Dan Eshleman wears his heart on his musical sleeve.
Often laced with a pinch of melancholy, a sprinkle of nostalgia or a side salad of introspection and always delivered with a crisp, synthwave-like sense of sonic gloss and space… Akuratyde music is a rich weave of feels, emotionally poignant enough to thaw the frostiest of souls.
In the past a great deal of his work has dealt with very personal themes of loss with his music carrying a palpably heavy heart. But on his latest album Head First we hear a somewhat more buoyant sense of energy. The emotion is still so thick your ears can taste it, but there’s a very clear sense of hope and a brightness in the mix that we’ve only ever been teased with in the past.
This is all down to the chapter of his life that’s inspired it… Head First was written between 2021-2022 as Daniel was commandeering one of the most bewildering chapters an adult can go through; parenthood. Written during the sleepless emotional highs and lows of his first year as a father, there’s a special energy and character to the album he’s not displayed in his music before. It’s an energy he’s also translated into this beautiful mix that ranges from deep autonomic to springy sci-fi D&B by way of many of his own productions…
Now so deep into family life he’s a proud father of two, we catch up with Dan Akuratyde to find out more about the album, how life experiences influence his music and how a severe health issue has prevented him from performing live.
So the last interview we did, a few years ago on UKF, I opened with a very grand observation that your album Home Movies was a very sad album. I’m going to flip that now and say Head First is a very happy album!
Yeah that’s funny. I had the same thought when I was listening to Head First once it was fully mastered. I always go through this process with an album when I’m working out the arrangement and nothing feels like it’s working and I’m trying all these different variations and I start to think that I suck and I should just quit, then I eventually get it mastered and I listen to it from beginning to end and it’s like, ‘Hey this is pretty good!’ So I was in that process and I thought about our interview and what you had said about it and came to the same conclusion… This is my happy album. It was written in the first year of my son Wesley’s life and that’s what it’s about. The highs, the lows, the good, the bad, the unbridled joy and unparalleled fear of becoming a father. You know the drill as a father yourself, right?
Absolutely
I’d say the album does go into my more melancholic side at points more towards the end but I had the very same thought about it being my happy album and what you’d said about Home Movies.
Brilliant. The title track is the most melancholic, I feel. Or very poignant for sure. Possibly very sleepless too.
For sure. Wesley was born five weeks prematurely. For the first four months he wouldn’t sleep without being held. We’d take turns holding him so the longest sleep we’d get was four or so hours, and during that time you can’t move much so I got into this really nice process of making tunes in the day while he was napping and then in the night I’d go over the tunes and make notes. I’d listen back and think about what I wanted to change. It made me really efficient because I already had a plan each time I sat in the studio. I wrote it so much faster than my last three albums.
Wow. Becoming a parent is one of the most intense things but you turned that state of flux into a super efficient creative process? Props!
My creativity is always at a high when there’s a lot going on in life, whether it’s good or bad you know? That was why I was so fruitful with music writing during lockdown. I get creatively charged when there’s a big change going on in my life. The same thing happened when my daughter Arrow was born last August, I got really reminiscent for jungle and that old 90s sound and made a load of tracks. Six that are done and around four that are half way there. I don’t know what I’ll do with them but yeah that’s the type of thing I do when life is getting intense.
I can relate to that. When life is pushing and pulling me in different directions my brain is like, ‘Screw this! Here are millions of really cool things you could and should be doing right now instead…’ Why do humans do things like that?
For creative people I think that’s how we process our emotions. That’s true for me at least; I’m working through the big change. Having a son is the greatest feeling in the world but he needed 24/7 care as a newborn so the only free time I had was when he was sleeping and it was really intense and that’s how I processed this new life situation. We also moved house during that time and we moved to a city where we had no family roots or friends so there was a lot of change in that aspect of my life as well.
And all of this positive flux is articulated in the album and the title captures that feeling really well.
I struggled with the title for a long time. The song was untitled for a long time but I knew it would be the title track of the album because it was the strongest emotionally. I just hadn’t quite worked out how I was going to bring it all together. When I came up with Head First it all came together and I was able to look at it as a body of work from that perspective.
That’s really interesting. You mentioned spending a lot of time on the arrangement of tracks earlier. I’d made a note of this in preparation for our call as it feels like the track Reflections is a very clear break point mid way. A chance to catch a breath. The story, narrative and flow of an album are really important to you aren’t they?
Absolutely. I put a lot of thought into that stuff. It’s similar to doing a mix in that way. But you’re right, I did have Reflections nearer the end of the album and I was listening to it through and something wasn’t working about it. It was really throwing me off. What brought it together was the vinyl – I was only able to pick 8 songs for the vinyl because of the limited running time so I picked the 8 I felt were the strongest and could tell that narrative in 8 instead of 12 songs. So I put Reflections on side 1 because that’s where it fit and when I did that the album made a lot more sense to me. It was a happy accident but it was a much better fit there because of exactly what you said – it’s a moment to pause before the second half of the album.
