Provoking Thought with Quinn Collins: An Interview
Image courtesy of Guido Iafigliola on Behance.
When we sat down in the weathered adirondack chairs outside of Sci Center, I’m not sure what my Music Technology professor Quinn Collins expected me to ask. Perhaps he assumed that I’d ask about his trajectory as a performer and composer, or about his experiences working with other musicians or even us as students. Instead, he humored me and some unconventional questions. On a warm Wednesday afternoon, Quinn and I bantered about the EDM clubbing scene, “objectively bad” songs, and the benefits of not taking yourself too seriously while composing music.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Eva Baron [EB]: In your opinion, what’s the fiercest genre of electronically produced music? What would the genre’s animal mascot be?
Quinn Collins [QC]: I don’t know a lot of the subgenre names for electronic music, but the ones I do know feel somewhat restrictive. I don’t really like limiting a genre to a certain BPM or sound and then thinking that any deviation from that makes it inauthentic, even if it’s a minor change. Thinking that a song isn’t black metal anymore because it doesn’t have a person screeching, for example, is a bit strange to me. With dance music I can understand that categorization more, since knowing a tempo range will influence the way people dance.
What’s the fiercest genre, though? Probably Detroit techno. Maybe its animal mascot would be a tiger, but a tiger from space. An extraterrestrial tiger, maybe like the one from He-Man. As a genre, though, I gravitate toward Detroit techno since it feels like music that people really perform. Of course, that definitely depends on the artist. I like artists like Carl Craig, Jeff Mills, Underground Resistance, and Drexciya. I like the grooves and timbre in Detroit techno, and that it sounds like people are really performing it rather than running it through a machine. There’s something alive about it.
EB: If you were at a club for seven hours and you couldn’t leave or stop dancing, what kind of music would you want to be listening to?
QC: I don’t dance.
EB: But you have to in this circumstance. You can’t leave and you have to dance.
QC: Wow. I wouldn’t survive. I’m not in the kind of shape to dance for seven hours.
EB: Hypothetically!
QC: I don’t know, maybe something with square dancing. If the dancing’s already going to be bad, it might as well be really bad. I think they taught us square dancing in middle school, so I might remember how to do it. They also taught us how to chicken dance, so maybe that’d be ideal for seven hours. Or polka.
EB: What’s the longest you’ve ever performed, and how’s the experience of performing electronically produced music different from “traditional” performances?
QC: In 2008, I played keyboards in this piece by my friend Vin Calianno called Escala at the University of Illinois. I believe that’s about five hours long, but you take breaks. It’s a long-tone composition. Most performance sets I do are at most 35 minutes—they wouldn’t even reach an hour. When I was growing up, though, my friends and I had our own high school garage band and we’d perform three-hour sets sometimes. We’d improvise, as well as perform our own original music and covers of classic rock songs.
In terms of the difference, it depends a lot on the type of instrument and what the monitoring situation is in terms of the sound system. The venues where I perform electronically are usually accustomed to playing weird music all the time, so the sound engineering is ideal. If the sound system is buggy, I usually just hope for the best with electronics since I can’t often hear what’s going on.
A few years ago, the duo I play in, llama/lama, applied for a very academic electronic music festival, and, even though we weren’t accepted, they were kind enough to give us three paragraphs of feedback. From that feedback, it was clear that they were perplexed about what we were doing. We were pretty amused by how much they didn’t get it, so I took a recording of the paragraphs, rendered it in a computer voice, and played it at the beginning of a gig at an outdoor show at the Unruly Sounds Festival, near Princeton’s public library. We included the name of the festival which, retrospectively, maybe we shouldn’t have done. Police were called during that performance, but not because of the name dropping. We were playing too loudly and we were ruining people’s dinners outside. I can’t say I like most of the locals in that town, though, so I wasn’t too bothered about ruining their dinners.
EB: In that case, should electronic music embrace the fact that it can really sound awful sometimes? What do you think of “objectively bad” music?
QC: I’m interested in some kinds of “bad” more than others. Earlier, I was playfully arguing with someone about harsh noise, and I was complaining about how awful digital clipping is for speakers. You’re potentially going to destroy the sound system if you produce sounds that are over +30 dB, which isn’t very nice to the people who own that system. Hard clipping also just sounds horrendous. I honestly can’t think of a context in which it wouldn’t be awful. It just physically doesn’t work.
During the summer, I hope to rediscover what “objectively bad” means and whether or not anything can actually be “bad.” Something that I’ve found quite liberating is working with 80s Yamaha DX7 presets. I don’t know if they’re objectively bad, but they get pretty cheesy, so I’d say that’s a good tool for helping me get over myself. Who cares if my output’s really silly? Maybe it’s confidence boosting, like the sonic equivalent of wearing pink-and-yellow polka dots in public.
EB: Do you think that the music industry needs to learn how to get over themselves sonically?
QC: There are a lot of different ways to interpret that question. The current state of music production allows people to do way more than is actually necessary—and people do that. There are these recording sessions that include hundreds of tracks on them, even though there are some beautiful records from, say, the 60s that only have two or four tracks. Now, it’s like people see these endless possibilities and produce without being capable of understanding what’s going on. In the end, it’s a lot of work to put into something that people are going to just play on their phones with horrible speakers.
