Brendon Moeller: Life Begins at 170

Sometimes, opening up a whole new well of inspiration is as simple as turning the tempo dial. Having spent more than 20 years exploring deep, dubby house and techno around the 120 BPM mark, nothing could have prepared Brendon Moeller for the shift in his music-making when he decided to try producing some tracks at 170.

"My initial thought was, 'Wow. This is too fast, too busy,'" Moeller explains on a call from his home studio in Upstate New York. "For someone who's into space and dub, I thought I might struggle with it, but once I got in I was like, 'Wow, this is giving me everything I need.' Since then I don't think I've actually made any techno tracks."

Moeller's decision to dabble in drum & bass tempos doesn't arrive in a vacuum — in recent years there's been a steady increase in crossovers between deep techno and drum & bass, with newer artists like Konduku, upsammy and Lemna joined by seasoned veterans like Donato Dozzy and Mike Parker in exploring faster, fractured rhythms. 

The music Moeller has put out since his gear shift to 170 includes 2024's Vacuum EP and the recently released Further LP on Samurai Music. Both releases sport the same keen sense of atmospheric design and shimmering melancholy that runs through all his work, but he's relished the opportunity to explore new tools to define this exciting new chapter for his sound. Alongside this interview, Moeller has put together a sample pack that features drums, loops, drones and one-shots created using the same gear you can hear across Vacuum, Further and his other recent releases.

Download Brendon Moeller’s free Sample Pack

Although he connected with jungle and drum & bass when he was discovering electronic music as a teenager in South Africa in the early 90s, Moeller never felt inspired to make the music himself. When he moved to New York and immersed himself in the city's club scene, he found his calling in techno. Working in record shops and distributors while he amassed equipment and knowledge, he initially debuted under the Beat Pharmacy and Echologist aliases in the early 00s. From those first releases he started shaping out a sound rooted in looming sub bass, minor chords and liberal delay and reverb. He readily admits the dub techno sound he was drawn to is rife with imitation, but he learned early on to carve out his own take on it.

"When I first started making dub techno, I sent out some demos and three different labels came back to me saying, 'This is cool, but you're basically just copying somebody else,'" Moeller recalls. "Obviously they were referring to Rhythm & Sound and Maurizio, and that affected me. I thought, 'This is really something to keep in mind if you want to make your own mark as a musician.'"

This was the early days, before dub techno grew as a genre with a defined sound and a network of labels and artists. Motivated by that initial feedback, Moeller shaped his own individual approach which has permeated his work ever since. Even as his tools and techniques have evolved, Moeller is the kind of artist who displays a clear idea of what he wants to achieve with his music, and he's prolific with it. His catalogue of solo work and collaborations is vast, and yet it all hangs together very naturally. This remains true for his recent gear shift to 170.

"I think it's a natural evolution of my own sound and production techniques," Moeller says of his new direction. "When I started working at this tempo, it just hit me like, 'Wow, I have so much freedom.'"

Although the percussion scattered across this new music seems to reference drum & bass, Moeller never set out to create a specific interpretation of the genre. In fact, he wasn't thinking of drums at all.

"The idea was to make ambient music at 170," he reveals. "I didn't even think of classifying it yet. I just picked a few bits of analog gear and some pedals, created these atmospheres and played some chords on my Prophet 5 desktop module or the U-he Diva soft synth. Adding the drums was always the final step in the process, and then I would just multi-track everything into [Live]."

For the pads in particular, Moeller started with the variety of tools he uses to find a chord progression he likes. These include free MIDI plugin Ripchord as well as paid-for Max For Live devices Chord-o-mat and Chordimist — all of them help point the way towards melodic composition. 

"Once I figure out the chord and scale I start building up different sounds, recording them and saving them in the project folder," Moeller explains. "I try to get as big a variety of tones as I can using that chord. Once I have between five and 10 unique sounds I will then use as many instances as needed of Live's Sampler to create an atmosphere that ebbs and flows using filters, reverbs and echoes. Another great device for adding character to atmospheres is the PitchLoop89 device which allows you to shift the pitch separately for the left and right channels."

As well as exploring different ways of processing pads and textures in this latest stage of his creative evolution, Moeller also found a new set of tools to create drum sounds unlike anything he'd used previously. In particular, the Lorre-Mill Double Knot became synonymous with the new material he was working on. The Double Knot is a unique West Coast-style twin oscillator monosynth geared towards rhythmic drum synthesis, and he used it to create some of the distinctive one-shots and drum loops in the sample pack which accompanies this feature.

 "What makes [the Double Knot] unique is there's all kinds of cross-modulation going on, so when you turn one dial it'll affect something else," Moeller explains. "Nothing's labeled, but it's such a small instrument that after a certain amount of time you can figure out where you're going with it. You can use it for bass, leads and percussion, or you can get into insanely wild sci-fi sounds. It's crazy what you can do with this thing."

Jamming out the drums to capture a live feel is crucial to Moeller's process, and he'll happily record as many takes as needed to give him enough material to work with in the editing and mixing stage. One key element that comes in this later stage is subtly shifting drum parts around so they're not perfectly in sync. "I like drums to sound a little ramshackle and loose," he explains. 

