Building Your Own Friends with deep glens
Interview by Zach Brose
Photos by Brett Bullion and Amy Anderson 
Brett Bullion is an engineer, mixer, producer and composer based in Minneapolis, MN. He’s recorded and engineered music by artists such as The Bad Plus, Low, Margaret Glaspy, Lizzo and Bad Bad Hats.
Under the name deep glens, Brett builds custom logic-based sequencers in Max/MSP to control drum machines and synthesizers; creating data feedback and capturing the results in an organic stream-like fashion. He released his first collection of compositions, titled Earn Grips, in 2023.
In this interview, Brett and I catch up about recording in his home studio, rediscovering Max in the midst of the pandemic, AI technology and more.
It’s been a while since we caught up. How’s the home studio? What’s going on?
It’s good. I’ve been mixing at home now for – I think December ‘21 was when I built the home rig and I love it actually. There are days when I miss having a live room but I was mixing so much anyways that it just didn’t make sense to be paying for all that real estate for six to eight months out of the year when I just need a mix room.
Do you prefer mixing at this point or do you miss producing bands?
I’m still producing and doing some recording. It’s just a little more spread out, I guess. It comes in waves. I’m gonna start a record tomorrow that’ll be two or three weeks of tracking and then another record in June so I’m actually going to be doing a lot of recording this spring and then I’ll be back mixing for the rest of the summer.
From mid-2022 until now, I’ve just been in the studio at home for almost a year. I haven’t been tracking much. I think I prefer that in general. Sometimes I go a little bit crazy but I like being on my own. That’s just my personality. Then it makes recording more fun because it’s really fun to have a week to hang out with some people.
But you know, [making records] is an intense social situation and that’s in the best scenario where everyone is cool and fun to hang out with (laughs). It’s just intense. People are being creative and vulnerable and you gotta help make that a good environment. It took me a long time to learn how to do that well. It’s fun to remind yourself you're a human and to get out of your weird little room.
What is Max and when did you start working with the software?
I got into max in high school. That’s when I first heard about it. Throughout middle school, I was starting to get into electronic music and had already been playing drums and playing in bands. I had some drum machines and samplers and I was super into learning how to use that technology. Then I got a little multi-track digital recorder and I was starting to understand how very basic recording worked. Computers were relatively shit back then. Pro Tools was just starting to happen in the studio world. I never had a tape machine but these stand alone digital things had this weird place in the market because computers couldn’t do that yet. It had to be standalone hardware.
When I was pretty young, I had friends who were older than me like JT Bates, Huntley Miller, Mike Lewis and Dave King. I think I first heard about Max through Huntley and I had also heard about it because I was really into Fennesz who’s an Austrian guitar player that plays through Max. It’s like experimental pop and soundscapes. There’s never really any rhythm unless he’s playing some guitar rhythm and it’s so cool. It’s kind of like the next iteration of shoegaze through this computer music lens. Then I heard about it through a German artist named Robert Henke who was going by Monolake at the time and he was using Max but had a totally different approach. He’s a Berlin techno producer. Then of course Autechre on Warp [Records] were using it at the same time as well.
As a kid, I remember thinking how cool it was that all their music was so different but it was all coming through the same conduit. I’ve had that mentality for a long time and it probably influenced how I record bands. In high school, I built tons of shit and was controlling my samplers and MIDI gear because that’s what Max did back then, mostly. There was DSP but it was limited by the computing power back then. All the drum machines I had, I was hooking up to Max and building sequencers. Then I got distracted and I got super into recording and growing up and going to college and trying to make a living and all that stuff. I got back into it in the summer after the pandemic started. I always kind of messed around with it on and off over the last decade but I got really into it in the first part of the lock-down.
I was playing tons of video games. Tons of open world stuff. I was reading tons of interviews with game developers, as a hobby, about how they built the non-player character AI’s and I was, maybe naively or boldly (laughs), thinking I could build something like that in Max. Something that’s an auto-arranger type of thing. That’s what I set out to do and I got on tons of tangents and I got distracted but then I just got tracks out of it along the way which is what became the record.
I think we had talked before this that you were playing Alien: Isolation. Was that the catalyst to all this?
