gyrofield, the prolific drum & bass project of producer/DJ Kiana Li, augments her DnB with influences across the historical lineage of UK electronic. Born in Hong Kong, Kiana’s musical background does not originate in the club, but rather, comes from years of personal listening. Her unique background has led her to push the boundaries of drum & bass music into unforeseen territory.
Ali Cyrus Saeed: Are you in the UK right now?
gyrofield: Yeah, I’m in Bristol. This is my room, where I write all of my music. I’ve always just written everything in my bedroom pretty much.
Ali: Is your family musical? What are your memories of Hong Kong?
gyrofield: I didn’t grow up in a musical family. My first experiences with music was Chinese stuff, like Cantopop and Taiwanese pop. Singer-songwriter type stuff. My parents also had a lot of Carpenters CDs.
In terms of my perception of growing up in Hong Kong… It was decent, I think. I was finding a lot of difficulty in relating to other people. I think that had to do with the interests that I had, and also growing up autistic and not having enough social support regarding that. I was left to figure it out on my own. Music came into the picture for me like a great wave of escape.
Ali: It’s interesting how synth music seems to be a place that neurodivergent people and people with transgender identities gravitate towards. Like Wendy Carlos, one of the pioneers of synth music, was a trans woman, and Gary Numan, one of the earliest synth pop stars, was autistic.
gyrofield: I think it’s the feeling of otherness that we’ve experienced as trans people. What drew me into electronic music was that it’s in its own world, and perfectly comfortable with that. And I think being autistic can lend itself to creative ways of thinking. The process of creating music was one of the first times I was able to find peace within myself. Having misunderstood myself for so long… It was powerful being able to create something that truly expressed who I think I am.
Ali: We’re around the same age. The first cultural moment I recall for electronic music was the rise of Skrillex and dubstep, and the parallel rise of deadmau5 and American EDM music. How do you remember this era?
gyrofield: That was when it got me as well. I was digging through 2000s pop rock and metal at the time, like Linkin Park, Sum 41, and Three Days Grace. Then, I discovered the EDM stuff alongside the old-school dubstep records from South London. Another important artist to remember is Noisia. They had just released their first full length, Split the Atom. That was a real shock to me. There was not much synthesizer in the Hong Kong music scene back then.
Ali: After that, you moved to study music at university in Bristol, UK?
gyrofield: There’s quite an important period of my life before university started. In high school, I gave this presentation on what we wanted to study in college, on “Sound Design in Music Composition”. My schoolmates didn’t understand what I was doing, and neither did the teacher. That year, I also started feeling distressed from experiencing male puberty. I ended up dropping out of school and not talking to people for days on end, not even my own family.
Two months later, I came out to my mother. She’s been the most supportive person in my family and I owe a lot to her. Soon after, “Out of my mind” became my first track to blow up on Spotify. By the end of 2019, I had done my first self-release that was mainly DnB, and it got picked up by a bunch of people in the scene, which led to my first few label releases. It was a crazy period of life, before I had even stepped foot on campus.
When I did finally start university in 2020, it was the middle of COVID, so I was rotting at home with an eight hour time difference with my uni, which made it nearly impossible to get my first year done. I ended up having to repeat the foundation year again when everything opened up after lockdown. That was when I started to learn what it’s actually like to be in a music scene, and also what it’s like to be an adult in general. It was a big learning curve.
Ali: What makes you unique as a drum & bass artist is that your entryway to the music was personal listening as opposed to the club itself. In what ways do you think that has been an advantage or disadvantage for you? And how has experiencing live music changed your approach to songwriting?
gyrofield: That’s a great question. After creating music for so many years in isolation, I was quite blind to this tenuous, back-and-forth exchange of music from the sound system to the crowd back to the DJ.
I went out to my first ever night in Bristol just before lockdown happened, because I was there to check out the university and meet some friends for the first time. It was a Wednesday night at this small venue called the Love In. It totally flipped my understanding of club music upside down. Suddenly, these sort of sounds that were inaudible to people on headphones became huge and physical, and they took up so much space. It was really inspiring to experience music created just for that: to maximize that impact, maximize a reaction, maximize the feeling of rhythm in people who listen to it. It took me so long to grasp that and really understand what it meant to create “bangers”, or tunes for sound systems. But I also felt that my taste and my own intuitions were not always aligned with that, and they never really did. To this day, I’ll write a tune, and it’ll be a solid piece of music, but it just won’t go properly on a dance floor. But I’m trying to embrace that sound as well.
