Multidisciplinary artist Freeka Tet on taking a hacker’s method to produce lively, subversive works of music and visual art.
Freeka Tet can’t choose whether he’s a hacker, a magician or a sell-out. This may be duetothefactthat he invests most of his time populating all of 3 of these functions. During his discussion with Fact he stresses the value of one of his numerous self-administered tattoos, the relatively ridiculous expression ‘ou ou et ou ou et et’, which curls throughout his chest in spidery cursive. “If you equate it into English it implies: ‘or or and or or and and’, he discusses. “Are you an ‘or’ individual or are you an ‘and’ individual, are you like ‘this or this’, or like ‘this and this’? Are you whatever or do you requirement to choose?”
It’s an withstanding belief that dates back to his developmental years playing in numerous underground sound scenes in Bordeaux and Paris, a innovative outlet he managed alongwith studying marketing and graphic style. “I was actually puzzled by the reality that I was doing my researchstudies in marketing at the exactsame time as being in the sound scene, playing in punk crouches and doing tattoos for individuals. I got truly lost in it”, he states. “I required to make a choice, was I going to have a profession in marketing, was I going to be an speculative artist, or was I going to be a tattoo artist? I felt like I couldn’t be all of them.”
This function was initially released in Fact’s F/W 2020 problem, which is readilyavailable to purchase here.
Fast-forward to the present day and Freeka Tet has showed his moreyouthful self stunningly wrong. The multidisciplinary artist, designer, developer and entertainer has one foot in the industrial traditional, working with Google, Childish Gambino and Margiela, with the other planted securely in the mulch of the speculative electronic underground, conducting psychopathic sound efficiencies utilizing just his face, making music without instruments or music softwareapplication and creating spooky animatronics for avant-pop provocateurs Amnesia Scanner.
Using emergent innovation, innovative coding and a hacker’s technique to creative production, he develops spirited works that interrogate and overturn modern mindsets towards cultural intake. His practice promotes, in his own words, “doing without understanding”, taking on deeply technical jobs based on procedures of knowing and examination while staying untethered from any particular discipline or method. Rarely stoppingbriefly for breath, he bounces around the brand-new media landscape with an omnivorous hunger for initial kinds, brand-new designs and really genuine modes of self-expression, all of which stem from a powerful pressure of imaginative indecisiveness. Boiled down into a deeply individual mantra, this effectiveness is now eternalized in ink. As he discusses: “I did this tattoo to be like: ‘It’s ok, male. You puton’t requirement to choose’”.
You can trace Freeka Tet’s uneasyness all the method back to his veryfirst musical tasks, a varied and enthusiastic body of work specified just by a persistent unwillingness to stick within the narrow boundaries of a single category. This is evidenced by the artist’s long list of musical aliases, which consistsof Surrr Grrr, Sgure, Sgur£, Maxi Bacon, a partnership with Scott Sinclair, aka Australian noisecore artist Company Fuck, and Gazormass, a partnership with Orion Bouvier, one half of French electroclash duo Kap Bambino. Growing up listening to Jamiroquai, Marilyn Manson and Korn, his taste was determined by his crowd: “I was in the South of France, I was in Bordeaux. So it was like: dreadlocks, skating, Korn, whatever.”
However, his passive listening routines were quickly interferedwith by the discovery of Mr. Bungle and Fantômas, the alt-metal combination tasks of Faith No More’s Mike Patton. The excessive rage of Patton’s sonic vocabulary, both actually in terms of his voice, which covers no less than 6 octaves, and in terms of category, was the trigger that would influence him to make his own music. A love of Japanese singer Yamatsuka Eye and Houston hip-hop designer DJ Steam sealed his love for the loud, loud and twisted, all of which are qualities that notify his early noise.
An continuous fascination with computersystem music established into numerous speculative electronic jobs, however it was with his early recordings as Sgure that Tet discovered severe acknowledgment. One early fan of the job was Stevo Pearce, the creator of Some Bizzare Records, who consistedof the Sgure track ‘Booyaka Vs Jalla’ on the unknown collection Some Bizzare Double Album, a 2008 upgrade to the 1981 cult classic Some Bizzare Album that veryfirst presented audiences to Depeche Mode and The The. Another was James Kirby, who would go on to release Sgure’s 2007 album Anulus Pexie on the V/Vm Test Records sub-label Vukzid.
“I keepinmind him informing me about the concept for The Caretaker in 2007”, states Freeka Tet. “Because I was doing all this Max/MSP things, I keepinmind thinking that it was rather lazy! At that minute I couldn’t comprehend his point.” At this early phase of his profession the most gushing fan of the task was Mary Anne Hobbs, who in 2007 explained the experience of listening to his tracks on her BBC Radio 1 program as, “like you’ve been pressed from the leading of the Empire State Building”.
An unwavering predisposition for intricacy sustained the artist’s continued experiments with Max/MSP, a visual programs language that hasactually endedupbeing an important tool for a generation of speculative artists. “Sound for me at veryfirst was actually sound, it was not music”, he describes. “It was something that required to be physical. There was currently some kind of terrorism, or vandalism, in the noise. When I began utilizing Max/MSP I endedupbeing more interested in visuals. So when I began doing visuals that endedupbeing the vandalism”.
It was likewise around this time that the artist began to get more seriously into hacking, something he partially associates to his love of the softwareapplication. “With Max, you requirement to be a hacker, or at least it feels like you’re hacking something. You requirement to go into something and touch cabletelevisions together and kind of hack it. Most of the time it doesn’t work.” This anarchic and haphazard mindset towards music production started to impact the method Freeka Tet approached the market he rather hesitantly discovered himself a part of.
Hacking was a significant part of his method to present the world to Erson Rybod, an enigmatic and resolutely confidential manufacturer with whom he still works carefully. This consistedof some online reservation company hoax that ensured Rybod’s initially reveals were incredibly well-attended for a total unidentified, as well as a prepared promotion stunt that trips the thin line inbetween the innovative and the wicked.
“Rybod came up at around the exactsame time that Syro from Aphex Twin was launched, 10 years after he had vanished and was coming back”, describes Tet. “So certainly Warp had a enormous marketing spendingplan. I utilized cSploit, which is a hacking tool, to appearance at how simple it would be to hack the label’s site and the strategy was to put Rybod’s track and image up on the day of the album’s launch.” Ultimately he chose versus the stunt for worry of legal consequences, although he still stands by the concept: “pranking Aphex Twin can just be a great thing.”
By his own admission, Freeka Tet is less interested in the mechanics of hacking than he is in the mindset behind it. “I’m a hacker, however I’m