ARTIST OF THE MOMENT: Tensen Park
We are so pleased to introduce you to Tensen Park, the mastermind behind the latest release on our record label, Never Late. The Amsterdam-based producer & visual artist was shrouded in mystery when we first were introduced to him & his music. His Bandcamp page is filled with ambient, IDM, dub, breaky & electronica inspired tracks that travel to unexpected places with human-like improvisation & randomness. His track titles & album artworks are inspired by dinosaurs which really spoke to my childhood love of all things science & dinosaurs - as soon as I saw that, I knew Mark & I would get along. The more we’ve gotten to know him, the more his many talents have continued to surprise us. Mark is a multi-faceted artist with a mind for experimentation coming from a place of science & process. When he welcomed me into his apartment in the charming Jordaan neighborhood of Amsterdam this summer, his computer screen was filled with lines of code rather than an Ableton project (which didn’t surprise me at all).
Tensen Park’s studio process involves a fair amount of the art of capturing ideas created by randomness. He approaches music-making from the mind of a software engineer / developer, creating Max For Live tools that generate random midi clips / notes. You provide these tools with a bit of input structure (a musical key or scale, range of notes, steps in a sequence, etc) & then you see (or in this case, hear) what the results are & capture the output. It’s not quite like using tools involving artificial intelligence but it’s definitely close to it. His latest creation is something we touch on later in the interview called Midi Evolution V2. It’s a brand new version of a sort of midi crossfader device that can lead to really interesting & unexpected results when working with large midi clips of melodies and/or percussion. Sign up for our monthly newsletter here to receive an exclusive free download of the tool on our upcoming Delayed October roundup.
Why did you choose ‘Jurassimo’ as the EP title?
I wanted to continue the Jurassic / dinosaur theme from my previous work (Futurebeats). I think the theme started because it just felt fun and not so serious. Also, I love it when music brings that feeling of wonder and imagination. I think of a world with crazy ecosystems and extreme wilderness. And maybe it’s also some kind of inverse childhood thing. I’m not sure. It’s Jurassimo because I recently saw the film Geronimo: An American Legend (1993). The Native American richness in mythology, the relation to the land and how objects and places have a certain spiritual essence have always interested me. I think my life does not have richness in that way, but music is a way to at least explore the topic of alternative states of consciousness or different or more connected worlds for me. I don’t know though. Not that all of that went through my head exactly when I decided the title, but I think these ideas have contributed to the choice. There’s definitely also truth in that I just thought it sounded cool haha.
What is your favorite dinosaur & why?
I call my girlfriend Dino sometimes. So I guess it’s her. But as for real dino’s, for the Futurebeats track titles I was looking for a dinosaur starting with the letter B. I found a picture of the Brachytrachelopan, and loved how it looked. It’s 10 meters long but its neck is super short. It looks very funny I think. Apparently it evolved that way to be the niche eater of a specific size of smaller vegetation.
We were immediately captivated by your music; the mood / soundscape of it, the intricacy of rhythms & sound choices, the overall aesthetic vision. Where does all of this come from?
In music I’ve always enjoyed getting lost in texture and strangeness, but still have one foot in the known.
In college I was fascinated by a lecture we had about Criticality, the state between chaos and order. Apparently, biological systems need that state to function; In complete chaos too much change happens, and in complete order nothing happens - molecules don’t move around enough. There’s a cool book on it called “How Nature Works: the science of self-organized criticality”. Since then I’ve definitely been incorporating that more consciously into the things I make.
Tensen Park - Jurassimo [Never Late]
Can you expand upon criticality a bit more? How specifically are you incorporating that into your creativity?
What means most to me is the mental model I get from it. It’s in a way an explicit guideline in the production process. I think what makes me like a sound or song depends on many many factors, and most of those are just implicit subconscious ideas, conditioning, and associations with songs I like. Making some of these factors a bit more explicit so that I can consciously think about it, helps my sensitivity and creative choices. Then they can be a bit more grounded.
It’s maybe analogous to the idea in psychology that if you just learn all of the words that describe all these nuanced emotional states, your sensations get primed and you get more sensitive to them and know better how to deal with it.
To go from abstract to a bit more specific, what styles of music & what artists have primarily had the biggest influence on what you’re doing right now in the studio?
