acloudyskye, real name Skye Kothari, is a young electronic musician who has recently taken a turn towards post-rock. His live shows are a unique preview of the future of post-genre music, resembling a cross between a DJ set and a singer/songwriter concert — created by one person who is not constrained by one style, genre, or scene. His recent album from earlier this year, There Must Be Something Here, has garnered attention for its ambitious songwriting.
Ali Cyrus Saeed: [conversation about how Skye is ethnically ambiguous — dad is Gujarati and Persian, mother is from Thailand and mixed race] Does your background shape your art?
Skye: Yeah, definitely. Growing up, I was around Indian music. I think less so Thai music because my family stopped going to Thailand early on. On the first track from my second album, “Apologies”, I was going for a Bollywood-style string section. They have all these octave layers going on, which sounds super romantic. And definitely percussion wise, it has found its way into my tracks.
Ali: Absolutely. I hear the percussive influence all over the place. I was gonna ask about that. I don’t mean to put you on the spot, but do you have any favorite Bollywood movies or soundtracks? Anything like that?
Skye: Not off the top of my head, because when my parents were playing that stuff, I would never ask what it is. I would just take it in as a kid. (Ali: I feel the same way. I’m Pakistani, but we watched a good amount of Bollywood growing up, and I can’t name names, but if I hear a song, it unlocks a certain childhood memory.) Oh my god, exactly. Like the Dhoom movies with the motorcycles, I completely forgot about them, until one of my friends was over, and they were watching a movie, and suddenly I heard the main theme. I was like, oh my god, I’ve completely forgotten about this. But I totally remember listening as a kid. It comes up in funny sporadic ways like that.
Ali: What sort of music were you listening to growing up?
Skye: A lot of indie rock from the 2000s. Pavement, Pixies, Radiohead. Then when I was getting into my freshman year of college, I was listening to Daughter, and more recently Big Thief and Car Seat Headrest. I also listened to a ton of The Killers when I was younger.
Ali: Sounds like you and I have pretty similar musical origins. It’s notable that for people who try to make ambitious rock-adjacent tunes on their own, Car Seat Headrest is this touchstone that everyone I interview keeps coming back to.
Skye: It’s the epitome of very ambitious music with low-fi aesthetics. I think when you’re a person making music in a bedroom, hearing what other people can do in the bedroom is really inspiring.
Ali: What instruments do you play? And when did you pick them up?
Skye: I mainly play guitar. I’ll pick up a bass when I want to have a natural sounding bassline, but I’m not good at it. I started playing guitar when I was like 12, because I don't know, it was my childhood dream to be a rockstar. But I feel like I’ve only really started focusing on it the last couple years because only now do I know what I want to do with the instrument. (Ali: When you were dreaming about being a rockstar, did you have any particular one in mind? When I was a kid… it’s very white of me, but I was like, I wanna be Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin. My dad would show me the concert footage, and I would think, that’s gonna be me one day.) You’re not going to believe this… It was Bon Jovi. (laugh). I was a big Bon Jovi fan as a kid. I think Bon Jovi was the first concert I ever went to.
Ali: You and I are around the same age, and we both remember Skrillex dropping “Bangarang” as a watershed moment in the culture. What do you recall about that era when dubstep exploded? What were the other big influences on your earliest days of music making?
Skye: That was around the time when I was getting Very Online as a kid, and Skrillex was one of those things where, I’d never heard something like this before, and I needed to know how to make it. So I Googled “how to make dubstep” and came across this website called AudioTool, which is just like an online DAW, but also like SoundCloud where people would comment on stuff. And everyone had profiles. It was a mixture of a DAW and social media.
I ended up getting super inspired by a lot of the artists on that website. That was the main basis of my electronic sound. A cool thing about the website was, for a lot of the tracks, if the person who uploaded it enabled this feature, you could actually remix the track and open up the project file in your browser so you can see how it was done, which was useful for learning how to do stuff.
