Interview: Synthetic Children - New Album 'Everything’s Perpetual'

Tash van Schaardenburg chats with Synthetic Children about her new album Everything’s Perpetual, #audacitygirls production, and Te Papaeioa’s booming trans and queer music scene, bringing forth intimate insights into the euphoric unions of transness and electronic music, and demonstrating how safe spaces for trans people and allyship in our local music scenes can bring transformation to our communities.

Tash: I’ve listened to all the other Synthetic Children releases and this album in particular felt really like a powerful biographical journey to me.

Synthetic Children: There is way more direct sampling of place on this album, of the Manawatū. All the field recordings are from around here. The songs have locations attached to them, rather than just being about a feeling.

I feel that biographical feeling pulls through much stronger in this album, it's got this lifelike resonation from where you are in the world within. I definitely notice what I feel like is a bit of Palmy flare in it. It'd be cool to hear a bit about the Palmerston North electronic music scene because that's kind of what I found you through in the first place. It really piqued my curiosity that there was this vibrant and unique sound culture existing in a town so much smaller than than what I'm used to in Tāmaki Makaurau,  and the other major music hubs, and especially the TinyClub scene, there really seems to be a unique, special, special thing going on there.

Pre-Tinyclub we used to go to the electronic gigs because they were the afterparties to bands. When I was first going to gigs, there would be after-functions with artists like Tākaro Techno Club. He (Hayden) would be playing these hectic hardware remixes of songs like "My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard", and they were super cooked. Bass would rattle the building, it was so exciting. But it always had this vibe of being an after party. There’s a proper scene now of live electro.

Do you feel like there's a deeper connection for you when you’re going to the club as a trans person. I know a lot of trans musicians find the club as a place of worship, and somewhere that brings them to a safer space. Is there something like that in Palmy where the hectic nature of the parties is connected to the freedom the trans community are finding in them?

Our mainstream nightlife is scary and unsafe, so TinyClub and other venues like Snails and The Stomach have been real havens for queer people in our scene. We have some great allies running these venues, and particularly at Tinyclub with it being a semi-private venue it's been awesome to see very direct allyship from guys like Hayden and Cam. So many of our friends have only had club experiences at Tinyclub, because they didn't have anywhere else that they could go for this experience. It was never intended to be a queer haven but it's just happened. At one point, I remember looking around at a gig and noticing how many trans girls there were with me, and in my head I was like: This is Palmerston North, and there's all these girls here together, and this largely happened because of music. You can safely have a queer night out at these venues. There’s nowhere else you can really go for that. The other co-founders of Tinyclub were so supportive of this too, where we could sort of protect queer people from the rest of the nightlife it in a healthy way, while still having a welcoming vibe.

Local trans artists have been showing up so much in the Student Radio Network charts for the last couple years, and a lot of electronic trans artists. I mean, you've been there twice now. Right? Everytime I check those charts, there's at least one trans artist on it.

It’s awesome. TinyClub has taught heaps of new people how to DJ, quite a few of us queer. For finding tunes as well, I'm friends with Fi who worked at Radio Control and they introduced me to lots of NZ trans artists like Amamelia. We were teaching people to DJ with her tracks and it felt important to know while doing that that there were trans people in New Zealand who were succeeding in music.

That reminds me of the the final track on the album, the 'dreams come thru'.

Lowkey the most trans track actually.

It's so full of warmth compared to a lot of the album. The trans euphoria comes straight through loud and clear. Let's talk about the album!

It's a good place to start, at the end.

There's a lot of dark places that this album goes before finishing on this very euphoric note.

Even though this album is club oriented, it's depressive club. When I got to the collabs, I really wanted to work with more trans people and capture the flipside, the positive experiences I've had since I started transitioning. I've experienced significant depression in the last few years but by hanging out with way more queer people, and through some of the things that happened in my Body, I engaged a gender euphoria, and a whole new approach creatively and philosophically. I wanted to touch on how much fun you can have being trans, and also something about dreams... I was having these dreams about dying as a girl, oddly happy dreams. Dying is usually a nightmare where you gasp and wake up, but in the dreams I would be a girl, and I would think to myself: "Aw, that's kind of nice". So that's where the name for the track came from ('dreams come thru'). I wanted to make it a pointedly happy dream. Sam/Impress was so good at translating all that bullshit into sound. I went to her house and we plugged my Volca FM into Ableton for the arpeggios, and we sampled 'Titanium' by David Guetta as a joke. The vocals sound familiar in a cursed way, like how in dreams you see things and you're not quite sure what it is, just that it’s familiar. All these things were part of channeling my trans-euphoria realised through dreaming. It’s also a bit of a joke.

Before you called the album 'depressing', for me I found it really cathartic. I felt like so many of the tracks hit that sweet spot between a sad and an angry feeling, or maybe that’s a passionate feeling. How did the making of the album feel? Did it come together over a long time?