I listened a lot to Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin in the past. Also lots of ambient thereafter. About 2 years ago I found a music blog, Optimistic Underground, which reinvigorated and deepened my love for ‘beat-driven’ music. Because of that I started listening to Smoke Point, and Purelink. Which took me to the music released by labels like West Mineral Ltd, Peak Oil, and 3XL (e.g. Shinetiac, Pontiac Streator, Ulla, Topdown Dialectic). This music just really makes sense to me and my interests, and I felt inspired to explore that area more with my own music.
I can hear a lot of this influence in the wonderful mix you recorded for our Never Late x Delayed series. This is actually the first & only mix we have ever heard from you. Can you tell us a bit about the process of putting it together & the track selection?
The tracks are all ones that I listened to a lot the past months. Some of the breakbeat/uptempo ones I played a lot in the car in a playlist I named ‘interesting futurebeats’. I wanted enough variation in intensity, and to present a good palette of what I found inspiring + 2 of my own tracks to put in that context.
I’m not experienced with mixing on the fly, although I’d like to do that more at some point. I put all of the songs in Ableton and didn't try to beat match since the tracks all have very different bpms. But to compensate, I made sure at least the pitch was in the same ballpark. I also liked the limitation of somehow making the different rhythms in different bpms work with another.
Let’s talk about gear. I visited your studio back in June & you were talking about how a lot of your tracks stem from jams on your Machinedrum combined with a Sherman Filterbank which are then chopped up / experimented with in Ableton. This is a somewhat similar approach to my studio process but I can’t quite get into the Elektron gear, especially the older legacy products. I find sequencing them to be very tiresome with too much menu-diving, key shortcuts, etc. How specifically are you using your Machinedrum in your production process?
Because it’s a bit older there’s soo much documentation on the internet. To me it’s fun to really study the thing, and learn about it. I get what you mean with the menu diving though, but on the upside, I get a ‘hardware’ workflow with little to no chaos from e.g. patch cables. I like it when gear is a bit opinionated on how to make music. Elektron products are that way, with the parameter locking and a couple of LFOs per track. (Although what I like about the Machinedrum is that you get up to 16 LFO’s on one track, which is something I’d never do in Ableton, but for some reason the interface and limitations of the device makes me want to go a bit over the top).
Also I love that it can send out MIDI notes. That way I can hook it up to my filterbank or quadraverb and control those with it as well. That + parameter locking + many LFO’s (also often applied to the filters) is a powerful setup to me.
I don’t always like that the rhythm sounds quite straight from sequencers, so lately I have my Boss delay pedal (on one channel only) hooked to the output with a delay time to really make it sound just a bit off. Then I just jam and record a delayed version with a complex rhythm and a clean version. This workflow I didn’t use for ‘Jurassimo’ though; back then I used an analog rhythm.
I remember you mentioning how prevalent the Sherman Filterbank is in your tracks. This is quite a menacing piece of gear that can get extremely loud, squelchy & distorted sounding very easily. I also have one & know how easy it is to blow your eardrums with a small tweak of the resonance knobs. I can hear the sound of it throughout the EP but it’s so incredibly subtle. What stage of the process are you using it in & how are you using it to make music that is so delicate & introspective?
Haha it’s true. The thing’s a menace. I use it mostly when I’m done with a drum sequence, and want to make it sound more alive. I use the peak-triggered envelopes to do these little filter sweeps over each transient coming in. I record it parallel to the original track, or replace it completely. Often I do a bunch of digital modifications to the filterbank output as well, like pitching it up, or stretching it out. The signal is just so rich in tiny little harmonics, artifacts and saturation, that you get really cool sounds if you stretch it out a little.
Also for pads I sometimes use it to add some more noisiness. Like the pads in my track Midnight Hover.
Tensen Park’s Amsterdam studio
Is there any new gear that you’ve been really itching for recently?
I’ve decided to stop buying stuff for a little, and be more creative with my current setup. But I’ve been enjoying just watching videos of cool gear. For instance, an artist I digg, Paperclip Minimiser, uses the Nord Modular G2, which looks really fun. You can make patches with your computer, and the software has this nostalgic Windows XP user interface. Just looks really fun, like a game.