Yeah I was playing that one and I think we both had some overlap of what we were playing at the same time. I guess it was mostly Alien: Isolation because there were these really cool YouTube guys that talked about the structure of the AI and then from there I got really into it and started reading about technology in general. For a while, I actually considered trying to do the record in Unreal Engine because you can do MIDI events in there. There are all these behavior tree tools and I was thinking maybe I don’t have to build it. I could just use a game engine to make a record with hardware and synthesizers. I didn’t get into that because the learning curve would have been so steep and I would have had to get a PC and I just thought I could do something in Max because it’s a language I’m already familiar with.
I’ve dabbled in Unity and programming in a game engine before but had to stop and think if I really want to get into all that.
Yeah, it’s like a bottomless pit. It’s like learning another instrument. I did some dabbling in sound design for VR and I was working in Unity quite a bit so I already had this very general idea of how that stuff works. When I came back to Max with the mentality of just trying to make music, I really loved the idea of building my own engine and that that would be my little world. It’s ongoing. Right now I’m rebuilding version two of a tool set that’s going to be way more refined and more powerful than what I did on the first record using concepts that I’ve been learning for two or three years.
When you start something like this, is it just connecting oscillators at first or how do you build something from the ground up?
I wouldn’t even be at the level of oscillators. For Earn Grips, I was really building sequencers and then higher level control structures to control those sequencers at a sort of a higher arrangement level. I was just controlling drum machines and synths in the studio. I didn’t want to dive into building synthesizers yet because I knew I needed to get my chops back before I was gonna do that efficiently. [On] Earn Grips, I’m just building sequencers and then I’m just kind of – I mean you’ve seen me make records and mix, I’m just doing the same thing philosophically where it’s like, “I know I’m not supposed to plug this in here but what if I did?” (laughs). You’re just trying shit. I can’t even remember how the sequencers work. I’d literally have to go look at the patches and then I’d be able to tell you. But I know that there is a lot of data feedback. The same way you’d feed a delay back to get repeats. There is a bunch of input at the top of the sequencer that says “if, then, this”, “if, then, else.”
Just tons of logical statements you’re setting up as you’re jamming and then you can take an output from that sequencer and feed it back into itself. Or you feed one sequencer into another sequencer and then back into the first sequencer. You have to keep refining it. Having logic gates and counters that only let every fifth note go through it or something. Eventually, you’re sitting around after a day or two of that and things are sounding pretty sick (laughs). Then you decide you only want control over two or three parameters and widdle it down to an instrument. I just started recording after that. Some of those tracks are like one or two hour long takes. There are a tree of tracks in this batch that use the same patch. The same group of sequencers from the same day and [the tracks] are all pretty different. That’s kind of a good example of how you can get somewhere else with it and not even know how you got there.
Click to listen
Do the sounds come from Max? Or are they mostly coming from the drum machines and synths you’re hooking up?
This record does both. Almost all of it goes through Max at some point. The drum machines were all going back into Max and being processed in real time using parameters coming from the sequencers. I would sometimes make something, record it on tape, and build a sampler in Max to play back that tape chunk. There are just a lot of iterations of building new groups of tools that mess up the thing that I just made. A lot of it was just exploring because I hadn’t used Max in a long time.
Then you record it down as stems and mix it?
I did have to build this stem recorder. There is a built-in version in Max but I needed something that did something slightly different. I built a stem recorder utility where at any point I could record eight stereo stems and then I just put all that in Pro Tools and mixed it on my console. In the new tool set, I really want to get it to the point where everything comes out of the console in real time and then just record a stereo file. Have a mix going while I’m recording essentially. I’m not even sure that’s the right way to do it for my brain but I want to try it.
Do you prefer this experimental way of making music over more traditional songwriting?
This is actually how I started making music so it’s actually in some ways a return to form, I guess (laughs). I grew up not knowing what I was doing, plugging things in and feeding things back and things sounding horrible but you’re just a kid exploring, right? I’ve always done that. I guess making music in the “traditional” way where you’re playing instruments – I didn’t come at making music through that pipeline. At the end of the day, it’s all kind of the same but through a different medium. That makes it more fun to work with artists in the “traditional” way. It’s such a rush sometimes to record a band. In the middle of the pandemic I was working on all these dense Max things and then I flew to New Jersey and worked on a Bad Plus record.
