PRODUCE LIKE
We visit the producer in his Essex studio to discover how he channels ’90s rave into ecstatic new sounds
Essex-based producer Mark Brandon, better known as Model Man, channels the utopian spirit of the UK’s ’90s rave culture into vivid and uplifting dance music. Growing up in a strict Christian household, Brandon was classically trained as a pianist before shrugging off the inflexible boundaries of his upbringing to embrace the liberated ethos of electronic music.
The producer’s self-titled debut album, released in 2021, found Brandon bringing these two worlds together, tempering the raw energy of the dancefloor with a shrewd and sophisticated musicality. On his forthcoming album, I Feel You Feel, he lifts this concept to new heights, imbuing a diaristic collage of synths, beats and samples with unfiltered emotion. We visited Model Man in his home studio in Essex to find out more about how the album was made.
How did you first get involved with electronic music-making?
“Going way back, I worked in a music shop called Sound World. It was work experience, I was only 15. It was one of these old-school music shops where the guy that ran the place was smoking and there was jazz music playing, that sort of thing. It was really cool. The owner had a little tape machine. One of those Tascam cassette recorders. He basically said, you can borrow this. He could see that I was interested in it. That was the start, just learning about multitracking and stuff like that.
“With this project. I started using Ableton about five or six years ago when I started Model Man. That was quite a game-changer for me, being able to manipulate audio in that way just opened up the door for me creatively. It was just the thing I needed to connect the dots between playing classical piano and production.”
We’re told that you drew inspiration from the local rave scene for your latest project?
“I’ve always been interested in that scene because it’s so inclusive. I sat down with Liam [Howlett] from The Prodigy once, and he said the thing that was a game-changer at the time in the early ’90s was that you had so many different kinds of people coming together at these events. There were no hierarchies: everyone was on an even playing field and there was no judgement.
“That was quite interesting to me, because coming from a background in classical music, where you’re doing grades and performances and being heavily judged, it’s so different to that. That was my world when I was a kid, to the point where I was rejected from college and things like that because I didn’t meet certain requirements. So to then have music become something that��
