Feature by Sayuri Govender
Photos by Alicia Tang
The Computer Music Center at Columbia, or the CMC, is tucked away into the side of 125th’s Prentis Hall–obstructed by concrete buildings and scaffolding. It is a secret gem of Columbia, a hidden garden only for those bold enough to brave its cracked ceilings, open electrical wiring, and commitment to spending hours there. For Maddie Breeden, her fresh dive into experimental music began here, in the CMC room with the modular synthesizer. She spends two hours a week in it, making music for her classes, her band, and hopefully, a debut album.
Maddie’s relationship with music has grown and evolved alongside her over the years. Her deep connection to music began with her father, who was constantly playing synthy 80s music–like New Order and The Human League–as Maddie grew up, slowly creating the sonic palette that resonates with her today. She also played the flute for her entire childhood, until the orchestra program was cut at her school in the middle of her high school career. Despite the loss of the music program, the musical discipline she learned at a young age persisted into her later life. She would go on to teach herself to play guitar, saying how she “loved the creative freedom I had with it, because I could write my own songs on the guitar.” Throughout Maddie’s life, music has been a constant thread. She grew up in Washington D.C, where she was exposed to the vast genres within the lesser known D.C music scene. “There's a Southern influence to the music scene there,” she tells me, “it gave me an almost Southern way of playing the guitar, which I think is pretty unique and special”. She also takes inspiration from D.C’s hardcore scene in the 80s, consisting of bands like Fugazi, Minor Threat, and Bad Brains. However, she revealed to me her biggest inspiration from home is not the D.C music scene, but the river by her house. She smiles shyly when she tells me, and I can perfectly picture her sitting by a creek, quietly recording the sound so she can try to modulate it later. “I do my best writing when I'm close to water” she professes, “I love the sound. When you listen to a song and get completely lost in it, it's like the feeling of waves on your body. In my music, I want there to be waves of sound that hit the listener.”
Maddie seeks to achieve these waves of sound with the modular synthesizer, a new tool in her life that has completely transformed how she creates music. This past year, in her digital music class, she learned how to use a Digital Audio Workstation, or DAW, and the modular synthesizer. “It opened me up to a lot more sounds that I've been wanting to make,” she mused, “ones that I've been hearing in my head and I can now actualize in my music.” When I ask her to explain to me the process of using the modular synth, she smiles and says “let me show you!” I watch as Maddie kneels down to the huge, black box covered in nodes, switches, plugs, and flickering lights. She takes a plug and inserts it into two outlets diagonal from each other. A booming synth rings out as she tells me about voltage control oscillators, sine waves, clock sequences, and frequency filters. As I try to keep up with the terminology, I feel like I’m learning a secret language. I realize the music Maddie hears is so different from the music I hear–her ear trained in picking up a song’s distorted tom drums or low modulators, like she knows the full recipe of a meal after taking only one bite. “It's not like a typical musical instrument directed around chord melodies,” she explains, “you have no idea what sound you're going to create, which is why it's so fun. Sometimes, when I'm writing a song, I really struggle with trying to perfect it. But I can come to this with an open mind and create something awesome without thinking twice about it. You can't recreate the sound; it just happens.” Despite her skilled use of the modular synth, she discloses to me how much more she still has to learn. “I learned how to do this by just experimenting and playing with it,” she reveals, telling me how much more she wants to learn and what new genres she wants to dive into (currently, she and her bandmate Lolo have been experimenting with playful disco beats–just another genre to add to her diverse discography).
Maddie is struck by the concept of unpredictability, a theme that seeps into her demos. She describes her struggle with finding footing in formulaic chord progressions and song structures, expressing how musical standards never fully resonated with her until she broke free of the structure and discovered the creative freedom of experimental music. “You don't have to follow the rules that are set just because they're popular, or because that's what people expect of you. Experimental music has allowed me a lot more creative freedom.” Her sound is the manifestation of her unpredictable dreamscape–airy, jarring, melodic, and exploratory. Her most cherished song, Etretat, named after a village in France she once visited, combines a gentle electric guitar riff with a synthy humming–coming together in a dreamy beat overlaid with biting electronic chords that build into a thrumming voltaic end. “I love the meshing of electronic music sounds with something delicate” Maddie muses, “I love incorporating the modular synthesizer into dream pop-esque music in order to create a shock or a sound you're not expecting; it keeps the listeners on their toes a little bit.”