How about the singer?
So that’s Chris Naughton from Winterfylleth. They describe themselves as an atmospheric black metal band. He was following me on Instagram and got in touch about if I ever wanted him to do any vocals. I’m quite picky about my metal. I really really love the 10 or so bands that I love, but I don’t really follow it as a genre much or have a wider knowledge of it. So I checked out Winterfylleth and was like, ‘Oh wow okay, this is great.’ So that was really inspiring to have made that connection and collaborate with him. He wrote most of the guitar parts as well as the vocals so it was a very evenly split collaboration in terms of what each of us brought to the track. I loved the whole process. I wrote to him about the album and its inspirations and it turns out he is also a father and he incorporated a lot the themes and mood into his lyrics and guitar playing. I’m very happy with how that worked out.
What other metal bands are you into?
Deftones are my number one. Tool. Fear Factory, Ministry, Static X. I just got into Bring Me The Horizon actually since Arrow was born. They did this amazing album during lockdown which is really aggressive and was co-produced by the guy who did the score for Doom. I love it. They’re not exactly metal but I love this band called HEALTH, and also Author & Punisher. I feel like I’m missing something obvious but they’re the type of bands I listen to a lot. Mostly industrial metal, really.
You make such a clean, emotional and bright sounding style of electronic music, I think a lot of people might be surprised about industrial metal influences
I like to surprise people and I think it’s cool to subvert people’s expectations.
Yeah. So your last album Conversations With Ghosts was an ambient body of work and was influenced by the loss of your father. Now you’ve welcomed your son in the form of Head First. That subverts things quite a lot and there’s a nice symmetry there. But what did you learn between those albums?
I hesitate to use the word “trilogy” but those three albums – Conversations With Ghosts, Home Movies and Past Lives – were all part of the same part of my perspective and themes of loss. Two are more literal and one is more about the of loss of innocence. The end of a chapter, I guess. So Head First does have a feeling of starting fresh and there are more new sounds I’ve not incorporated into my music like IDM and glitch. I listen to a lot of Telefon Tel Aviv and Richard Divine and all that kind of stuff so I wanted to bring in more of those influences and mess with the formula a little.
Yeah you can feel that, especially in the more dancefloor-minded tracks. You’ve done a mix for us, but I forgot you don’t DJ live when I asked for one. Not sure if I was a bit cheeky!
Oh not at all. I have decks and I do my Modern Conveniences podcast mixes on them. I love mixing but I don’t perform live because of a health issue. I’ve got irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and it’s pretty severe.
I’ve had it for 14 years now. It started out more dietary based but over the years I’ve developed a really intense anxiety over it from experiences of being sick when we’re out and the fear that comes with that. Never knowing what’s going to happen. I could be at the grocery story and suddenly have to run to the bathroom and that’s caused me a lot of anxiety. When I started releasing music I thought about playing gigs but even the thought made me incredibly anxious. I get painful cramps, nausea, all that stuff. I’d love to get to a place where I can play out but right now it’s not in the cards. I spent 3 years seeing all kinds of specialists and have tried various medications, even some experimental ones, but nothing has really worked so far. I’m not sure if this is something people want to read about in an interview but for me it’s life.
Fully respect your honesty! Very sorry to hear, too. You can’t be alone. In years of interviewing DJs this is the first time it’s been mentioned but I’m sure there are other artists who face that health issue and have faced a lot of challenges because of it. What a journey you’ve been on then!
Definitely. What I tell people is, “it makes my world smaller”. There are things that are challenging and difficult for me to do but would be easy for someone without IBS to do. Like flying, for instance. The idea of getting an IBS attack mid-flight and there being a long queue for the toilet can be panic inducing. Normal day to day stuff is usually okay – going to the store or taking the kids to the park – it’s usually the bigger things that trigger a lot of anxiety for me. But to bring things back to Head First and its inspiration, part of the reason I wanted to become a dad was so I could push myself out of my comfort zone more. Like exposure therapy – the more you expose yourself to something, the less you’re scared of it. It makes me go out more, socialize more. Fear would prevent me from doing that a lot more than it now does.
So it’s an album about growth as much as it is an album about happiness. Tell us about this mix!
Well there are a lot of my own productions, which I’m really enjoying now. I’m getting a lot more confident with playing my own music. There’s a lot of stuff from my label on there and my usual autonomic influenced style. I hope you like it!
Akuratyde – Head First is out now on Modern Conveniences
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