2020 to 2021-ish was spent writing tracks on the Elektron Model:Samples. I was still unsure about who I was and the lockdown era forced me to grapple with this, as well as death, and some repressed traumas. I guess I was coming to terms with all of this via the drum machine. The album tracks came to be projected onto specific locations. This notably happened at Beatcamp, an event hosted in February of 2022 and 2023 by the TinyClub crew — Hayden, Cam, Aidan, and myself. We took a bunch of music gear out to Āpiti’s remote Sixtus Lodge. It was a camp for experienced and new producers to learn from each other. I recorded three tracks at these, including 'sixtus dub' in 2022, and it’s where lots of the field recordings are from.

Like the ruru at the end of 'sixtus dub'?

The Ruru, and a glow worm walk for the reverberating cave. Then there’s the metal gate to the lodge rattling. I got to Beatcamp before anyone else did and it was pissing down but I couldn't get inside. So I was swinging this gate and recording it.

I was in a much better place mentally at Beatcamp, around my friends. There were like eight trans people at the second one, bringing all this lovely energy that made its way into the recording and mixing.

Then I guess the third stage of writing was the collabs. I already talked about the one with Sam, but writing with Jess and Rosa was hilarious. They taught me some music theory, because I don't know any, and Jess is a music theory nerd. Rosa had her violin and she came up with this cool progression, then right as I was going to hit record she dropped the violin and it snapped. We were just like: “What the fuck are we gonna do now?” We ended up recording it on a viola that Jess’s mum had, and it was the most bones set up. I had no gear to record properly, so I just took a vocal mic, cranked the gain, and recorded the room. Then I sent it through like four reverb and delay pedals, that's why it sounds super cursed and ghostly, yeah…

That track really does lull you into some sort of dark ghostly place. You’re talking about 'u will hollow', right?

Yeah, it's a Dark Souls reference.

I always feel there are distant ghostly dance floors throughout the album. Dark Souls dance floors?

Yeah, I'm a massive Burial fan so the distant dancefloor thing is probably that influence.

I remember when I first saw you play a set I was a little surprised by your hardware set up for how textured and big the sounds are that Synthetic Children performs. I hadn’t seen someone use Volcas to make music like that before and you produced this album on Audacity too? Tell me more! Is it that we all have been looking down on Audacity as a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and it's actually more complex and got all these great ways of doing things we don't know about?

Absolutely not. I have great admiration for people who have the patience to learn Ableton but I've never done music in any sort of educational setting. I've never had access to it and I felt like I didn't have the money previously, or the time now, to go and learn that. I forge my sounds on the hardware and with pedals, so that I don't rely on any external processing. I enjoy the tangibility of hardware and the clunkiness of its limits. It forces you to be creative, the same as Audacity. For example, if Audacity can’t do something, you're going to figure out an alternative, or make something that sounds different. I struggle with confidence in my mixing, especially when my sub bass doesn’t hit as hard as I would like, because I haven't used something like Ableton to process it and blah, blah, blah. But, I am also proud that it sounds like me, and captures my messy live sound. It doesn't fall into those kinds of genre mixing tropes, it doesn’t sound cloned. Outside of music I often feel a bit alien, like I do things differently. It’s crack up that there's a parallel to that with the way I produce. You should see the EQ on Audacity though, it's horrible.

Can you name drop some of your favourite local trans musicians who we should be listening to?

Obviously Impress. She just put up her Bandcamp with an EP called DJ Thank U So Much, hilariously good ambient trance edits. That's a whole world of music I am not in yet, but when Sam makes it, I want to be in that world. I think there's big things coming soon from Impress, possibly on Bankrupt Records.

Skye is a friend of mine in Palmy, and she's not released anything on her own page yet. But there was a compilation that my friends did called felt cute, might delete and Skye has a track on that. Her artist name is Cactus, the track is called 'unfuckable', and it's dialled. It was a big inspiration for me in rewriting 'Body'. 'Body' was originally done for my first album and it used to be just a weird synth sound that lurks and there was no beat at all. But then I heard Skye’s 'unfuckable' and I thought, “Wow, she's made a club track about dysphoria”, and I really wanted to do that. That was a big part of why I rewrote 'Body'. A collab is coming in the future.

I feel like mentioning my own band Bitch Whistle. Jess doesn't have a solo project yet, so this is my way of shouting out Jess. Bitch Whistle is Jess, Fi, and myself. I think if I had been sixteen years old, and seen a band with three regional, specifically regional, trans women; not the typically cool Wellington, Auckland, queers; but regional trans women. If I saw that when I was sixteen: three people on a stage making a lot of beautiful, aggressive music, and expressing themselves and being openly trans, I think that I would have changed my life a lot quicker.