Space Dimension Controller Stays Grounded

Jack Hamill's never been one to let his music do all the talking. There's usually another side to his art beyond what you hear when you press play, like the lore behind his star-hopping alter egos Space Dimension Controller and Mr. 8040 or his 2013 album Mikrosector-50, which told of an area of deep space where he yearned to be reacquainted with a lost love.

But on his latest EP, something's changed. Final Quest, out July 26 on Will Saul and Fink's record label Aus Music, comes with no back story, no world-building, and no vocoder-dipped narration. The six tracks — all of them made in Bitwig Studio — are sleek and focused, but still dripping with the unmistakably euphoric funk the producer is known for. In this conversation, we spoke to Space Dimension Controller about history, hardware, workflow, and the real meaning behind his music.

Let's start at the beginning. Your first piece of hardware was the Technics SH-8040 Space Dimension Controller. What was it about the name of that piece of equipment that led to you using it as your alias?

I had it sitting in the studio, and when I saw the name, I was like, “Oh, that'll do.” I always liked sci-fi, but the name really gave me something to build on. At first, I had another name, RL/VL, doing ambient and IDM stuff. Then the Space Dimension Controller name came, and I started making '80s-influenced electro, and it just spiralled out of control after that. A lot of the concepts, places, and characters [I've come up with] come from names of equipment I've had. I always liked making up silly stories when I was a kid. I think I've grown out of the silly sci-fi stuff — which is good, because I don't know if it would translate very well right now. But yeah, I really committed to it.

Now I'm making things very loosely space-themed, but there's a lot of Space Dimension Controller baggage for me, and I think that's what I'm trying to get away from. Maybe that's what the Final Quest thing is about.

What other equipment in those early years stands out as being particularly important to the Space Dimension Controller sound?

The Korg Monopoly has always ended up coming back. The Minimoog Voyager, the Yamaha CS30, the Roland 808, and the 909 as well. The 808 has been on a lot, but I try not to use it as much these days. Lately I've been trying to use the 909 more, and that's partly why things have started sounding more clubby the last few years.

When I started out at the end of 2006, I used early versions of Reason, Ableton, and Logic before settling on Cubase. But during lockdown I decided to make a few hardware-only EPs for Bandcamp. I thought I should probably get a good hardware sequencer, so I got the Squarp Pyramid, and since then, my studio workflow has become hardware sequencer-based. Then I went to Ableton for a year, and I think that was the stepping stone.

With Cubase, it was quite linear – I didn't have everything playing at the same time, and I wasn't jamming live. I would find a synth melody I liked, record six different versions, and move on. You can pile that up forever, but then you have to arrange it. I would get stuck with arrangements for a month. Then I moved to Ableton and could record a whole tune roughly and finish it quickly because it's already pretty much arranged. That carried over to Bitwig as well.

Why did you decide to start using Bitwig Studio? And what was your experience adapting to the program?

The move from Cubase to Ableton never felt entirely final, as I was still jumping back to Cubase at times. Bitwig always seemed super interesting to me in its aesthetic, layout and functionality. Honestly, at first it was a bit daunting. I definitely gave up a couple of times and retreated to the familiarity of the DAWs I know, but one day everything just clicked and I haven’t looked back. It feels like there's nothing in the way of my ideas anymore. Bitwig actually inspires me, which is something I've never experienced with a DAW before.

Are there any particular Bitwig features that you couldn't do without now, workflow-wise?

The way it works with plug-ins. It's just so easy, how it handles adding and removing them, how you can preview things, the seamlessness of it. I can stack them up as quick as I want without clicks. In other programs, every time I added a plugin, the audio engine would restart and there was a little click.

You're well known for the ideas and concepts around your music, whether it's the album you made when you were 18 and trying to sound like Boards of Canada or the intergalactic love saga of Welcome to Mikrosector-50. What's the story behind Final Quest?

There is a loose concept behind it, but nothing very intricate. I'd like to go back to the full-blown concept stuff, but I'm not sure if it's the time for it anymore. People aren't interested a lot of the time due to the way things are sold. It killed me because I intended my albums like Welcome to Mikrosector-50 to be completely seamless, and when I saw people buying individual tracks, and I was like, “This is the same as buying one chapter of a book!”

Your recent EPs — Final Quest included — lean pretty heavily towards the dancefloor. Is that related to what you said before about people not being in the headspace for more conceptual projects?

It's a bit of that, but it's probably because I've moved to hardware sequencing and not messing around layering things for weeks. Editing on the Squarp Hapax is so close to what you can do on the computer, but it's way more hands-on. It felt more like an extension of myself. Instead of doing something on the computer, I could just put my hand on it and twist things at the same time, and it sounds really dynamic with these spontaneous little changes. When everything's on at once and they're all interacting with each other — that's when it's really good.

I'm looking forward to working with Bitwig on other things. You can be as experimental as you want with it, and I'm looking forward to going back to the ambient and IDM stuff I started with, not just making house and techno.

What's your relationship with the club itself like at the moment? You've struggled with it in the past and pulled away from it at points.

I used to go out constantly, but I don't really go out here at home. I just enjoy making music. It's very easy to disappear into your own head once you chill out in your early 30s and have a kid and get married, but if you don't go out, you start feeling detached. That's one thing that I'm looking forward to with the move [to Amsterdam].

How does playing live in a club environment compare to DJing?

They both have their benefits and are both fun, but in the past, if a live set wasn't really connecting, I couldn't improvise much. With this new one, I'm able to do that. It's almost as flexible as DJing, because if I feel like people aren't enjoying a track, I can speed through it if I want, in the same sort of way you would mix out of a track that wasn't working in a DJ set.

It's also the most equipment I've ever brought with me. Using hardware sequencers in the studio has played into that, because sequencers are involved in this now, whereas it used to just be stems and maybe some synths being sequenced by a MIDI track in the computer. But stems are really boring to do a live set with. If you miss a trigger on a stem or accidentally restart one and it's out of time with the others, there's no real easy way to fix that. Loops and sequenced hardware can be quite stressful to set up, but are more forgiving and a lot more fun, especially if you have loads of synths going at the same time, so I'm enjoying doing it again.

You used to play in metal bands when you were younger. Is there any guitar on the new record?

Yeah, there's some little French house, disco-y guitar licks and harmonies — nothing crazy. I'm more of a noodle-about-until-I-find-something-I-like person, something that I can play over and over again.

I came from metal when I was a kid, and back then, you'd scoff at anything that wasn't complicated. But now I like things that are really simple and nice to listen to over and over again. It's similar in electronic music as well. A lot of Basic Channel tracks are just amazing loops without much variation, but they still sound dynamic the whole way through. That's a proper science that I wish my brain would allow me to do.

What's the best piece of advice you've been given when it comes to music production?

It's bad to have expectations, to put expectations on yourself when you could just be having fun with what you're making. Since the workflow change, my music has become a lot more fun than it used to be, and it probably has something to do with that way of thinking instead of putting everything I do on some sort of big pedestal. If you're having fun and don't care about things, I think it comes out, it shows.