It can be quite difficult for producers to set limitations on what tools to use to make music. The marketing on instagram & youtube for new gear is out of control & omnipresent. Everyone is claiming their new piece of gear or new plugin is what you NEED right now. Also within Ableton you have an ocean of plugins, samples, etc. Where did you find this restraint? Do you have any tips for other artists that are eager to become more creative using less?
What does help me is the realization that with each new piece of gear I buy, I’ll have to invest a bunch of time to learn how to use it well. Which is time I could’ve otherwise put into making new music.
Also I read in an interview with Purelink in which they responded to a question about gear that they’re not really using it. It’s all samples and Ableton! I thought that was kind of profound and liberating when I read that. One of my most listened to albums was made without any gear, so I definitely don’t need it.
We talked a lot about AI when we were together in Amsterdam this summer & had some really interesting discussions about the future of society & the effects AI may or may not have. There is a lot of negativity around AI & its influence on music at the moment but I feel optimistic about it, more tools just means more possibilities for creating. On the topic of randomness in production - are you utilizing any AI tools for creating randomness or for simplifying things in the studio?
As for actual AI tools, I haven’t really used those for music. The only thing that I used was a model to extract the different stems from a track (drums, voice, guitar, bass). I once used that to get just the drums from a song, which worked pretty well. The sound quality was not perfect, but filtering out the gnarliness with a bandpass worked well. It’s in my song Dawn Chorus Cachuma, about halfway through.
I think engineering tools like this should be the first AI implementations for music producers, not the text to whatever models. Also I see a future in AI-based super resolution of samples, or hallucinating the resonances out of a sample. Kind of the magical small engineering things that are hard to do with conventional tools.
Tensen Park with friend & collaborator lmnop
As a bonus to go along with your EP, we’ll be including a free download in our upcoming newsletter mailout of a Max For Live device that you’ve created called Midi Evolution V2. Our previous release on Never Late was from an artist called Mjulev who also is a creator of Max For Live devices. He spoke about his love for randomness in production in our interview with him back in April. You are a producer that is also very inspired / driven by randomness. It seems that music production technology is in a very exciting place at the moment where there are so many tools - can you expand on that a bit?
100% agree!! There are so many code frameworks and tools out there right now to build whatever you want in audio. There are no limits anymore. I say ‘anymore’ as if I’m an old man, but actually it’s been limitless since I was a baby, with tools like Supercollider.
But having Ableton, which is getting more powerful every year, + Max for Live with the Live API to control anything in Ableton is kind of insane. Especially for building generative MIDI devices. After this device, I committed to not use MaxMSP anymore for bigger real-time audio projects. Code works better for me, which is not possible for time sensitive things in Max as far as I know. If they’d add that I’d have everything my heart desires.
Can you elaborate a bit about ‘real-time audio projects’ / time sensitive things in Max for people who may not understand?
With real-time I mean that the device can generate time sensitive content (like notes) during play time without changing the intended timing.
The opposite is e.g. an AI model that generates an entire score, and you just press play.
So with my new midi evolution device it should be able to play a MIDI clip in play mode and make changes to it while it keeps playing.
In addition to the fantastic music you’ve shared with us, you’ve also created a handful of amazing visual graphics to pair with the release. How do you make these?
I began with creative coding in 2019, when I graduated from college, and started to think about what I should do with my life professionally. I wanted to combine my favorite things: AI engineering and design/arts, and found a job where I got more familiar with graphics, AI and arts from generative art studio Onformative. I learned a lot there, met cool people and got experiences with creative technology, including Unity3D, a game-developers engine, and the idea of focussing on real-time graphics using code.
Later on a friend recommended to me an online compute shader workshop by someone named Arsiliath, who made incredible bio-inspired realtime artworks with biological simulations with Unity3D. Since then I’ve continued to experiment with it.
What you basically do is simulate millions of particles on a 2D plane. You tell them how to behave opposed to other particles, based on e.g. biological processes like bird-flocking, how ants behave, or how fungi move. Then you make millions of them, and observe how interesting patterns emerge when you press play. You often have to adjust different parameters and get surprised by the crazy variations that emerge. It’s a super cool collaboration with the computer. You basically build a world.
I’m very happy that we can combine my visual works with the Jurassimo release. Always nice when things come together. Those workshops and also a WebGPU can still be purchased, and I cannot recommend them enough to anyone interested in it.