Ali: Your music is often singled out for its visionary bass sound design. Can you dive into your philosophy for designing bass and applying effects?
gyrofield: If this were a clip on TikTok, I’d be like, I put delay and reverb on my bass. That’s the headline to grab people’s attention, to say something that feels wrong but make it sound right in the end.
I’ve simplified what I do in bass quite a lot over the years. Instead of using bass to fill out the spectrum, I’m looking for a sound that’s more focused in a particular region. I used to think I had to make something super complex and use a lot of modulations/automations/resampling in order to have that impact, but nowadays, I rely on simple oscillator design. Either using frequency modulation or layering different waveforms on top of each other, then applying a conscious amount of expressions on the sound.
The first time I really figured that out was this track called “Tech Flex” [above]. What I did was make a simple rhythmic bass sound, then took a pitch modulator to make that sound go from high pitch to low pitch. Because those frequencies are changing across time, the listener experiences a range of different feeling as you perceive the sound with your body.
Let’s go back to when I did the Stimulus EP. That was a reasonable midpoint between my most extravagant bass design versus now. In that EP, I used a lot of simple synth patches, then used quite a lot of modulations on the filters, particularly, in order to get tone and sculpt the movement of the sound. The filters would often be band passes, which capture a particular region of the sound, so you can accentuate something suddenly in a totally different region of the sound, but your brain still registers the sound as one thing, which creates interesting movement in the low end. Sometimes the filter’s all the way down, and you can hear that bass come through very well, but once it shifts up, the energy becomes more focused in the mid-range.
Ali: Do you automate the band pass to move…?
gyrofield: Yeah, automation, or envelopes that you trigger with the notes. In tracks like “Calico” [above], where I had just a long sustained bass sound, it was broken up by rhythmic gates. It would come through in a staggered and broken pattern, so there would be some sort of movement in the sub.
It’s all about allowing the right amount of sound, mainly in the mid-range and highs, to really come through at just the right moments to create an impact. I would say the most important thing is to have fine-tuned processing that targets those low-end frequencies so that you can change the amount of it, for example, using a high-pass filter to slightly move the sub out of the way and then bring it back in again. That’s how you get a natural feeling of bass that echoes in a room instead of remaining static and sustained.
Now to circle back to the technique of using reverb and delay. Sometimes it comes at a deficit of the available space in your mix, but it helps to get more out of a bass if you’re expanding whatever modulations/movements/expressions you have on those sounds across the time domain. You’re basically splattering it. I find that to be an effective technique to get more texture and expression out of a sound.
Instead of something being a pluck, it can be a short decaying series of rhythmic hits, for example. And with reverb, you can get a feeling of space along with whatever shape or form that you already have on the bass. An 808 with some reverb is one of the classics used in Grime and dubwise techno, or even just jungle and drum & bass. Don’t be afraid to experiment with the expression of your bass sound and to make something more than just a sustained note with modulations on top.
Kiana features in-depth master classes on bass design and other production topics on her Patreon.
Ali: For the last part of the interview, I wanted to ask some more personal questions that you can skip if you prefer. At what age did you start questioning your gender identity? Were there any works of art that were influential to your conception of gender?
gyrofield: The first part’s relatively easy to answer. I started questioning when I was like 13, and it took 3 years until everything got a bit too much. I felt like my teachers were all understanding, but there was not much they could do within the school system to help me. They were just like, take care of yourself and hold out until you get to university.
I think in those times, a lot of people in that SoundCloud scene were also questioning their gender, or coming out publicly for the first time. For me, there was no bigger influence than just having people who were going through the same things. It was definitely messy, though. We were all troubled teenagers trying to work something out with ourselves. I’m still in touch with some of the people that I knew from back then, and for the most part, their lives have been changed for the better.