Just recording some of the greatest musicians in the world and just totally enjoying the pleasure and honor to try and capture that. It’s a different kind of rush. So, I like both. I’m trying to get the tool set where I can [perform in Max] in real time like I’m improvising and I don’t have to spend tons of time patching. I’ll already have the tools built and can hook them up together in a new way each time I’m trying stuff out. That’s the ultimate goal for me. I want it to be like jamming with my friends but I don’t have any friends any more because I’m old and COVID and everyone has families and no one has time to make music anymore (laughs). I’m just going to make my friends. “My friends are toys. I make them!” Blade Runner deep cut there (laughs). That’s one of my favorite movies.
On the topic of making your own friends, what are your thoughts on A.I. and music?
First of all, I don’t really know enough to have some sort of informed opinion about it but from what I know, I think there is an opportunity to have really cool tools. There’s all this panic about human creativity being over and I don’t think that’s true. I guess that’s all I can say without knowing more about it. It just still seems like if-then pattern matching to me.
I think the only thing I can say is that value and facts are different categories philosophically and to me a true AI has bridged the gap between value and facts because that’s what human minds do. Facts in the deductive sense. Humans are actually pretty bad at that with confirmation bias and negativity bias. We don’t want to hear facts sometimes, right? We want to believe in the value of what our group dynamics are. The power in that is that we have a conscious experience about things and we can make art. Art, to me, is the bridge between value and facts in some way. I don’t think AI has that bridge yet and I think when it looks like it has a bridge it’s because it’s doing a mirroring pattern matching and we’re bringing our own experience to what it’s outputting. We think, ‘oh my god, look at that!’ And it’s like, well, it’s trained on the data set of the internet.
I think it’s possible to make a ChatGPT machine that mimics me perfectly or indistinguishably but it would need to have every single bit of facts from the day I was born until now because I’m the sum total of all my experiences and decisions over the last 38 years. So, think about the complexity of one human alone. We still don’t know why we’re conscious. We still don’t know why I’m having an experience. This is a big topic (laughs). I think the main thing is the facts and values thing. It’s not so easy to figure out the relationship between those two things. I don’t think that stuff is there yet [in AI] but I think it’s an amazing tool.
To me, ChatGPT is like a super advanced search engine. I read an interview a couple days ago with an ER doctor who was talking about how ChatGPT is a really cool tool but it makes all these mistakes and, [in one situation], if he wasn’t there to diagnose and use his intuition, then literally 3 people would have died. He said his concern is that humans will lazily use it the same way we lazily use Instagram. It was just this really interesting thing. It's just not at the point yet where [AI] intuition can make all that knowledge truly do something next level. In terms of it being an aid, it’s amazing. That part of it is cool, I think.
Going back to Earn Grips, when did you decide you wanted to make a record and put some promotional materials behind the deep glens project?
It was pretty intentional that I was going to put a record out. Trying to run it like a small business in the same way I do mixing things. Try to promote it and make merch and interact with a community of people that are into it.
I feel like I tend to abstract the creative process a lot and think about the emotional side versus the technical side. Do you use one or the other more when you’re making music like this?
The answer for me is both because you need both. It’s like that thing I was just talking about with ChatGPT. To me, there is the emotion of something and the execution of something and they’re related. Sometimes you have to get into a different head space to do either one of those things well. There were days when it was like, “alright, I gotta sit down and learn some dense music theory so I can build this sequencer that’s gonna do chords and change global harmonic stuff.” Then there were days where it’s six in the morning and I have headphones on and I’m just doing takes. Some stuff is making me choke up or something. So, yeah it’s really emotional for me. I’m a very emotional person, you know? So much so that I think sometimes I have to make things more technical to avoid feeling overwhelmed. But both are important. I don't have an abstraction because it’s instrumental music and it’s a little more abstract to begin with. To me, with instrumental music, it can sort of transcend that in a way. Whoever is listening to it just brings their own thing to it. If there’s some kind of music that resonates with them, they can enjoy it in a way that’s personal to them. In some ways I don’t think it’s worth me talking about what I think about the music. I don’t want to take that away from some person that might listen to it.
