Heavee: Note To Self

Originally a fan of video game and cartoon culture, multidisciplinary footwork artist Darryl Bunch Jr’s early experiments in production were mentored by footwork pioneer DJ Rashad in Chicago’s Teklife Collective. Debuting as Heavee in 2018, Bunch Jr’s first releases were heavily influenced by those he chose to work with. An explorative and lovingly crafted debut LP, Heavee’s WFM (2018) featured collaborations with footwork artists including DJ Phil, Gantman, DJ Paypal, Sirr Tmo, and a co-write with the aforementioned DJ Rashad.

By 2022, Heavee was basking in the success of his video game music-influenced EP Audio Assault – a conceptual, mutant strain of footwork soundtracking the genre’s culture of dance downs and ‘boss battle’ routines. However, Heavee’s sophomore LP, Unleash, goes one step further to truly inscribing his name on the footwork cannon. Using 160 BPM templates as a springboard for expressive micro-rhythms and infusing elements of R&B, rap and jazz, Unleash fully showcases Heavee’s unique, world-building sound.

In what way does your music relate to a love of video game culture?

From an early age, video game culture has always been a part of my life with various games lending themselves to exploring electronic music and influencing my perspective. Games like Jet Set Radio and Streets of Rage were a take on Detroit techno and Chicago house and composers like Hideki Naganuma created very beautiful music playing through the different levels of games. I wanted to try those sounds in my music, but knew it was something that I’d have to work towards.

Some of the gaming consoles used to sell music production-type software. Was that part of your education?

The first instance of me playing with a music maker was a Mario game on the Super Nintendo. It had sheet music, each individual note corresponded to different characters and you could make little melodies and stuff. When PlayStation 2 came out, there were games like eJay Clubworld, which leant more towards DJing and arranging loops, Magix Music Maker and Funkmaster Flex’s Digital Hitz Factory, which changed everything for me. It had pre-built sounds and a USB microphone, so you could create loops and patterns on something that resembled a tracker-style arranger.

You’ve also mentioned cartoons having an influence on your approach. In what way?

In the early ‘90s, I watched a lot of TV as a kid and cartoons were my world. I remember The Powerpuff Girls having really aggressive drum and bass/jungle-type theme songs, and of course movies would use techno or jungle tracks for action sequences. The way they used breaks meant there had to have been some sort of connection to hard house and experiencing that was like making a mental note in the back of my head to come back to it later, which is interesting because I’m now collaborating with jungle and grime artists.

Was there a pathway from house to the juke/footwork genre that is prevalent in your production style?

I do see a pathway. The earlier instances of ghetto house encompassed music and dance, which included showcases, performance and battling skills, but over the years communities have focused less on showmanship, or what we used to call ‘dance downs’, where groups from all over the city would practice choreographed routines and compete in shows and parades. RP Boos’ Bangin’ on King Drive music video is an example of what that scene looked like. Although the music eventually started to show more ingenuity, I’m happy to be a part of the lineage of black and brown producers who were producing electronic music on synthesizers and drum machines in their basements based on that culture and community.

Is there anything to differentiate the juke genre from footwork or are they interchangeable?

While we could technically interchange them, they do serve different purposes and aspects. As mentioned earlier with the showcasing and testing of skills, juking goes along with the dancing, partying and grinding and its sound leans more towards the more minimal side of four-on-the-floor Chicago ghetto house rudiments and rhythms, whereas footwork dances back and forth between how different crews have different styles. There is an exchange between what they’re doing and what music producers make when watching their videos. For example, a producer may think about some of the moves they hit or how many counts it took to do a step and work that into a particular track. So juke and footwork are part of the same culture, but juke came first and footwork is maybe a division or by-product of it.

Your debut album, WFM, had some form of collaboration on almost every track, whereas Unleash only has a few. Were you conscious of wanting to make an album that you could truly call your own?

Excuse my language, but hell yeah [laughs]! I had so much fun making WFM and working on tracks like “So High” and the title track, which were made at DJ HANK’s house when DJ Paypal came to Chicago along with Gant-Man, Sirr TMO and DJ Phil. We were all in the studio together banging out tracks and trying different ideas. There were moments when we were pressing pads at the same time, which was a lot of fun, but people were confused about who did what. I had to sit with that, so right after it came out I started listening to a lot of jazzy stuff, got back into older material that I could sample and started listening to new artists like Brainstory or Apifera. I made a huge playlist and noticed that when you looked at the credits you could clearly tell who did what, so I felt like it would make more sense if people didn’t have to wonder about that on my records.

Do you think that using too many collaborators waters down your sound or makes it less uniquely identifiable?

There’s a funny saying, “too many cooks”, and that’s what it felt like after WFM. But it was my first album and I was looking to anybody that could give me advice and help me get across the line. Now I listen to and appreciate so many different albums from top to bottom that I feel more comfortable being able to inject my concept or story or knowing when a song is finished.

With its emphasis on intricate sound design, do you feel that Unleash bridges the gap between the dancefloor and experiential home listening or are you happy to sit outside of typical dance music classifications?

I had to think about that, knowing that I was putting multiple songs on the album that had fewer drums, were ambient or had really long intros. Part of that process was to think about the early music I listened to when I was a kid watching and listening to video games, movies and cartoons. I wanted to showcase footwork while injecting the ideas and sound design techniques that have now become my signature.

I read you were influenced by Steve Goodman’s book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, which discusses how sound can be used as a weapon?

