TALKING SHOP
The Toronto producer talks Sd-2, saturation plugins and pitch-shifting the master bus
Working under the alias Loukeman, Toronto’s Luke Fenton makes fuzzy, fractured beats that sound like they’re breaking apart at the seams. Lifting vocals from pop, indie and R&B, Fenton runs his samples through pitch-shifters and saturators to gift them with ghostly textures, before setting them against glowing synth lines and crunchy analogue drums.
There’s no blueprint to Fenton’s music; his latest project, Sd-2, takes in tempos spanning hip-hop to drum & bass, with a few fruitful detours into beatless ambience and guitar-led instrumentals along the way. The thread that ties the tracks together is Fenton’s talent for recontextualizing unexpected samples through his truly unique take on effects processing, which makes everything sound beautifully degraded.
We caught up with Loukeman to hear more about the making of Sd-2.
How did you first get involved with electronic music-making?
“I started in university. My best friends and I just started making music. My laptop broke and I had FL Studio on it, so I got a new laptop and got Ableton, and from then on I was hooked, and I just started making beats every day. .”
Tell us about the background to the new project.
“The first record I put out, Sd-1, was very much just a mixtape. It was a compilation of beats. I was flipping random samples and making random stuff. I made it within a month, mixed it and I didn’t even get it mastered. I uploaded it, and it chilled for a while and some songs got picked up. That was unexpected.
“Sd-2 was different, because it’s the first time I’ve put out music with some folks watching. It took me a little while to figure out what to do there. I spent two years nerding out on production stuff and just tried not to overthink it.”
Talk us through your current home studio space? Is that still mostly based around the laptop?
“The bulk of it is laptop stuff – the real sauce is mostly the laptop. I have a few bits of hardware; a mixer and a few synths that I’ve used on both Sd-1 and Sd-2. But most of what I’m doing is from the computer; pitch-shifting plugins, stuff like that.”
Which hardware synths have you got?
“My favourite is the Oberheim Matrix-6. I use a few drum machines, too. I just got the Elektron Octatrack – it’s really sick, I love it. It’s so dense, but also limitless and super fun. I have the Analog Rytm MKI, too.”
We love those. That compression and saturation stage on the Rytm’s master effects is gnarly.
“Exactly. It sounds so good. Winzzz from Sd-2 is like, completely Analog Rytm. Except for the vocal. I made the whole beat in the Analog Rytm with the master distortion and everything together. It’s two stems, that project in Ableton.”
Did you experiment with
