The Mr. Bill Podcast

Today I've got AHEE back on the podcast — Chris Adams. He came up through audio engineering and synthesis, and he's spent years pulling dubstep, trap and future bass into one sound, with releases on Bassrush, Subsidia, Circus Records and Wakaan, and support slots for Excision, Subtronics, Shpongle and Liquid Stranger. He also puts a lot of producer knowledge out for free on YouTube, which I respect.
Last time we spoke he'd moved onto a farm outside Portland, Oregon. He's still there, still has the chickens.
Most of this one is about his new DJ/VJ rig. Instead of DJing with WAVs and MP3s he's DJing with MOVs, running them through Rekordbox with the CDJs as a MIDI controller, so the audio and the visuals come off the same file and the faders crossfade both at once. He turned the camera around and walked me through the whole thing, including where the visuals come from, which is mostly CapCut and InShot on his phone, layering up gifs and old commissioned artwork into what he calls hyper collages.
We also get into having far more finished music than you can ever put out, why he's releasing it as the Bass Quest EPs instead of albums, the forty eight albums he made in four years at college, and why he started Zot Records. And then there's a long detour into UFOs, including the time he stepped out of his body onto a ship while holding a field recorder, and what his mate said when he stepped back in.
AHEE Links
https://soundcloud.com/ahee
https://www.instagram.com/iamahee
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNNFPGqrCztLAlfTKIJ1uKQ
https://www.facebook.com/aheemusic/
https://open.spotify.com/artist/1gbDc1TANALgP8lLvO5UEf?si=mXUO8maBRzCa2RD3INNfJw
https://music.apple.com/us/artist/ahee/688432748
https://www.twitch.tv/iamahee
https://www.aheebass.com/

Mr. Bill's Links

Today we're joined by Tom Cosm, a New Zealand-born producer, technologist, coder, and educator who's been pushing the boundaries of music and sound for over two decades. He's known for pioneering YouTube tutorials that taught a generation of producers, and for building systems that turn things like tree-disease data and biometric signals into actual music. He's currently Technical Director at Telepathic Instruments, where he built the first prototype of Orchid and now oversees its development.
We start out talking about travel and jet lag recovery, which sounds like small talk but turns into a pretty real conversation about what it actually feels like to be constantly in motion — the post-travel bounce, the crash that follows, and learning to slow down when you get home. Tom just got back from London, Berlin, and Spain, partly for a Telepathic team meetup and a pop-up where people could come play Orchid in person, and partly for Superbooth, which he describes as basically a Vegas casino lobby for modular nerds — in a forest.
From there we get into Telepathic Instruments and how he got involved — Kevin Parker reached out after seeing his work on YouTube — and what the development of Orchid has actually looked like. We talk about what the device is trying to do, how community feedback from their early adopters has shaped the features, and what's coming next. Hope you enjoy it. Please welcome Tom Cosm.
Tom Cosm Links
https://www.instagram.com/tomcosm/
https://www.instagram.com/telepathic.instruments/
https://www.youtube.com/@telepathic.instruments
https://www.tiktok.com/@telepathic.instruments

Mr. Bill's Links

Today we're joined by David Satori — co-founder of Beats Antique alongside Zoe Jakes and Sidecar Tommy, a trio that came out of the San Francisco performance underground, Burning Man, and the West Coast Circus Bass music scene. He's also co-founder of Dirtwire with Evan Fraser and Mark Reveley, which blends experimental bass music with folk music from around the world. Between the two projects he's co-produced and recorded over 20 albums in the past 15 years. He also co-founded a nonprofit called SunRise Studios Collective, which builds micro recording and multimedia studios in under-resourced communities around the world to give youth a voice through music and production.
David and I actually go back to a tour we did together in 2017, so it was good to catch up. We spend a good chunk of this one talking about life on the road — buying and converting buses, what it actually costs to tour as an independent artist, and the tradeoffs between owning your vehicle versus renting. He just got off a two month run with Dirtwire and shares what touring looks like for them right now, including how they run their live setup with Ableton and handle sound checks. Hope you enjoy it. Please welcome David Satori.


David Satori Links
Mr. Bill's Links

Today we're joined by Nicholas Yochum, an LA based sound designer currently working at Blizzard on Overwatch, where he focuses on synthesized sounds to help create effects with a more clean, stylized aesthetic. He's on the heroes team and is currently working on new heroes for the game.
Nicholas and I actually go way back to like 2012 in Boston, so it's cool to finally catch up. We get into how he got into the industry — starting out at a third party audio company called Hexany, which he describes as kind of like sound design boot camp, and eventually landing a senior sound designer role at Blizzard, which even he still seems a little surprised about.
We talk about what stylized sound design actually means — why game audio has been pulling more and more from the
electronic music world, and how listening to stuff like Noisia is basically research at this point. We also get into the difference between working at a third party studio versus being embedded on a game team, and why that sense of ownership and connection to the work ended up mattering a lot to him.
Hope you enjoy it. Please welcome Nicholas Yochum.
Follow Nicholas Yochum
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholasyochum/
https://www.youtube.com/@NicholasYochum
Follow Mr. Bill https://linktr.ee/mrbillstunes

Today we're joined by Mr. Wobbles, a.k.a. Austin O'Brien — a live loop station artist who's built his own approach to creating music entirely in the moment.
We get into where the name Mr. Wobbles actually came from — which involves a beatboxing Ventrilo server, a wah bass, and a guy who turned out to be a three-time world champ. Austin talks about coming up as a beatboxer when he couldn't afford production gear, doing street performances, and running a touring beatbox troop — and how all of that shaped his obsession with the live element. We also get into why live performance feels so absent from EDM right now, and what he thinks is missing when shows lean harder on production value than on the actual music. And we talk about where he's at now with learning to produce, trying to bridge that gap between his live setup and the in-the-box world.
He's playing 1720 in Los Angeles on April 24th with Honeycomb, so go check that out if you're in the area. Hope you enjoy the episode.

Follow Mr. Wobbles https://linktr.ee/mrwobbles
Follow Mr. Bill https://linktr.ee/mrbillstunes'