these kinds of people who, once they get interested in something, they tend to gravitate towards the doing end of things. They want to try these things out for themselves and get involved and see if they can do what it is that all these other people are doing, or make what these other people are making.

I went to university when I was 18. In my first year I kind of fell out of love with playing the drums, because the constant grind of rehearsals and soundchecks and carrying drumkits around and dragging friends to gigs that didn’t really want to be there but felt like they had to… It started to wear me down a bit. I took a break from that, which coincided with a lot of my friends starting to get more into going out, listening to dance music, going to clubs. I fell in with that, and what was meant to be a break ended up being maybe a month and a half of not making music before I started wondering, “How are these sounds being made?” Like, “This is music that I know nothing about and I’m uncomfortable with that. I want to find out more about this, I want to figure out what this person in the DJ booth is actually doing or what music they’re actually playing and how this music was made.”

It went from a position of total ignorance to one of starting to try and make my own stuff, learning how to DJ… Then realizing that there wasn’t really much of an outlet for the kind of stuff that I wanted to play within the student community at university, unsurprisingly enough.

Putting on parties is a slightly grandiose way of describing it. I took over a very small club night that had already been running when the person who was running it left town. I ran a biweekly night at a bar. Nothing particularly special, but it was fun.

I think there were quite a lot of people around that time, like 2006, who would have been getting into dance music from more guitar-based music, via either Ed Banger electro, or the kind of tail end of electroclash or blog house, fidget house as some people called it. That was kind of my route into things. I lasted maybe six months, a year, listening to and playing that kind of stuff, before I realized that most of it was abjectly terrible. It was loud, it was fun, it was banging. It was definitely like a gateway drug.

From there I got into Surgeon, oddly enough. I remember that it was that mix CD that he did for Warp, This Is For You Shits. That bridged a gap for me between the club world that I stumbled upon in the last year and some of the IDM I’d been listening to four or five years previous. Suddenly it started making a bit more sense.

How long was it from having this transitional lightbulb moment of understanding more clearly the direction of music that you wanted to make, and finishing your first track that ever came out?

2006 would have been when I started learning how to DJ, which is also probably when I started playing around with Reason or Cubase, trying to consolidate what I knew about mixdowns and recording with what I was learning about writing dance music. I finished maybe three or four tracks over the next few years. I was also studying at the time, so I certainly wasn’t spending a huge amount of time doing this.

I moved to Berlin when I finished university in 2009. My first record came out in 2011. I finished those tracks late 2010, I guess.

What impact did Berlin have on that music?

I guess inasmuch by the time I wrote the tracks that went onto my first record, which was basically a dubstep record, I was getting pretty disillusioned with functional techno. Not only because I’d already been two years in a city that had that in spades and I was getting pretty bored of it, but also because I realized I wasn’t very good at making it. I went out on a limb and thought I’d have a go at making some dubstep for fun. That’s kind of what came out and the result was something I was a lot happier with than anything that I’d made before.

Around that kind of time I was posting fairly actively on the Dubstepforum, which at the time was – I can only imagine – a lot busier than it is now. I remember posting up demos more or less as I made them. I got this message from a guy called Jack Revill, who turned out to be Jackmaster, but I didn’t know that at the time. He messaged saying that he worked for a distribution company called Rubadub, and would I be interested in setting up a label to release some of this stuff, and that they would pay for everything. My initial response was basically no. Like, “Thanks for the offer but I’m not really interested in setting up a label. I’d rather leave that to someone who actually wants to be a label person, and just wait until a label is ready to have my tracks.” He successfully twisted my arm and after a bit of convincing that it wouldn’t really be much effort, I would retain the copyright to my tracks and that there wouldn’t be any financial risk to me, I agreed to it. We put out the first 12" in January 2011.

To be honest, it was a total surprise to me that someone thought that any of this stuff was releasable. I had grown so accustomed to making tracks that I would play out, and they wouldn’t sound quite right or I wouldn’t be happy with them. The idea that I might actually have reached a point of something being ready to be released was pretty foreign to me. I was putting this stuff online for personal pleasure more than anything else. I had a day job at the time. It’s not like I moved to Berlin and then dropped everything to follow my dream of being a techno producer.

Do you still experience that sense of doubt at all before you put something out?

Yeah, sure, all the time while I’m writing and while I’m working on tracks. These days, by the time a track gets to the end stages of completion I’m usually pretty happy with it. I would say for, like, 80% of the journey, I’m by no means confident that it’s something that I would want to release.

What do you remember about the response to this first record?

Basically from the point where Jack offered to put this record out, it felt like a pretty steep staircase of stuff happening. He was pretty savvy in how he handled it. I think he recognized that the record didn’t really need that much behind it beyond sending it to a few people he knew would be into it, and just letting the music speak for itself.

I remember the 12 months following the completion of that record being like a sequence of really encouraging events that I never would have expected in the months previous. It went from putting out those tracks and getting a really positive response from Jack to a whole load of artists that I really admired at the time playing them out and writing Jack back to ask who this person was who had written this record.

