Brett Bullion may be more familiar through the artists he’s produced, engineered, or mixed, including Low, Samia, Hippo Campus, Margaret Glaspy, and The Bad Plus. As deep glens, he makes records of his own, and in 2025 he took that music on the road with Autechre. His latest, carver, follows the live dg ae 2025, and it was built in an unlikely way for someone with his studio résumé: from analog tape loops pulled at random out of a box, set against one another to see what would happen.
That approach turns his own past work into something he can be surprised by. It recalls the way some of us spent childhood, playing alone for hours, inventing games, building an elaborate inner world. Brett’s version is mapped, documented, and then shared, so others can wander through it with him. Deep engineering knowledge sits underneath, but what comes out is an intricate wash of electronic music that still sounds hauntingly human, tangible, and open: a side quest of the imagination, and the found accidents of the heart.
In my conversation with Bullion, we discussed why cutting tape is a matter of workflow for him, how grief over a friend’s death became “ok ak,” and the old Mac driving game that taught him to look for the edges of the world. He also explains why so much of his process amounts to building bandmates for himself.
The transcript has been edited for length, flow, and clarity.
Kallie Marie: On the emotional side, and in terms of creative choices, you intentionally chose some analog elements instead of going fully digital. Was this an intentional return, or did you just want to be creative in a different way?
Brett Bullion: I actually like the sound of digital more than I do tape a lot of times. Sometimes you lose the transient—it’s just not right all the time for everything. I’m assuming you’ve edited tape, so you know there’s nothing like cutting tape, where you’re totally listening. So when you cut a loop, it’s not always exactly perfect. Sometimes you fuck it up, and it doesn’t feel good.
I just always love cutting tape. It’s not really about the sound, though sound can be part of it. I like the way it sounds, but it’s mostly workflow. Just getting into a flow state where three hours have gone by, and you’re buried in quarter-inch tape all around your heels. I love that. There’s no time for it on sessions anymore. I’ve never actually made a record on tape for a client where tape is the storage medium. We use tape a ton for effects and loops, but I don’t find it particularly fun to work on tape as a storage medium. But workflow-wise, it does. Not looking at stuff, having to pause and rewind, having to listen through the whole thing. You have to listen through a tune when you’re getting a mix going on a console. You can’t just loop a section or jump around. That kind of stuff is good for us as humans, but not for generation loss or anything like that. That just sounds like a nightmare to me.
My favorite quote about tape is from Andrew Scheps. He said something like, “Tape is great for everyone who’s never made a record on tape.” Everybody who’s never worked on tape loves tape.
Kallie: So how has your process in the studio evolved since the last album?
Brett: Using all the tape loops was the biggest thing on this new record, carver, compared to the previous record, Earn Grips, where there wasn’t an extra step between building stuff in Max/MSP and recording stems straight out of Max, and then mixing that on my console.
Have you used Max at all?
Kallie: Yeah, I did years ago. Is that a thing you usually do?
Brett: Yeah, that’s kind of where everything starts. It’s building a sequencer, or a sequencer and an instrument, and then either recording right out of that, or, in the case of this new record, I would build generative systems, do jams on those to tape, cut tape loops out of the tape, toss the tape loops in boxes, and then improvise with those later.
So it was very, very convoluted, but I’m trying to create bandmates, essentially—that’s the way I think about it. I’ve got so many friends, and I’ve been in so many fun musical collaborations over the years, but everyone’s busy, they have kids now, and it’s hard to get everyone to commit as much time as I want. So I’m just trying to make bandmates; that’s what all these weird processes are. I’m trying to make it so that I get super surprised and I’m reacting to things. I guess we all do that in a way, but I can’t sit down at an instrument and write a verse, write a chorus. I work all day with artists, and they’re really good at it, and I always like reacting to that thing. If somebody plays me a verse and a chorus, I go, “Yeah, that’s cool, but let’s chop those two bars off.” Or, “What if you took the progression from this and put it here?” I like it when I stumble onto something in the world rather than invent it. So that’s the way I’ve tried to keep evolving.
What I’m doing is like that movie—I haven’t seen it in forever, so this might be a dumb analogy—Memento, where he’s got to tattoo everything. It’s some version of that, where you’re leaving breadcrumbs for yourself, for the future, where you go, “Oh yeah, I don’t even remember making this drum loop.” Or, “I don’t even remember making this melody, and I really like this.” Then you hear it differently, especially on tape, where it’s very fast and tactile; you just grab a varispeed and pitch it up to whatever context you’re using it in. So that’s the thing that’s changed the most: getting more and more speedy at essentially creating found accidents for myself.
