"My music is what happens when you decide you want to jump off the boat and stay there with the pirates all day": Ryan Connor / Sublamp

The weekend has landed: here's a longform interview with a super productive ambient music composer who *also* works at Last Podcast Network.

Welcome to Runaway, a magazine all about expectations, reality and the inevitable crash.

Speaking of: I started doing longform interviews over the handful of days my laptop was out of commission. The instant effect was so refreshing and energizing, I've adapted on the fly. Brand new essays are coming soon, but meanwhile, I’ll be featuring two independent creators a week. Social media has been making it even harder to discover work: might as well resurrect the Weekend Culture Magazine, and on a bloody Substack too.

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The first time I bumped into Ryan Connor, also known as Sublamp, it was a total chance meeting on a platform we both came to dislike. By some miracle we kept in touch, and even though we never found a project we could work together on, his music remained a constant companion.

Topics include: composing ambient music like it’s a score for an imaginary movie, the catharsis that comes from watching horror flicks as a full grown man, collector’s edition vinyl, living in the San Fernando Valley, working at Last Podcast Network, being alone vs. seeking out the company of strangers when you’re making art, what to do when the post-release depression hits, rich kids, unscrupulous self promoters and people with manufactured “intense musical genius” personalities elbowing others out of the way.

Enjoy.

The music you've been making strikes me as some kind of pure creation. “Projector Ghosts” feels like a looping soundtrack for a real movie that might be out there, streaming somewhere, but the absence of any material (no sets, no imagery, not a ton of documentation about your composing/recording process) makes it feel like the music willed itself into existence. Am I getting too attached to this because I'm not big on ambient music as a genre, or was any of this deliberate on your end? 

No, you’re absolutely right! Nothing I do is ever deliberate, I never have a plan or a statement to make and I don’t understand why so many artists feel like they have to justify why they made something. I just love sound, especially dense textural sound. I guess I’m like a puppy exploring a backyard, just thrilled to be experiencing my own senses.

I think it’s more accurate to call myself an active listener than a composer. The music doesn’t exactly will itself into existence like you said but it’s more like I help it grow and sort of nudge it in an interesting direction. Like I’ll start with my guitar, strumming chords and messing with pedals and amp settings until something happens that catches my interest and then I’ll focus on THAT and try to record as much of whatever made that moment happen as I can. Then the process switches to exploring what interested me about that sound and finding ways to expand that moment. Sometimes I think of it like if a normal song were an amusement park ride, with a vehicle on a track that moves you through the various parts of the song in a certain order at a certain pace, my music is what happens when you decide you want to jump off the boat and stay there with the pirates all day.

Did you start as a player only to drift into composing later on, or was it the opposite way around? How did it work for you? 

It was kind of both at the same time! My mom bought me a guitar when I was 13, and pretty much right away I joined a band with friends who also had no idea what they were doing and instead of learning to play other peoples songs like a normal teen band we just started writing our own stuff, all of which was awful at first but we kept at it and got better and eventually recorded a few records by the end of high school. So I never learned the difference between playing and composing, it was all the same thing for me!

I'm thinking about the audience element here. What would be the best way for people to engage with your music: coming to a live show where you play a full album for them? Listening to your catalog in the privacy of their homes? Buying a vinyl copy so that they can cling to a physical object as well? Collector's editions look like they've had a comeback in recent years, but I'm not sure how much it's been a successful push from indie labels vs. a genuine desire on the part of "niche" music enthusiasts. (When Alamo Drafthouse distributed "Miami Connection", that movie's score was made available for novelty's sake, but I was pretty happy with listening to a few tracks online, and I don't know who would have been the audience for a full soundtrack other than "movie geeks who wanted to add a colorful object to their Wall of Nerdery"…)

Listening to my album wherever and whenever you want is the best way to engage with it! At home on a nice sound system is probably the best way to hear everything I put into it, but personally I do 90% of my music listening (both pop and experimental stuff) in my car or on headphones while out doing something else so however anyone wants to listen is fine with me. When I play live it’s pretty different than the recordings, it’s usually more of an improvised guitar drone type thing. I almost never recreate music from my albums live, it’s more fun to make something new.