One thing I do remember was a sense of, “Hang on, so this is what it’s like to be releasing music and to have people talking about your music, and actually it’s not really any different from what I was doing before?” This pedestal on which I’d put all of the producers that had records out suddenly didn’t really seem to exist anymore, and I realized that a lot of it was down to just chance or serendipity or whether you had the opportunity to put something out. That there was not really anything separating a good producer who was releasing and a good producer who hadn’t released any music. Also, meeting a ton of artists who I really admired before and realizing that everyone in that scene was also just a person, a real person, and most people were pretty nice.

Are there things that you know now about either yourself as an artist and what you want to do as an artist, or the music industry as a whole that you’re operating in, that you wish you had been aware of back then?

No, not really. I’ve obviously learned a lot of stuff along the way. I do feel like, at the time, I came up through this music scene as part of a broader cohort of artists of a similar age who were feeling their way through in the same kind of way. It feels kind of nice, somehow, like a class that graduated together. I guess most of us are in quite different places now, but there was this kind of shared learning experience.

How have your goals as an artist shifted since then? If you went from putting out this record at a time when you were just, “Oh, I’m putting tracks up online and it’s for fun, it’s for personal edification,” to thinking, “Well, now I’m in this position where people are paying attention to my music. What do I want to do with that?”

I think back then my insecurity over what I was making led me to write towards a goal of filling a box, in a way. Like, I would make tracks that I would hope such-and-such would play out, tracks that I would hope would work well in such-and-such a club or in such-and-such a set, without having quite as much faith in my ability to make something quite unusual.

As time has gone on, I’ve become more comfortable with exploring that side of me musically and seeing if I can push things out a bit further. I don’t know if that actually manifests itself audibly in the kind of stuff that I’ve been making, because I guess that there have been slightly off-kilter qualities to most of my releases. This is something that I strive for a bit more now, seeing to what extent I can subvert what’s expected from certain tracks.

What do you need to see in a label that it makes sense for you to be, “Yeah, I want this track to be here. I want to release with these people.”

I feel like I’ve got to a point now where if I were to write a club-oriented track that I was really happy with, I’d probably just put it out myself as another Objekt white label. I don’t really feel so much of a need to sign up for any particular camp or anything like that. Obviously, with an album it’s different, because there’s all kinds of infrastructure that you need from a label in order to handle the bigger job of putting out an album. I think mostly for club stuff I’m quite happy putting out my own stuff these days.

I have worked with labels for that in the past. Sometimes it’s been because it’s friends and I wanted to work with someone. Sometimes it’s because I’ve happened to have a single track that was going spare that I didn’t think really fit with another track to go on a white label. Any material that I do put out on another label, I would only do it if I felt it fit sonically. If the label were one that I liked and whose direction I appreciated and the people involved were people I felt some kind of connection with. I feel beyond the point now of putting out singles with x-label or y-label just because I want to be part of that club, or because I want to be seen in a certain light.

For the moment I’m fairly happy with where I am. Doing the album on PAN was really nice because it left the door open to being a club artist – I still play in clubs and do propulsive stuff on there. The other side to that association is one where I have a lot of freedom to make as strange and unusual stuff as I want. That’s quite a nice remit for me.

I know you take months on a track. How many tracks do you just discard? I get the sense that you probably don’t have a lot of unreleased things, just because you’re chipping away at something until it gets to a point where you can put it out. Is that true?

I would estimate that for every track that I release there’s probably another four or five sketches that don’t get finished. Each of those sketches that don’t get finished might have had so many versions that there would be between one and three different tracks within that sketch. But usually, if they don’t get finished they don’t get finished for a reason.

Can you give me an example of one of your tracks that did come out that you thought wouldn’t? Like, you had been through so many revisions that you thought you’d kind of exhausted the possibilities within a certain track, but then at some point something clicked and you thought, “This is ready?”

Coming back to the point of what kind of criteria are relevant to me when deciding whether to sign a track to another label or do it myself, often it’s the single tracks that I don’t really see much of a future in. But if someone else does I end up signing to labels as part of a compilation or a split 12", in the case of the Leisure System release or the Bleep Green Series thing.

What was the process of recording the mix for Tresor? Why were you happy to see it come out on their label?

Tresor approached me to do this mix CD for their Kern series, and it took me by surprise, as I didn’t really have much of a relationship with the club before that. I played there once, for an event associated with Atonal festival, so not even one of their regular Tresor nights. I had a look at the series, and mine would have been the third installment in a mix series that previously featured DJ Hell and DJ Deep, and that was a pretty flattering offer.

Recording a physical mix CD was something that kind of terrified me but was also something that I had always thought I would love to do at some point. Particularly because I tend to spend quite a lot of time on mixes as well as productions. I feel like a lot of the time those mixes end up being perceived as free content – which they are, basically – and with something like a mix CD the extra time and effort you spend on it is somehow rewarded, that has artwork and is an actual release rather than just the next installment in a free podcast series that gets downloaded automatically by iTunes or whatever.

It was an opportunity that I relished to take as a bit of a mission statement, and really put everything that I had into. I thought it was a really nice series as well. DJ Deep and DJ Hell had been quite flattering company, and it was kind of a no-brainer. How long are mix CD series even going to be around for? Who knows.