I guess, I’ve always seen you as someone that just does a lot instead of thinking about doing a lot. Is that fair to say?
Oh, I think a lot (laughs). The healthier I’ve gotten the less I’ve thought and the more I have a feeling about something then that’s good. I don’t want to get into some cognitive loop about it because that makes it worse. I’ve just learned that through making tons of records with tons of people and watching tons of people do the wrong thing where they just beat something into the ground or they’re really hard on themselves and they lose it. And then my job sometimes in those situations is to help us move past those little bumps in a way that’s not disruptive. That can be really challenging.
What do you do in those situations? Do you have tools you fall back on?
I’ve done a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy and I think that that approach can work for basically any human in any situation where they’re feeling like they’re having some sort of feedback loop or some intense thoughts about themselves or others.
I think it’s some of that stuff that’s been internalized and then it comes out in the working process. I’ve had to have more empathy for people moving slowly or being unsure in the studio and at this point I kind of let people get into their dead ends a little more than I used to. What I used to do, which is not the right way to do it, was to see people driving into a dead end and go “okay, no, no, turn left here.” But all that does is make that person feel like they don't have any input. I’ve had to get better at watching people make mistakes and turn around and look at me go “what do you think we should do?” Then you have trust and an actual collaboration going on.
Nobody likes a backseat driver (laughs). It took me a long time to realize that and let people try stuff. Sometimes people go into a dead end and it’s amazing and it’s an incredible idea or take.
With Max, it can be really intense. I’ve had to work even harder on avoiding getting – well, I could do anything. I could put a modulation envelope on 700 things in this patch. Obviously, computing is going to stop you at some point but I had to be like “what do I really need to control here?” As I get better at programming, I’ll go back and start deleting features because it’s too much stuff. You stop being creative when there is too much thinking and too many options. I can empathize with artists in the studio is what I’m saying.
Do you get paralyzed by all the possibilities in a software like Max or do you like to try everything and subtract?
I definitely have limitations and work within that framework. Narrow things down and try concepts and see if they work then try to work with them for a bit. Try to make something with it. Inside the limitation you start getting all these wild ideas like “what if this thing could listen to the pitch information from anywhere in the setup?” Stuff like that. You start having more interesting ideas when you’ve limited it down, I think. You start using them in ways you wouldn't have thought of otherwise.
But it is really hard with Max. This is kind of software development we’re talking about now where early on you have to build a foundation that your house is gonna go on so it’s actually pretty important to make sure you’ve got everything that’s going to be load bearing in a way. So that’s kind of the trenches I’m in right now. Building the foundation of something.
What’s next for deep glens? Are you wanting to experiment with live performances or visuals in Max as well?
Yeah I just have to build the tool set and then I’ll be doing all that. Making tracks and making a live set. In the meantime, I’m just trying to get people's ears on the current record and promote it.
I’ve been advertising on social media and trying to do that in a way that’s cool. I wanted to subvert the sort of influencer culture ads thing. The ads [I’m running] are sort of surrealist – I built this really stupid Markov Chain therapy bot that is very bad at making sentences in a way that’s really cool and I’ve been using that to generate copy for ads. People seem to be responding to that (laughs).
From a “brand” perspective, I think the whole project is packaged very well.
Cool, man. I’m really just messing around and thinking about records that I liked and how they were marketed. I loved the way that Kid A and OK Computer and those dystopian ad campaigns of the late 90s, early 2000s. I thought that stuff was genius. I think it’s clear that that band and the creative people close to them were really driving that ship as far as I can tell. I just think that’s awesome. I love how subversive it is. Advertising by making fun of advertising (laughs).
All of [my ads] are made in Max. I’m making everything in Jitter which is the visual side of the Max tool set and reprocessing the Earn Grips tracks and just free patching. Just making a weird patch that does video and has that weird bot saying stuff. The people that are into it are really into it and that’s really meaningful to me. Those are the people I wanna be involved with and make records for.
Website: https://deepglens.com/
Bandcamp: https://deepglens.bandcamp.com/album/earn-grips
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deepglens/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@deepglens
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/2SJQqEpEOXx7Ez1V4V8Xfv