Ali: By the time you shifted to Ableton and started releasing music earnestly, your sound had matured. You were still releasing dubstep-inflected electronic, but it could also be called melodic or indie or experimental electronic. Who were the key influences in expanding your sound beyond dubstep in those early years, say 2015 to 2017?
Skye: I was listening to a lot of post-rock, and because of that, I ended up wanting to make post-rock. The first two artists I dove into were We Lost the Sea and Oh Hiroshima, who have this album called In Silence We Yearn, which inspires a lot of the drum sounds I like using in my own tracks.
Later on, I started listening to Daughter and Elena Tonra; her vocals were super inspiring to me. Then… definitely Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I would say they’re my favorite band right now.
Ali: You only started singing on your released tracks later on. Could you always sing?
Skye: I will say that I was always singing, but I just felt for the longest time that I didn’t have the experience, and I wasn’t taking vocal lessons. I was mainly just trying to figure out production. I feel like I had to wait until I figured out what I wanted the production to sound like, before I could figure out what I want my voice to sound like.
Ali: Can you describe the lyrical arc of this album?
Skye: The whole album tells the story of the two human characters who are in the music video for “Team” [above]. It’s mainly from the perspective of one of them, who, as this world around them is falling apart, it affects the other person more than it does them. The whole album is about that evolution of that relationship.
The first track, “Relay”, is a prologue to the ideas that would pop up later on the album that’s written from the other person’s perspective. The first couple of tracks are brighter sounding instrumentally and tonally because nothing bad has happened yet. “Team” is where the main character starts getting a sense that something is wrong, that something bad might happen, or things feel like it might not last. “Depths” is the turning point sonically in the album. It becomes clear things are going to go down. Then, “Quicksand” is pure chaos. The following tracks are looking back on what has happened.
Ali: Are either of the characters the mascots that we see appear in the cover?
Skye: No, I think this is the first album where those characters aren’t talked about in the story. I think the story is more of just like… I wanted to give people a sort of lore dump. (Ali: So we’re in the Skye expanded universe now.) Yeah, expanded universe. I think in “Ditch”, there’s a mention of the life that comes after humans disappear from this world. That’s the one reference on the album to [my previously recurring characters] Enth, Izi, and Ila. With this album, I wanted to focus strictly on the relationship between those two humans. That was something that felt unexplored about the world behind everything.
Ali: That’s a unique concept to your music. It’s like, with your discography, you’re building a game. You’re designing… It feels like a JRPG, like Fire Emblem. Your name reminds me of that as well.
Where does the “I hate all of you!” sample at the beginning of “Flares” [above] come from? What’s the story behind that?
Skye: That’s a funny one. It’s a song about enjoying your time with friends and feeling connected to those who can bring you out of bad emotional situations. That sample… Oh my god, it’s from a clip from when my friends and I were playing VR Among Us. I feel like there are a lot of old indie tracks from the 2010s that would start with a weird sample from somewhere, so it’s a reference to that era as well.
For some reason, after playing ten rounds — there were only four or five of us — I had not gotten the imposter role a single time. So every round from then on, they thought, oh it must be Skye now, and I kept getting killed at the start of the round. Every time they were voting I went on a rant, “It’s not me! It’s not me!” That’s where it came from. Maybe I’ll post the full clip of that somewhere…
Ali: You touched on this earlier, but I find your use of percussion unique. When I listen to it, I think of "Gobbledigook" by Sigur Rós, in the way that it’s tribal sounding. Did you record any live percussion or all they all just stock samples that you sequence and mix?
Skye: I think it’s all from the orchestral toms stuff. It’s just different one shots that I stack on top of each other to get the big, tribal sound. For a lot of the rock drums, I’ll use Native Instruments Studio Drummer.
Ali: You use a variety of instruments, but throughout your career, you’ve been noted for your synth design. Do you have a go-to VST for that?
