ill.Gates

Sharing His Methodology

San Francisco based producer, educator and performer ill.Gates has a huge art collection. Having established a global fan base over the last 16 years, the man also known as Dylan Lane has performed at the world’s first concert for the deaf, hung out with Bill Gates while playing at a Microsoft party and toured and tutored the world. ANNABEL MACLEAN chats with The Phat Conductor about working with Bassnectar, Nietzsche inspiration and his love for Die Antwoord.

Ill.Gates used to eat a lot of “toothpaste sandwiches”.  Whether the phrase be literal or metaphorical, it’s something he looks back upon now and laughs but, part of his tone reveals a man rugged with a hard skin bought on by pure determination to succeed as an artist after his dire experience when interning at a wedding magazine when he thought he’d become a graphic designer.

“It quickly cured me of my urge to be a graphic designer,” he says, sitting on the banks of the Yarra River ahead of an afternoon studio session with Opio. Lane decided to pursue a career in music full time after reading Nietzsche’s theory called Eternal Recurrence. But, he says it was instinct which influenced his decision to cast his eye away from wedding magazines. “It’s definitely always been my passion and I was afraid that it wouldn’t work out for the longest time, it just didn’t seem a realistic choice,” he says.

“Everyone’s got those relatives and friends who encourage you to be realistic and it was really just a realisation that there was nothing realistic about making myself miserable so I just took the plunge and never looked back.”

Having DJ’d since the age of 13 after attending his first rave (“It was in Ottawa and they had a 50,000 watt sound system in this tiny little warehouse and it was all wild, minimal techno”), Lane has gone on to tour the world, collaborate with some massive names and share his knowledge of the music industry through workshops online and in the flesh. Lane was asked to play a private party for Microsoft at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010 and it’s a memory he looks back fondly upon. “Brilliant!,” he says, talking of meeting Bill Gates at the big bash. “He’s a really great guy and I was expecting that some day they’d tell me to change my name but he was actually really, really supportive. He gave me my blessing and wished me the best and I’ve been working with Microsoft doing ringtones for the Windows phone and music for advertisements.

“A lot of the audio stuff that I’ve done for them has been like pretty edgy and unusual and they really like that. They encouraged me to have full creative freedom when I work with them and really think outside the box.

“Silicon Valley is a very psychedelic place. The micro chip was invented by someone on acid and if you ever go by Google or anything like that, they really encourage their employees to take time to think outside the box and whatever it takes to do that, they’re fully supportive. They’ll give you time off to go to Burning Man because that was how it all happened – Burning Man. A lot of people don’t realise but Burning Man is just crawling with employees from Apple and Microsoft… they employ a lot of really young, free thinking people and they’re all very, very supportive because it’s all about innovation with those companies.”

Innovation is a big part of Toronto’s Ryerson University too. Lane was asked to headline the world’s first concert for the deaf in 2009, an initiative by ASID – a laboratory dedicated to Alternate Sensory Input Devices. “They invented these chairs that transmit sound into vibrations that occur at different points on your body,” he says. “You sit in the chair and the lower frequencies are down in your legs and so they buck the whole chair up and down whereas the higher frequencies are up in your shoulders and you can get almost a tactile picture of what’s going on with the audio… to see deaf people first having the experience of non visual art that travels through time was really moving.

“A lot of them were crying and laughing and completely amazed by this. The event was in this shitty little rock venue that could hold 100 people and we ended up having to do two separate events – one for the needier and one for the party goers. They had to prioritise people who were deaf over people who were not deaf because everyone wanted to check it out. There were sign language quizzes at the door which was pretty funny. I think the strangest part was that they wanted us to close caption the lyrics… I work with Jamaican vocalists and close captioning the Patwa lyrics for deaf people – it’s like, if you’ve never heard someone speak Patwa, what does it even look like? (laughs). I just remember these lyrics coming up on the screen and going like ‘wow, this is really quite funny’.”

Lane has two new EPs in the works – a solo one and one with Bassnectar who he’s been working with since 2004. “We’re really challenging ourselves to step outside of our existing formula and write tunes that are as much for the heart as they are for the dancefloor,” he says of the latter EP. As for his solo work though – expect a “signature ill. Gates sound.” There might even be another Die Antwoord remix in the works. “I think they’re doing some of the more interesting and provocative things with music these days,” he says of the Cape Town rave-rappers.

“I like that they’re not afraid to push buttons and that they’re not afraid to tell Interscope [Records] to fuck off when they start trying to tell them what to do. They’ve really shown that they don’t need that kind of money to capture the public’s imagination, you just need to be violently creative and have a set of balls on ya and off you go… I really like them; I think they’re really pushing things forward and expanding people’s conception of what the role of a musician is in today’s world.”