I was never really aware of music’s ability to serve a purpose that goes beyond my enjoyment of it. For example, we instantly recognise that the sound of sirens and ambulances are used for awareness and are a call to action, so knowing music can be used for that unlocked the understanding that I could try different textures that didn’t necessarily have to be based on enjoyment. I really appreciated the author of Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman, for planting that seed, but I also found that artists like Eprom, Jimmy Edgar, Kode9 and Machinedrum backed that theory up and did a good job of trying techniques that felt cutting-edge to me.

You studied physical modeling. What did that encompass?

Physical modeling helped me to figure out concepts like attack, impact, tension and relief, and what it meant to apply them. For example, because I’m working in the digital space, thinking about how the top end of a drum hit could be one element but the tail end something completely different, or using two instances of a drum synth, putting different effects on them, manipulating the audio and recording them at the same time. I probably don’t have a deep understanding of it, but trying it in principle and liking the results is enough for me.

When you speak of VCAs and filters most people immediately think about hardware rather than software. Do you see those technologies as interconnected or separate?

At this stage, they’re more separated but I have a few different setups. When I’m making footwork or house tracks, I’m using software VST plugins from Arturia Analog Lab and all of the different V Collection synths or something from Native Instruments, and then I’ll have my Akai MPC drums as a VST plugin or use the MPC for MIDI programming. Then again, I also do DAW-less hardware jams for my Instagram and YouTube communities using gear like the Korg Volca Sample, Volca FM, Korg SQ-64 sequencer, Teenage Engineering OP-1, K.O. II Pocket Operator or POM 400 and run all of those into my mixer or Black Lion audio interface and record them into Ableton using it as a multi-track recorder. The live jams basically allow me to explore different ideas, the potential of an alias or possibly build a hardware show, but honestly it’s just about having fun based on the original idea of jamming with friends who have similar equipment or bringing a portable synth to a studio session.

You also use the Ableton Note app to initiate ideas?

As soon as Ableton Note was announced I immediately downloaded it because I’d seen people talking about it on Twitter. I liked the idea of being able to create ideas without necessarily needing to finish them in a space or place where I wouldn’t normally be able to crank my laptop open and pull out a microphone or keyboard. I remember having a three-hour layover at the airport following a recording session in New York and was feeling good because everything went well, so I opened up Ableton Note and pretty much banged out a very early version of the title track “Unleash”. The early version didn’t allow me to transfer a project, but an update came out two weeks later so I could upload to the cloud. Back in the studio, I opened up Session View, jammed with the track for a while, got a little crazy with the triplets and did some granular vocal work. Once I had secondary elements that made it feel like there were two drops, I used the MIDI function to sequence the session and start recording in Ableton’s Arrangement View.

How would you differentiate your use of Note from some of the portable hardware modules that you carry from session to session?

Note is sick because you kind of get a chance to get back the time you couldn’t spend in the studio. Now I can potentially make an EP on the train to get out ideas and bring them back to the studio to make them bigger – and that track could end up being played in a club the same night and go viral tomorrow. The software also gets improved because there’s an open relationship between Ableton and the consumer, so we can see the changes being made in real-time, stay in the mix and continue to use the product.

Tell us about the track “Bounce Dat”, which features Paypal & Dan TOG’s heavily edited vocals. How did you explain to them what you wanted, knowing in advance that their vocal would be treated?

Believe it or not, that particular track was actually from a session that started around the WFM time. It’s changed so much since then, but Dan TOG has an awareness of how footwork uses vocal samples and how they can be heavily manipulated, distorted or chopped up in a very frenetic way. He’s okay with that, so we were trying out different call and response commands and landed on bounce dat ass and went in for it [laughs]. That’s the track I mentioned where we were pressing buttons at the same time – it’s me and Paypal literally fighting over the kick pattern.

The LP closes with “Smoke Break”, which is a lot more jazz-influenced. The track almost sounds like a live take despite it being assimilated from different sessions…

Jazz is a style of music that’s always been revered in my culture and community, so I wanted to attack it through the lens of footwork. For the first part, I used a virtual drum synth from Reaktor that had an acoustic setup and amped it using stock Ableton amps to beef it up and make it sound really alive. Homesick provided keys and strings in a separate session that we blended to the drums and I built the bass under that and added vocals. We were looking for something to fill the top end and that’s when I reached out to [producer and trumpeter] Takuya Nakamara through the DAW-less community. He sent back this beautiful heavily reverbed piece that he’d played a few different ways with and without a muted horn. By using reverbs, delays and flanger panning, grouping sounds in buses and compressing them as a whole, you can emphasize and glue everything together. The whole session was moved into Ableton and I made new drums using the MPC and compiled everything to get to what you hear today.

With the complexity of your sound, do you tend to mix tracks while you’re working on them or would that focus be misplaced?

I wish I could mix at the end but it irks me to wait, so if a sound sticks out I’m going to grab it and look to get the best out of it. I do have friends who say that I’m messing with the feeling of a track or that that time could be spent further crafting or expanding upon an idea, but I like to keep moving towards the finish line and make room for other stuff. I think it helps to give a session a purpose, so if I have a session that’s just for sound design then nothing is necessarily a bad take because you can take a source signal and use effects chains and racks to provide multiple instances of modulators and automation. With that in mind, I don’t care if I record an off-key or distorted vocal or melody because I can throw it all through an effects chain, sample it, cut it up, mangle and re-record it into something else. 

Follow Heavee on Bandcamp and Spotify

Text and interview: Danny Turner

Photos courtesy of Sam Siegel