Meet Bear Tummy

Snuggle up with the warm spaced out electronic tunes of Bear Tummy. In our latest interview, we chat with the artist about gear, collaborations, and their 2020 release “Void Traveler”.

A Self-Portrait by Bear Tummy

Would You Rather

your skin flash like a fast strobe light, or be incredibly slippery? Why?

Probably the strobe light, especially if I could turn it on and off. Would be sick to just turn my skin on during a peak moment in a DJ set or something.

Some Questions with Bear Tummy

Is there a piece of musical gear that you often find yourself returning to? Why?

Yeah, there’s this one distortion/low-pass filter hybrid plugin called Driver which is pretty central to the type of music that I do now. I think it was originally designed to be a guitar effect, but you can use it for anything; it’s pretty good at giving texture to drums, for example. Sometimes I’ll bounce the thing I’m working on, stitch it together with another project, and run the whole thing through Driver. You can get some crazy sounds like that.

Who would be your dream collaborator?

Phil Elverum of the Microphones/Mount Eerie, especially since I’m guessing he’s not interested in this type of dance music at all, so having him on a track would be a pretty big deal. One thing we both do is make liberal use of distortion, so it could potentially happen. His lyrics and vocal style would kill it on a minimal house beat.

What was the creative drive behind your 2020 release “Void Traveler”?

Aside from the general state of the world, I’m actually in school for something right now for something that’s completely unrelated to music. I did a math class this summer for credit, and about halfway through I was getting really frustrated because it was eating up more time than I had originally anticipated just trying to absorb the material and make it through the homework. And so instead of ramping up the enthusiasm for that, I just sort of checked out and started working on Void Traveler. After the initial version was complete, I crammed full-force for the final exam and managed to skirt away with a passing grade. The tension created by trying to balance day-to-day activity with my intense love for music has always been a really relevant factor behind the material that I work on.

To give a shorter answer, the main creative drive behind Void Traveler was procrastination.

What is the best pizza in NYC?

For me, Patsy’s on 2nd avenue. I was hanging out with my dad a while ago and we went there. The crust was so thin and flakey.

Your release Void Traveler is super rich with layers upon layers overtaking one another. What attracts you to the more dark low-fi sounds?

In electronic music, there are two major camps: dance music, also commonly referred to as EDM, and the exact opposite of that, which could be called electronica but this really means anything like noise, ambient, glitch, breakcore, etc. I’ve had exposure to both, but I tend to be more focused on creating the type of stuff you could hear at a club or a party. The thing about that, though, is by operating in that space, you open yourself up to a lot of criticism from people who are hyper-focused on the “right” way of making dance music. You’ll hear things like, “Oh, you need to make the kick drum way louder,” “This track needs more compression,” “There’s too much noise in the background,” like your sole focus needs to be on making the cleanest, tightest, most energetic 4/4 drum pattern imaginable. After a while, following the rules was no longer fun or interesting to me, so I started doing things like layering tons of reverb, routing everything through distortion, not paying attention to song length and not really using EQ at all except for mastering purposes. This was an attempt to break outside of that box while hopefully still making something that people want to listen to. As far as influences go, I’ve always been interested in artists like Shlohmo, Clams Casino, Gold Panda, Com Truise, Bonobo, Giraffage, XXYYXX, Gesaffelstein, Chrome Sparks and Flume because they straddle the line between the two areas of electronic music that I mentioned above. I also listen to a lot of indie rock and alternative pop music thanks to my girlfriend, so there’s that.

What would the title of your memoir/biography be?

Void Traveler :-)

Was there a catalyst that brought this project to life?

At one point, I went through a phase where I would only make cute-sounding trap beats as a way of coping with feeling isolated and anxious, which is where the name Bear Tummy comes from. As far as what actually brought me to make the type of music that I’m making now, it’s kind of a different story.

Basically, I was replaying The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for the millionth time and also reading a bunch of wiki articles about the extended universe of that game when I came across this dude Michael Kirkbride, who was responsible for a lot of the weirder/more cryptic lore that went into The Elder Scrolls as a series. He also wrote a semi-canon derivative work called C0DA which didn’t make it into the games but it’s supposed to be the unofficial “ending” of the in-game universe set way in the future, with things like an advanced civilization of dark elves living on the moon and the whole world being decimated by a giant robot god monster. There are also some random deities from the series that show up to help out the protagonist. Anyway, I just thought it was really cool and unique, and it inspired me to work on some music that I put together to make the initial version of Void Traveler.

Any final comments? (This is your electronic soapbox for one last answer.)

If you’re an artist of any kind, don’t be afraid of mashing different ideas together. Also, meditation can be a good way to unblock yourself.

Bear Tummy