Kallie: Do you find it hard to separate your engineer side from your musician side while you’re writing? Do you make conscious choices to keep the two camps separate, or do you just let it run?
Brett: They’re pretty intertwined in a way that, for the most part, I think is okay. I think it’s good for me to not compose in a DAW, for a bunch of reasons. One reason is what you’re asking about: I’ll sometimes start mixing. Some of that’s good—getting the right sound, just good classic engineering stuff, where you get the most finished sound you can as soon as you can so that it informs everything else. I’m definitely from that camp. But sometimes if I have too many plugins around, or there’s too much stuff, I’ll get lost doing that. The line is super blurry, though, especially when I’m using something like Max and building something that then plays a certain part. It’s hard to separate the engineering from the songwriting, if that makes sense. I’ve put myself in a situation where things aren’t super fiddly, where I can’t fiddle with any parameters.
Kallie: It’s very tricky, and DAWs are definitely a culprit . . .
Brett: The candy! It just takes a little mindfulness. Obviously, tons of people do it that way and make cool music, so it’s not like it can’t be done. For me, I just have to be mindful of it; that’s all.
Kallie: What were some of your key tools or instruments on this record? What drew you back to them over and over again, and what was that creative experience like for you?
Brett: For the new record, carver, the most important pieces are this little German 1/4" tape deck called the Uher 4000 Report Monitor and Cycling ’74’s Max. The Uher was originally built for journalists to conduct field interviews. So I have two of those, bought as new old stock from the parent company.
For the album, I used Max to build generative sequencers, then recorded those parts to reels of tape. Then I cut out the best parts from all of that as tape loops. I threw all the loops into two Tupperware boxes: harmonic loops and rhythmic loops. That was the first stage of “composition.” In the second phase, I would randomly grab two tape loops and put one on each tape deck. From there, I could use the tape machine’s varispeed control to get things into the same key, and use gates and filter envelopes to make the rhythm work together. For example, I might have a drum loop on one deck and a monophonic synth part on the other. They weren’t composed together at the same time, so they’re overlapping in weird ways. I might change the speed of one or both until they start to gel, then mult the drum loop on a patchbay and send it into the sidechain trigger of a gate. Now you’ve got a drum part shaping the harmonic part. Then I’d insert a delay between the patchbay mult and the sidechain input, and adjust the delay time by feel until you’ve got some call-and-response going on in a musically interesting way. Once I have this sort of thing happening between two parts and it feels good and keeps morphing, I record 10–15 minutes of it into Pro Tools. And then over the best bit of that, I’d repeat the process: randomly grab more loops, use outboard to fit the vibe, record those loops. Rinse and repeat. After a few iterations of that, you’ve got a bunch of parts and an arrangement going.
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Kallie: The first single on the album, “ok ak,” was in response to your friend’s passing. Do other songs on this album have similar themes, or is it just that particular song? How was that different—if you’re okay talking about this?
Brett: Yeah, for sure. There was a lot of that last year, losing a few people, and that’s a really human thing. I’m 42, and I had a friend pass in their late thirties; obviously that’s pretty young. So some of that is maybe not to be expected, but I don’t know what to say about it other than it happens and everyone experiences it at some point. It’s horrible, it’s part of life, and I guess the only thing I can say is it’s not a linear process.
You hear about the grieving process when you’re a kid, and you think you’ll do all these steps. It’s not like that. It’s like a weird, messy cloud floating around you. I wish more people talked about it that way, but you can’t even talk about it really until you go through it. It is like a mist that appears around you, goes away, then comes back, and you feel like you’re walking in a circle, but you’re moving outward. It’s like this: (makes circular loop with hands in air).
There’s this image I always have when I think about it—I don’t know if you remember this from museums when you were a kid, you’d put a coin in, and it would go around this big—do you know what I’m talking about? I don’t know what those are called.
Kallie: Yeah, it goes down a hole and it spins really fast?
Brett: Yeah! I feel like the grieving process is the opposite of that phase. It becomes a big circle, and then the circle draws a big circle around other things in your life. Then you have some understanding. Acceptance is probably a better word. So I think that’s the way our brains work with it; it starts as this very tight little strange motion, and then, if we’re lucky and we have a good support system and tools around us, it starts to move out like that (gestures bigger circle in air).