Her journey into this more experimental music began during her study abroad last spring in the UK. Introduction to the UK’s post punk groups–such as Black Country, New Road, Jockstrap, Black Midi, and Opus Kink–combined with the prevalence of experimental and techno music allowed Maddie to explore genres of music in a way she hadn’t before. Maddie told me how she also joined the Indie Music Society, a group of bands in Scotland that met to discuss music and share their work. Her friends in the group pushed her to make music with the same devotion they did. She tells me how “I was able to allow myself to be open to creating, centering my music creation. A product of doing that was allowing myself to listen to other types of music and realize their power and how interesting they are. There’s a structure to the noise, and that’s awesome.”
I’m almost reminded of that infamous NYU Masterclass video, in which singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers shows Pharrell Williams her song Alaska–to which Williams shockingly tells her, “I have 0 notes” after hearing it. The reason the song is so striking is because it reflects Rogers musical journey, as she explains how she grew up as a folk singer but after studying abroad in France and having a spiritual experience with dance music there, her relationship to music completely transformed. Maddie’s musical journey–while different–still holds that idea of having a strong piece of one’s musical past transformed by the introduction of a previously unheard of music scene in a city far away. I realize there’s something magical about being in a new city, alone and young, being held together by the songs you come across–letting it shape who you become and what you create. When we get to step out of the everyday Columbia bubble, the thing quietly beating inside us gets to take form, as if it's been there all along and was merely waiting for a calling.
These days, Maddie is working towards releasing new music on her own and with her bandmate and drummer, Lolo. “It's been challenging to create the sound you feel in the room and translate it to an audio file,” she confesses, “But we want to get our music out there so that people can listen. I’m trying to put out at least a few songs by the end of the semester.” Her determination to release music is in part due to an illuminating conversation with an old friend and music teacher from home, who respectively told her how much they loved her music from high school and want more of it. “Having those conversations made me realize it's my duty to produce something and give back by inputting something out into the world. It can be a lot to juggle, but I know I have this obligation to new music.” She played me a snippet of two songs she's been working on–one a thrumming electronic beat with snappy and buzzing synth inspired by indie rock band Spirit of the Beehive, and the other a haunting single-string guitar melody with a build into electronic drums and piano that she only started the day before. Each is completely different from each other, but also intrinsically Maddie. She tells me how she’s been struggling with the notion of making a cohesive theme in her music. However, to me, I feel like the theme is obvious: it's all grounded in the fact that she was the one who created it. The reproduction of her dreamscape, of her mind and the sounds within it, are all immersed within the music she's made. It's a sound that recreates a Southern guitar influence combined with a passion for experimental music abroad–a sound that has a journey within that reflects Maddie’s own.
From writing songs in her teenage bedroom using GarageBand and a MIDI keyboard, to taking on the intricate and complex modular synthesizer, Maddie’s musical journey has grown up alongside her. She reflects on how the musical practices she developed when she was younger are still with her (the Alvvays songs she first learned on guitar in high school are forever embedded within her fingertips when she plays). Maddie’s pure joy and adoration for music is the vehicle for her intricate and impactful songs, as she embeds her experiences in venues across the world into dreamy guitar riffs and idiosyncratic synths. Maddie articulates the sensational feeling of music, contemplating how “When I’m dancing somewhere, I feel the music. It speaks to me and takes over my body in a way that I can't explain. You just get lost in it, and lost in your own world”. The ephemeral, glittering, intangible experience of music is built into the core of what Maddie does. She describes to me a poem by David Berman, the lead singer of the Silver Jews (a 90s indie rock band she listened to growing up), called “And the Others”. “Berman talks about this ‘Light’ that you cannot see,” she tells me “He says how the light shines for all these different people in different ways [such as literature, art, or sexuality] but it shines.
For me, the light comes from my music.”