“Projector Ghosts”

Getting back to soundtracks - would you be in the market for those? What would your process be if and when a film producer approached you ? 

OH YES. I would love more than anything to write music for horror films. I’ve created so many hours of unsettling audio for the immersive horror experience Alone: An Existential Haunting, I know how to upset and disturb people. Horror is really the only way to reach people who don’t listen to experimental music. Horror fans come in disarmed and willing to experience something unfamiliar, I couldn’t ask for a more perfect listener!!

I'm gonna take a proactive stance here. How can we help you get on a soundtrack, and by "we" I mean "all the people who are following this chat" ? 

If anyone out there reading this knows any horror filmmakers, or is one, and needs some music get in touch!

Ryan Conner

About location. You're currently based in Los Angeles: what works for you when it comes to producing music? Do you need to be alone, or do you need to be tethered to the place you live in - the neighborhood, daily interactions with the same people... ? I'm asking because I found out I need SOME human routine when I have creative work to do, isolation stresses me out immensely, so I need to have a small rundown coffee shop I can bounce to when the home walls start closing in. 

Yeah I’m in Los Angeles (the Valley to be even more specific). But no, I don’t need to be around people to be creative. Sublamp is alone music. I’ve learned that I’m a little too comfortable being alone. I could be a lighthouse keeper probably. I DO love to collaborate with people though, so I’m not going to become a hermit yet I guess.

Did you watch a lot of horror growing up, or has it been something you embraced as an adult? The genre has been pretty much canonized as a "rite of passage" kids carry over in their adult lives, but the more I think about it, the more I feel like this was a big frame we might have inherited from *other books and movies* - the teenage horror fan who grows up to be a creative person is a trope in and of itself. 

I didn’t watch horror as a kid. I was always very drawn to monsters and Halloween and dark things but horror, even just the idea of horror, was too much for me. It wasn’t until I was very much an adult that I started reading and watching almost nothing but horror. I think maybe having an adult understanding of mortality and how cruel life can be makes horror more of a cathartic release compared to watching it as a kid. I don’t get scared, but I feel better after watching horror. Like it cleanses me or something.

When we first met you were working as an audio engineer for Earwolf, but you’ve since landed in a different place. What changed for you?

I think it’s safe to say that being an engineer at Earwolf was the best job in the world until it wasn’t. The good times were so much fun: building the button box sound machine for Spontaneanation, going on tour with Comedy Bang Bang, making space laser sound effects for a fake L. Ron Hubbard radio show found at the bottom the ocean… but once that all stopped it was pretty depressing. I wasn’t happy with the direction the network was going in and eventually had to leave for my own mental health. I’m now at Last Podcast Network and it’s like being at early Earwolf all over again. Except better, because I’m no longer the lone weirdo who likes demons and skulls and dark witchy stuff.

I started this project once I fully appreciated my overall frame was (still is) "expectations, reality and the inevitable crash". Looking at your musical output, is there one moment that stands out to you as a case of "expectations crashing into reality" ? And is there any lesson you learnt in the aftermath ? 

I try to expect nothing so I’ll never be disappointed, but there’s always a moment after the work is done and the record is out there in the world when depression suddenly hits and I have to ask “well now what”. The hardest lesson I’ve learned is that even in experimental music the rich kids and unscrupulous self promoters rise to the top, being really good at making sounds isn’t enough to get attention when you’ve got people with manufactured “intense musical genius” personalities elbowing others out of the way. The movie Tár got it right, even though it’s about the classical music world you find the same kind of people in any art scene, they just wear different clothes and instead of shaking a baton they shake a metal canister full of broken glass into a cheap microphone in a grimy downtown gallery.

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This was so much fun to do. Ryan Connor is amazing.

And now:

catch up with his discography over at Sublamp.com

stream or buy Projector Ghosts on Bandcamp

or, you know,

https://spotify.link/YC9917NFxyb

Are you still here? Good. Come back tomorrow, David Avallone will join us.

Oh wait, there he is:

"Don't like it? Do something else" : the many lives of David Avallone