From there, Live's native devices such as Echo, Reverb, Filter Delay and Vocoder are just some of the tools he applies to add modulation and movement to percussion sounds. He also stresses the value of audio effect racks to edge more distinctive character into his sounds.

"The audio effects racks are a goldmine for unique sounds and rhythms," he points out. "I love using Noise Space, A Larger Sky, Backing Strings, and the Echo Factory and Fuzz [Effects] racks.

As you can hear from the loops and one shots included in Moeller's sample pack, the Double Knot's distinctive analogue zaps and pops make for some very original sounding drums even without any processing, but there are other more familiar percussive hits which sneak into the tracks on Further. The submerged, rattling snare snaking its way through 'Rambler Blues' has a familiar junglist tonality, and it's played with the choppy, freeform spirit of the early pioneers pushing their Akai samplers to the limit. For Moeller, who was a drummer in bands in college, it made sense to bring the tactile playability of a Roland drum pad into his jamming process and experiment with other sequencing methods to trigger more 'classic' drum sounds.

"I slice up breaks in Simpler constantly," he explains, "and experiment with triggering them with different sequencers. One of the reasons I got the Roland drum pad was so I can hook it up to a Drum Rack and bang out my own breaks." 

He also shows off the expressive quality of his drumming in the Dub Drum Stems he put together for the sample pack, which feature rolling takes of live drum sounds running through a heavily processed signal chain.

"I've been doing live dubbing and drums with the drum pad and then processing it with this Hypnosis unit from Dreadbox," Moeller explains. "It's a delay, spring reverb and chorus all in one, and it can go from subtle to insane results really easily."

Despite the tempo and broken rhythms, you're more likely to hear these kinds of splashy percussion sounds than explicit drum & bass tropes on the Samurai Music releases. The staccato wobble bass on 'Urban Cosmos' is a pointed exception, but even that comes flanked by wispy, distant pads and echo chamber drums shaping out a shadowy labyrinth of negative space. For the most part, the sound is a sparse and mysterious inversion of conventional drum & bass. Even the first experiments Moeller tried at 170, which are now coming out as the Blue Moon EP on ESP Institute, are relatively leftfield, mellow meditations.

As the bass loops in his sample pack demonstrate, Moeller is more than capable of making 'classic' drum & bass sounds. Alongside his artist production work, he also has a busy sideline in producing sample packs and sync music for professional audio libraries. "Through sample packs and writing for this bespoke music thing I think I've really widened my understanding of production techniques," he points out, "so every time I make music the well of knowledge I can draw from to write a track is almost overwhelming." 

Moeller is also quick to point out this line of work, where accuracy and very specific results are key, is completely independent from his own musical expression. On the tracks for Vacuum and Further, he went to great lengths to avoid obvious tropes like breakdowns, build-ups and drops you would usually associate with drum & bass.

"Because I spend a significant amount of time trying to make those sorts of drops for a brief I've been given, with my own stuff I'm constantly trying to not fall prey to obvious strategies," he reveals. And yet, on tracks like 'Repercussions' understated surges of energy manifest through pronounced reverb swells, noisy delay feedbacks or kick drums quietly departing and returning. It's a subtle approach which suits the overall restraint in the sound Moeller has sculpted.

"Say I've got all the gear going and 16 mono signals going into Live," he explains., "I'll jam for 20 minutes and record everything, and while I'm jamming I will try and create as much movement and motion — with the bass and the frequencies and the elements — so that I have as much to work with as possible when I'm doing the arranging. A lot of the time you're hearing stuff I've done consciously while doing the jam, and when you're in the moment, adjusting the mix or the decay on a reverb to create a drop can be so powerful."

From the synthesised drums to the oddball processing, the subtle threads of modulation to the sideways approach to drops, this combination of curious elements have all fed into Moeller making some of the most expressive and adventurous music of his career to date. The new framework of a different BPM helped form a clear purpose for his music, and he's keen to build on that sense of intention. In 2024 he was approached to record an album by UK label Quiet Details, whose brief to every artist is to create an audio interpretation of the label's name. For Moeller, this conceptual framework inspired him to make an album in a rapid two-week spell during the peak of a summer heatwave. 

"I've recently discovered there's two ways for me to work," he explains. "One is to start from scratch with no ideas and just let the instruments and my mood dictate where things go. But if like with Quiet Details there's a solid concept, things can move really quickly. Albums are such strange things now in this culture of streaming and limited attention. To inspire people to go and listen to a full album properly these days, you need to come with something."

As well as hinting towards more concept-driven work in the future, Moeller acknowledges the simple fact of his tempo shift as bringing a clear focus to his work in the past year. At a time when stylistic boundaries hold less relevance over electronic music, his progression from linear techno production has allowed for albums like Signals on Constellation Tatsu, a more ambient, equally adventurous record where fractured rhythms and negative space once again take his music in new directions.

"I feel like these albums I've done over the last 12 months are years ahead of things I've done in the past," he enthuses. "There were things I did in the past that turned out just amazing, and they've stood the test of time, but back then I didn't know why. Now, I understand why."

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Text and Interview: Oli Warwick
Photos courtesy of Brendon Moeller