Also really important to me was the work of SOPHIE. They were just getting picked up by PC music and released that series of singles, PRODUCT. Listening to those was like experiencing that otherness of electronic music again for the first time. A year or two later, they came out as transgender and dropped OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES. That sent shockwaves through so many people I knew. It’s strange to live in a world where she’s not here anymore. But in a way, that heightens the impact she had within a relatively short period of time, being so brave in expressing that. Not bending to the masses’ wills and obliging to explain and dumb down everything. Her work was authentic. She did not take any compromises.
After SOPHIE, I found out about Arca, who’s been a similarly monolithic visionary in the scene. It’s truly been a journey to listen along to the progression of her work and see all the times that she’s put herself out there in an artistic way. It’s definitely been inspiring to the things I’ve done on my own. Press shoots. Especially the one I did alongside my metalheads records. It was very theatrical.
Ali: In America, there’s an ongoing reactionary cultural war against trans people today. Although I don’t live in Great Britain, my perception is that it might even be worse there. With my friends, we have jokingly referred to Great Britain as TERF Island, but maybe our perception is skewed by how obnoxious J.K. Rowling and her friends are. What’s your assessment living there, both in society as a whole, and also in the drum & bass scene, which I understand is still male dominated?
gyrofield: I can speak more to the DnB scene than wider Britain, because what people in the media do is totally different from the life that I live. From what I see, there’s a lot of queer & trans people in Bristol, and this place is still as welcoming as the day that I arrived. I really hope it stays that way.
I think right now, a significant factor in wider Britain is people’s trust in the media, what the media is willing to say, and the sort of depths that the media is capable of stooping down to. Right now, it’s quite bad, but I personally think it’s worse in America. It really depends on the state. Some states are pushing legislation to ban trans healthcare, which is extremely grim. I say that… but the NHS recently pushed forward a ban on puberty blockers for all trans people under 18, so that’s already quite a step back. I went private when I was in Hong Kong, but I can say the private system in Hong Kong is similar; you had to go through a long process with the government. It required psychiatry and a multi-department assessment for anybody who wanted to receive gender affirming care.
There’s so much to be sad about in the world out there today, to be honest. I’ve experienced a bout of stress symptoms not only because of all the gigs I’ve done, but also just letting what’s going on diffuse through me. What I will say is that, leveraging the connections I have, I just want to do my bit of supporting queer and women communities in Bristol. Recently, I’ve been volunteering at this women’s DJ workshop. I came by one day and they’re like, oh, one of the mentors is not here today. Would you mind just making sure everything is working and answering everyone’s questions?
I feel like I’ve missed out on being around queer people for much of my DJing career because drum & bass is so male dominated. Even within that, the Black and Jamaican roots of jungle and DnB are being pushed out by major labels. It’s not supposed to be a radical thing to say we need more black DJs in the scene, but there’s some people who think that’s just being dramatic on social media. It’s tough, spreading the word and making change. I have a lot of respect for anyone who is doing that right now in any scene of electronic music. I’m just helping out in drum & bass because that’s where I have the most connections, and I know people who are doing the work. Places like EQ50 and Unorthodox.
Ali: My last question is, who are your favorite artists outside of DnB these days?
gyrofield: Main one is Perc. He’s a diverse techno artist drawing from industrial and noise. I read this interview of him regarding the state of techno, and how he wanted to see more tracks that would really surprise him, and I resonated with that.
Caribou is an artist that I’ve been listening to a lot. I got to meet him when we played the same nights for Fabric. He’s a super versatile musician, and I really admire the way that he writes songs, because there’s such a lyrical way of delivering ideas that’s almost like a poem being recited.
Sega Bodega is another great musician. He’s done a lot of pop work and some stuff that’s more experiment as well. Across it is brilliant songwriting… He creates music that’s floaty and, I’d say, ethereal is a great way to describe it, even though that sounds pretentious. (Ali: We music critics love ethereal. And visceral. That’s another one. Everything is on the ethereal–visceral axis.) I’ll give one more example, actually. I’m just scrolling on my liked songs on Spotify. It’s sort of obvious to say, but like, Explosions in the Sky, Sigur Rós, that sort of stuff. They’ve been an influence in my work for quite a long time now, even before I got my start in drum & bass. I love the way that music without drums is detached from time and allowed to flow. I think in later ambient and noiseworks that I’ve done, like All of Meaning and Depths of Winter, while far away from post-rock, they carry the same spirit. There are moments of beauty rushing past you. That’s just a great feeling.