Sounds Like Water: Canblaster Interviewed
There a many images and sounds that come to mind when you think of a river. A silent trickle of water at the top of a hill, giant cascading rapids towards the centre of its path, or a vast river mouth, with water pouring into the sea where it can finally breathe. A river’s weaving path is a journey, a fluid experience of joy, fear and tranquility which is exactly what Canblaster achieves within his music – meandering soundscapes that sound like water.
I am looking at a calm sea when listening to Canblaster’s latest album ‘LIBEROSIS’. Set to be released on April 12th, his sounds ripple with the water in front of me, creating a bond between the digital audio of my headphones and the natural rhythms of nature. Following an hour-long conversation with Canblaster AKA Cédric Steffens, it felt right to sit within a natural landscape and listen to his music, immersed within the environment from which he draws his inspiration.
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“I often take inspiration from nature” Canblaster mentions to me over Zoom, with his trademark black-rimmed glasses balancing perfectly on his nose. “I will often go into nature and visit various areas during the day and find inspiration for different sounds. Sometimes taking sound recordings as I go.” You could create an extremely varied word bank to describe his sound: crystal, fluid, rippling, undulating, pulsating; all these words fit with his intelligently produced music. It’s the experience factor as opposed to stand alone tracks that sets Canblaster aside from the rest. If we take a look back into his history, there’s certainly a reason why he seems to prefer albums to singles.
“Albums were something I grew up with” mentions Canblaster as he begins to reveal his electronic past. Canblaster started with an alternative technological awakening. Signposting the beginning of his producing career in the sci-fi realm, Canblaster was creating music for gaming soundtracks whilst he was still in college. He describes the gaming sphere as providing a “duality” with his music. “I made music for two types of games. The first were short games with sometimes as little as 30 seconds of audio and the second type were these long deep story games similar to Final Fantasy.”
It is the longer game soundtracks that seem to draw a current parallel with Canblaster’s production. Over ten years have passed since his gaming days and he is still achieving a sense of narrative through his music. “My music has a long evolution. At its core, multiple tracks in ‘LIBEROSIS’ have a consistency in soundscapes whilst still evolving, It’s this narrative emotional longing that I like to tap into.”
In 2019, Canblaster paired music with visuals for the first time with his animated short ‘WILD HORSES’. The audio-visual experience mirrors a game-like quality that draws direct parallels to his history in the gaming sphere. In 2024, takes this a step further, releasing three videos alongside the three ‘ACTS’ that make up his latest album ‘LIBEROSIS’. With an innate ability to take the listener on a sonic journey, it’s evident that the long fluid audio that was required in gaming has impacted how he produces, emphasising that journey-like feeling alongside the soundscape of natural textures. “Electronic music is about imagination, and I want people to imagine what they want from my music.”
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With an impressive career spanning across nearly two decades within the French dance scene, alongside his narrative pursuits, Canblaster became one of the four integral pillars of the music clique Club Cheval. The project began in 2009 as a four part collective with Myd, Sam Tiba and Panteros666. The team continued to thrive until recent years when the foursome split into their respective electronic directions. “We sometimes cross paths with each other, we made bonds for life”. With community being at the forefront of his ethos, it came as no surprise to listeners when Canblaster took to producing with a modular synth – because building your own synth is almost like building your own community.
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Whilst speaking to me via Zoom, I notice Canblaster’s synth poking into the corner of the screen. Cables noodle across various modules, hooking together in a chaotically beautiful way that only he truly understands. “I have to be surprised by the sounds that I make. I knew that sooner or later I would come to modular synthesis. I was a heavy Ableton user. I felt at some point I had come to the limit of what I was really enjoying doing via a computer. I just wanted an unconventional method of creating sound.”
If you don’t know, a modular synth is an electronic synthesiser made up of different modules that have different functions to create sounds. Back in the 1960s when the modular synthesiser was invented, this process involved various modules, cables, and wires in order to craft electronic sounds. Today, every DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) has its own synth built-in without the faff of having to do things manually. For Canblaster, it was this hands on approach that drew him into this now niche practice. “It’s a community. People trade modules and talk about different modules. Making electronic music can be solitary so I liked how you can build a community in a different way”.
Collaboration continued for Canblaster after Club Cheval ran its course and over the years he has remixed music for the likes of A. G. Cook, Charli XCX, Sinjin Hawke and Cashmere Cat. During his career, he’s had multiple boiler room sets and he currently live streams to thousands with DJ sets in his basement. He just released an alternative live session ‘Sceaurore’ with the artist Aja which emulates his now fully established live modular style. A tactile artist, Canblaster now reliably performs live at gigs with a triangle of synths surrounding him.
We live in an age where singles seem to trump albums. For Canblaster, the feeling of a full project emulates greater importance than a stand-alone single. His upcoming release ‘LIBEROSIS’, set to air on April 12th displays a desire to forge a connection with the listener and the natural world. Because after all – why settle for a drop when you can have the whole ocean?
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Words: Isabel Armitage // @armitage_isabel
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