Skye: I just use Ableton Wavetable and Operator for most stuff. I’ve tried using Serum a couple of times, but I have no idea what I’m doing. It scares me… (Ali: Too many knobs!) Yeah, too many knobs. A lot of my sound design is taking stuff I either find on the internet, like from freesound.org, and mangling it in Ableton’s sample editor, or just recording guitar, putting it into the sample editor, and making it into a weird synth. I try to keep things pretty Ableton-stock in my workflow.
Ali: You’ve recently tweeted exasperation at people claiming the new album must have been inspired by Parannoul. Even if he wasn’t a direct influence, I’m seeing the most heartfelt independent songwriters of our generation converging on a pretty similar sound. Like, combining guitar walls of sound with electronic melodicism and a melancholy atmosphere. We at Jellybones were the first publication to interview Weatherday, and recently interviewed Parannoul; I’ll also cite some artists like Asian Glow, Jane Remover, and STOMACH BOOK. Do you identify with this movement at all? Or do you think all of you arrived at a similar place independently based on having the same influences?
Skye: I won’t speak to the other artists, but… I think we are arriving at similar conclusions. I feel like a lot of us grew up on the same music. We’ve been talking about how you and I come from a similar musical background, so it’s logical to me that a lot of people making music around our age are making similar sounding things.
When people compare me and Parannoul’s music and find a similarity there, I think that probably comes from, like, Porter Robinson and Madeon, that era of EDM generally. Especially After the Magic. I think “Polaris” was the song on that album that I listened to and thought, this is something I can imagine myself making. I have no idea if Parannoul is listening to that stuff, but that’s what it hits me as, and that’s what I’m putting into my own music.
Ali: Who are some artists that make you excited for the future of music? Like, you hear these artists and realize music is progressing.
Skye: Definitely Jane Remover, Underscores, and thatcherblackwood. Viznode, who I’ve worked with on a track before; their way of producing is totally different than mine, and I'm always fascinated by their work. Shoutout Marzy as well on SoundCloud, and cash, who recently put me onto Patrick O’Neill who’s also doing cool stuff.
Ali: I’ve watched some clips from your live performances that get retweeted. They look like a cool blend between a DJ set and a singer/songwriter solo show. How did you go about designing your live performance?
Skye: You probably watched the Form Fest set, right? That was the point when I started to be more upfront with vocals. I wanted to get used to doing that, see how it felt for me in a live setting, while also not completely committing to it.
In that set, I wanted to make sure I was always doing something on stage. If I’m not singing, I want to be doing something else, so I had two MIDI keyboards to select different video clips that were connected from my laptop to the projector they had in the venue. I was messing with transitions using the knobs, and I would click one of the keys to load a different video clip. It was super janky, but it ended up working pretty well for what I wanted to do.
Ali: Do you know in what direction your music might be heading next? I know you mentioned the possibility of some folk music, but what are your thoughts?
Skye: I think folk music will come later. I want whatever I do next to be more upbeat. I want there to be more sonic density in my music, which I think there already is during the louder parts. (Ali: I noticed that the first three or so songs on Spotify have a lot of listeners.) I think that stuff really resonated with people. I want to make songs that will be super fun in a live setting. I’m not sure what that’s going to look like yet – but I have an idea, just keeping that bright energy and also finding ways to make some of the quieter songs that I do even more active.
Ali: It seems like, with your career, you’re building a universe with these characters who are just traversing… Like I said, designing a video game. It’s like we’re slowly unlocking new areas, new terrains, new everything, but it does feel like one continuous journey. And that’s remarkable and unique to you as an artist. I’m excited to see where this journey leads.
Skye: I’m so glad the album was received this way. I just want to do music for the rest of my life basically. It’s cool that other people might enjoy it too.
Ali: Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions in so much detail. I really appreciate it.
Skye: Thank you, I appreciate you having me. [Gossip about Young]