EB: If the music industry stopped taking itself so seriously, would that ultimately benefit the music it produces?
QC: In most cases, probably yes.
EB: This reminds me of TikTok and its contemporary influence on music. Would you lie out of shame or embrace it if your music went viral on the platform?
QC: It depends on which song.
EB: I mean, I’d definitely lie out of shame.
QC: You would?
EB: For sure, yes.
QC: I wouldn’t embrace it, I guess. I’d tell the truth but be pissed off about it. I don’t like the medium of TikTok, but I’ve only used it a couple of times and I don’t have it on my phone anymore. I don’t think most of the content on there is very interesting, but there are some creators that are fascinating. There’s Dogg Face who drinks cranberry juice and lip syncs to Fleetwood Mac. That guy rules. Then there’s @ytietofficial who sings numbers in this impassioned voice. He also rules.
I don’t think you need TikTok to make that, though. It must inspire a certain format, but there are countless other platforms that you could use instead. On the other hand, social media in general can be pretty detrimental to the arts, but it seems to be good for visual art in particular even when you witness that digitally. In comparison, I don’t think music fits the timespan of scrolling or social media very well. You really need to dedicate time to listening—and listening well, ideally with some nice headphones. I also think it’s odd when musicians try to position themselves as influencers on social media.
EB: Given that TikTok is really able to facilitate what music gains popularity, what do you think of “pop cultural” music? What are the intersections between “pop cultural” and commercialized music?
QC: I don’t listen to that kind of music. I hear about it from students fairly often, and, every once in a while, I hear some hyperpop. I’m not sure if that’s commercial. Or maybe it’s getting there—but that usually means it’ll start getting bad, since that’s unfortunately the case a significant amount of times. It’s difficult to continue creating with integrity once you become beholden to certain entities. There are also cases in which artists lose their touch after a certain amount of time. We tend to be critical of artists that run out of steam or ideas, but, really, we should give them credit for being awesome for 10, 20 years.
What I also find interesting are these reunion tours that a lot of musicians and bands are doing now, and the fact that people eagerly go. At the end of the day, a lot of these artists do actually need the income. You’d think that given their fame that they’d be set, but that’s often not the case. It’s really difficult to have a [steady] income when producing any kind of art, especially now. What makes it so difficult to subsist on now is because real estate is and will continue to be incredibly expensive. I genuinely believe that’s one of the greatest threats to independent music—the fact that no one can afford to live anywhere anymore.
EB: In that case, what advice would you give to those interested in pursuing a career in music or music production?
QC: It really depends on what sort of economic background you come from. If you don’t have, say, a trust fund, I’d highly recommend finding another source of income that, ideally, is fairly lucrative and that you can do for a while because you’ll need to have a side job in order to pay the bills. Hopefully, at some point, you’d be able to quit that job and simply pursue your music career, but I’m fully convinced that the thing that opens the most doors in the arts is access to generational wealth. Nothing else.
EB: Would you say that the artists that possess generational wealth—or “industry plants”—are detrimental to the quality of the music industry and the music it produces?
QC: Some are, some aren’t. The thing is, I’m not questioning the talent of a lot of these people, but there are also plenty of other people that are every bit as talented and don’t have the access to these same resources and opportunities. It’s detrimental to music in that a lot of creative, talented people simply do not have access to that world and that’s incredibly discouraging. It took me a while to figure this out since I used to be convinced about the myth of meritocracy, one that’s typically propagated by higher education in particular. I used to assume that people were successful simply because they were talented and that they’d earned success, but now I know that’s not the case.
EB: This is a little more lighthearted, but how does your pet cat Judy react when she hears your music?
QC: She’s actually okay with a lot of it. For llama/lama, we made an ambient record and one track has a lot of high frequency sounds. When Judy was listening to it, her ears were twitching, and I could tell she was really engaged. I’m not sure she likes everything, though, especially my pocket trumpet. She’s also not crazy about crashes and booms, but she seems to enjoy sustained noises that she can predict.
EB: What do you think about the prevalence of drugs in the EDM scene?
QC: Oh, I mean, people have been taking drugs, listening to music, and dancing to it since forever. That just seems normal to me. But that’s not an answer from a health perspective.
EB: What’s your favorite and least favorite songs of all time?
QC: That’s tough, since there are a lot of songs I like and a lot that I dislike. I think my #1 least favorite song is “Somebody that I Used to Know.” I hate that song. Part of it is that it’s really catchy, and I know it’ll get stuck in my head even if I hear it briefly in the grocery store, for example. Realistically, there are songs that I probably hate more, like those from Billy Joel, but it’s the catchiness of “Somebody I Used to Know” that I hate. I’m just allergic to this song.
In terms of my favorite, I think it’d be the Dionne Warwick version of “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me.”
EB: Finally, imagine this: you can assume the identity of any artist ever. Whose?
QC: Madonna.
EB: Why? What’s your favorite song of hers?
QC: I just like her. It must be fun to be Madonna. She’s responsible for a lot of interesting music, and my favorite would probably be “Into the Groove.”
EB: In an ideal world, who would be the headliner for Worthstock?
QC: Madonna.