Max Eilbacher is Baltimore-based intermedia artist who primarily makes abstract computer music.

“I just do”

How did you get into computer music?

Max Eilbacher: I took a computer music class in college by accident. I was studying film, video, and animation and I thought I was signing up for a jitter class. The teacher was super cool and said we could do audio or video. At the time I was doing a lot of modular synths building, modifying cassette players and keyboards. Computer music seemed like something only really smart people do. It had this essence that to make something cool you had to put in years of hard work in. While in reality the method of electronics/composing I was working with before the computer took so much more time and capital than making “computer music.” Ever since I learned to bounce cassettes to audacity, the computer has always been an important tool for me. I have always done lots of creative work on the computer. When I got into more modern electronic music I started to think about the computer as a source of sound. So even before I was “using a computer” I had been “using a computer”. The only difference now I am more proficient, understand a little more whats happening under the hood and I do not record hours of functions generators onto a four-track and then bounce in real-time into a DAW.

Do you see computer as a music instrument, or more as a gear?

The computer is just a tool. Sometimes I can express creative ideas on it, other times after a day of work I choose between watching an Ozu film or a Lifetime film on it. The computer… a synthesizer with gmail, a modular with netflix, an octatrack with excel. It’s nothing to fetishize or overthink. If I was a member of a different economic class I would probably have a wall of some fancy old synthesizer. In an ideal world, I could make the sounds I want to hear with a can of duster and a lightbulb and I would never touch a computer. Sadly I am not at a point in my creative practice where I can do that.

Do you think making music on a computer is ‘avant-garde’ or ‘experimental’, or is it only so if you use it that way?

When I sit down to make sound/music/art I never think about how myself or a listener would categorize it. I just hear something in my head, try to translate it into reality and sometimes I share those sounds with people in one way or another.

Do you see what you do as ‘making music’, or more as ‘working with sound’?

Depends on who I am having a conversation with! I just do. There is so much possibility for arranging sounds in space. When a sound, a sonic system or a conceptual driven idea comes to me I do my best to create a brain to speaker pipeline. More recently that process has involved a microphone and a computer. The final outcome that comes out of speakers usually sounds very different from how I imagined it. If I like what I hear, I roll with it.

Is making music having fun/playing for you, or more a form of investigating/self study?

A mix of both? I am really striving to never punish myself in any aspect of life and I enjoy listening to the sounds I make.

Which record in your discography do you prefer the most?

I always prefer the record/project which I have not made yet. I guess I prefer the piece that is still brewing in my mind’s ear.

What’s the role of a record?

Music/sound is unavoidably subjective. Even if I was to introduce a piece by saying this work is about questioning post-war modernist Japanese Architecture and it’s historical and abstract links to European radical Marxists, the work will still probably sound like a fly dying under a refrigerator to most people.

– Joeri Bruyninckx

Max Eilbacher Bandcamp