Kallie: The metaphor I’m thinking of is that those stages you’re mentioning are a bit like weather, or like health. You can have something that has acute symptoms, or a targeted area of a storm, and the storm passes, or dissipates, or the symptoms shift, right?
Brett: Yeah, yeah, yeah! Weather’s a good analogy too, I think. It’s a non-linear thing that’s changing, but there are patterns.
Kallie: Now, you also have a number of upcoming tour dates to support the album. How does what you do on this record work in a live setting?
Brett: For the last few tours it’s been pretty straight ahead: sequencer, sampler, tiny line mixer in a rack, and then I can throw stuff into an effects chain. But for this next one, I’m using no sequencer. It’s just a sampler and an effect send. Basically, I took all the tape loops from my boxes, digitized them, and loaded them into the sampler. So I’m doing the same thing: combining different, unsynced tape loops and using filters and speed control to compose on the fly so they fit together. The sampler has 16 slots, and I can combine any number of elements, and I’ve set it up so they all work harmonically.
They can flow into each other, or I can play them forward or backward. I could start in the middle of the screen and work my way out. It’s much more improvisational than some of the sequencer stuff, where you’re starting here, and you play through a set number of patterns or something.
So it’s going to be different every night. I’ll probably get stuck, which is fine some nights. I don’t know if you grew up gaming at all, but there was this game called Vette, like Corvette, a car game. It’s stupid, but as a kid, I would just drive off the sidewalk and try to find the edges of the world, and that was all I did. Why would you do the main game? That’s boring compared to this. So I try to make playing live feel like that. Kind of like, “What are the edges?”
Kallie: You’re finding some side quests to go on.
Brett: Yeah, exactly. Or just completely fucking off and not doing anything you’re supposed to, which is kind of fun. Using your taste and your ears to make it all work together is obviously the most important part. It isn’t programmed the way I’ve been doing these earlier shows. It’s much more like, “Here’s a bunch of elements—try to smash them up and make them work together in real time.”
Kallie: That’ll be cool for audiences, because no two shows are going to be the same.
Brett: Yeah, I hope so.
Kallie: How do you feel about touring?
Brett: Good. It’s so cool to meet people, take in other people’s sets, and really listen and get inspired. People romanticize it, but it’s a grind, and you don’t really have time to see things. The best part is slowing down and really listening to the other artists you get to play with—getting knocked on your ass by somebody’s set and thinking, “Whoa, that was so cool!”
I got to do a few Autechre dates last October, and watching Sean [Booth] and Rob [Brown] take in other artists’ music and listen—that was inspiring. It made me grateful to meet people in different cities who have some kind of aesthetic overlap with me, listen, and then try to respond to their vibe with what I’m going to do that night. That’s a fun challenge. If someone plays a drone set and I’m playing after them, I’ll try to respond to what they were doing, even if it’s subtle.
Kallie: It does remind you that there’s a little bit of life outside the studio. It’s easy to lose that relational space.
Brett: Yeah, I spend a lot of time in this room. I do really miss playing with a band. I’m getting better at it, but playing solo is not my favorite thing to do. I’m starting to enjoy it more, but I like being with somebody and playing off somebody.
Kallie: What’s your favorite non-musical thing that you think impacts your music?
Brett: I think just trying to stay mentally healthy—being aware of all my own cognitive distortions and trying not to judge others too harshly for theirs, and just trying to learn about the nature of how we think and process information as humans, and process emotions. On the bell curve of how humans interact with that question, I tend to be on the side of thinking about it too much. It’s so weird that we’re here; none of it makes any sense, and that’s okay. Accepting that, and being okay with its strangeness, is something I spend a lot of time trying to live in, and it probably impacts what I’m up to most in life. Is that too vague?
Kallie: That’s an honest, heartfelt, and intellectual answer—that the quandary of existence is your favorite thing that influences your music, outside of music itself.
Brett: Yeah, something like that. Just trying not to get trapped. I do think it’s a relatively new phenomenon that forces are always trying to manipulate your feelings for some kind of outcome. We’re very group-ish, and we exist within a dynamic of group-ness. That’s just our species’ nature. So I’m not hating on something new, but we are in this strange environment now, where your own mental situation can be manipulated so quickly, by so many tools. The most nefarious ones are probably the ones you agree with—whether it’s advertising, news, or whatever—so try to step outside of that. Keeping your head on straight is a worthwhile pursuit, I think, while also being grateful for the situation. It would be easy for me to just sit here and go, “Well, fuck all that!” But it’s not that simple for me.
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