King Yosef is an artist whose music shifts seamlessly between metal, industrial, noise, electronica and more, tying together crushing rhythm and groove with glitchy, blown-out and distorted sounds. Performing live with a band, and his productions blending traditional instruments, synths and VSTs, we get to the bottom of Yosef’s sound.
Your music floats between industrial, metal and electronic, how do you define it?
I normally say it’s like industrial metal or industrial hardcore. The goal is the same of the genres, but is rooted heavily in using synthesis and sampling to get there.
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Some of your arrangements and instrumentation is quite unconventional, how does a song start for you?
Most songs for me have to start with the vision of the track. I’ll think ‘I want something that feels like this’ and I follow that. Mostly it’s chopping samples I’ve recorded and drums, finding tempo. The rest is all variable. I won’t even know if a song is a guitar song until the last moments of it being written.
Do you think about performing live while composing/writing/arranging? Or do you just make the song and figure out the live parts later?
I do now but I certainly didn’t when King Yosef was a bedroom project. It’s still a lot of figuring it out later but I always see the studio as a tool and the recreation of what you make there is always going to differ. If it differs, it should feel more intense.
Is there one specific piece of gear that you find yourself reaching for or using that always achieves the sound in your head?
Either my Sequential Prophet 6 or a guitar. After that it’s always iZotope Trash 2 and some sort of reverb or modulation plug-in.
How much does the live show differ from the recorded version in terms of instruments and layers?
Every song is sliced down to its bones and rebuilt back up for live purposes. There are certain things that we decide to leave in and what will be performed live. Most times Cameron (guitar/synth) is performing anything that is a focal point of the song like he’s playing a sampler. The structure stays the same but nowadays we are learning more towards opening it up, changing things as we go with the new album underway and playing some of these songs almost a hundred times.
What kind of gear are you bringing on the road to recreate the intensity and weight of your recorded music?
Huge one for us is the MPC X. It’s basically a computer as a standalone sequencer and it does everything we can possibly need. This next tour cycle we are about to announce, it’ll be the backbone of the set still but with a huge overhaul on how we use it. It’s a tank and I love it. I’d love to incorporate more of the MPC devices into our flow!
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