Get to know Deepchord's Rod Modell, the Detroit Artist Who Still Wants to Loop 'Till Infinity

Detroit-bred sound designer Rod Modell started making experimental electronic music in the 1980s, in a time just before techno took over the conversation. But it wasn't until the edge of the new Millennium that Modell's music started to come out, most notably as half of the duo Deepchord (long since his solo project), who combined his obsession with ambient sounds with a narcotic dubby beat that many were eager to compare to the the beloved sound of Berlin's Basic Channel.

In the subsequent 15 years he's released 25 albums under various names and working with various artists—Echospace, Waveform Transmission—all of which offer a similar singular vision of endlessly looping ambience, usually propelled by a resting heartbeat of a rhythm. His latest release, Ultraviolet Music, is his third album for Scottish imprint Soma (typically home to more forceful techno by owners Slam, as well as Funk D'Void, H-Foundations and, oh yeah, Daft Punk).

Enjoy the 70-odd minutes that make up disc two of this double album, although as we learned from talking to Modell in the interview below, the division is merely a convenient convention. Time is an abstract.

THUMP: The new album is a double disc, but your music seems to often drift to infinity. How do you decide when something is done? Can you tell how long should a loop, a song, an album last?
Deepchord: Most tracks on a CD start out as 45­60 minute pieces that get edited for the album. I have a hard time with this. I enjoy making a loop and letting them play for hours or days in my house. Plus, I always start with the ambient parts when making a song. I never start with a kick drum or bass line. Those are just dropped in last minute and are the least important—they are just a metronome for the ambient elements. In a perfect world, an album would last 12 hours and be easy to ignore as it played. Good music messes with one's perception of time. I view each song as a little sound sculpture that can be looped forever at low volume.

This album is said to return to the more narcotic sounds of previous work. Was it a matter of intent or process that brought you back to that?
It wasn't contrived. I record at a pretty steady pace of 2­3 songs per month. I record them and just file them away, and every year or two, compile a collection of the ones that I like the best. Sometimes I'm looking at a huge pile of ambient music. Sometimes a pile of more 4/4 stuff. But as I'm making it, I never strive to create a particular sound or style. I just let it come out, and maybe in a year, I'll have all ambient, and maybe I'll have dance music, or most often it's something in between.

The title feels very 80s alternative­/new wave to me (maybe just Ultravox, perhaps). You were active in the Detroit music scene back then. How did those sounds effect what you've subsequently done in the realm of techno?
Yeah, it does kind of feel like that. Actually, if there was an inspiration for Ultraviolet Music, it was the etheric plane and stuff that's around us that we can't see. Like radio transmission waves and the spiritual world. During the period that these recordings were made, I was fascinated with shortwave number stations, abandon transmitters, and things like that. I like the whole "ghosts in the wires theme." I think "Ultraviolet Music" embodies this. Things around us that are slightly outside of our normal perception. This is a good way to describe the ideology of the album too. There are lots of processed field recordings swirling around in the background and little sonic occurrences that the listener doesn't realize they are hearing until after they're gone. Psychoacoustic experiments set to a kick drum. At the end of the day, I'm an ambient sound­ designer from the 80s. I make sonic atmospheres to get lost in. I have much more in common with artists like Hafler Trio and labels like Staalplaat than anything techno related. In the 80s, I was making weird "music" with processed shortwave radios and homemade analog drone machines.

Somewhere along the line, the techno fraternity adopted me. In the 80s, no one liked what I was doing. It was very unusual. Then the techno scene was born around me in Detroit, and they were extremely open-minded and actually liked things that were unique and different. They took me in as part of their family and suddenly I had an audience. I was being invited to play at their events. So I try to be nice in return and give them a 4/4 kick and bass line. I feel a sense of debt to techno. Without techno, I'd be a recluse living in the countryside, making sounds with tone generators and guitar pedals with no audience.

Even though I don't really consider myself a techno artist, techno gave me a forum to display my sound paintings. "Techno people" are extraordinary. They seem to be on another plane of consciousness. They appreciate things the average person can't. They seem enlightened. If techno was around in the 1960's, it would definitely be the soundtrack for Andy Warhol's Factory. The Velvet Underground wouldn't have had a chance.

I also grew up around Detroit and thought I had heard every Electrifying Mojo anecdote there is. But you told a tale recently about hearing him play the same loop for over 20 minutes one night. How did something like that possibly fly on the airwaves?
I was ecstatic when I heard it. It was a complete paradigm shift for me. It might have been the moment when I realize that music doesn't need to be presented in the traditional 3­ 1/2-minute song format. All of a sudden, I was blown away by the potential of this. For the first time, I wanted to make music. When I thought music needed to be a 4-minute song, I had no interest. It opened my mind to the possibilities. Hopefully others felt similarly.

I'm sure some listeners hated it. They probably thought he flipped out doing this, but it was brilliant. I know it's been said over and over, but that guy (Mojo) was 20 years ahead of his time, and I think the radio station knew this and allowed him more freedoms with his programming.

You've been more vocal than most about distancing yourself from Detroit, calling it a negative place. Have you witnessed any of the renaissance that everyone is talking about?
The only thing I've seen is what [Tresor owner] Dimitri Hegemann is doing with his Detroit­ Berlin Connection, and it's good. I think he's got the ability and ideas to pull it together. Sometimes we need to look at old problems in completely new ways to find a solution, and he's doing that. I have faith in him and his team. But Detroit isn't very receptive to new ideas, so we'll see how far he can go. I have more faith in Dimitri than Detroit.

Other than this, I really haven't witnessed any renaissance. Detroit's biggest renaissance came in the mid­-1990s when Dennis Archer was mayor of the city. He changed the landscape of the city more than anyone in history. In the 1980s, Detroit's massive Fox Theatre was a porno theater. The city looked like a dystopian, post apocalyptic war zone. I kind of liked it better like that. When Archer became mayor, he cleaned up the city, initialized new housing projects in the core, and consequently started bringing people back in. Since Archer left office, Detroit slipped back into a state of despair.Now we're trying to get things back to half what they were when Archer was in office. It's too depressing for me. I wish everyone good luck.

Everyone always asks you about your studio set­-up. I'll spare you, unless there is something particular that we should know for this album.
I don't speak much about this because I truly and sincerely think it makes no difference and can only do harm. In the early days, I would discuss it, and I found it had a negative effect on artists who were just getting into making this music. They thought… "well there you go… I need all that stuff to make this music" and nothing could be farther from the truth. You can make a great record with a used $150 synth and some cheap Electro Harmonix pedals.

Either that, or I became technical support. If I mentioned a piece of gear that I used, I would get emails from people asking me about how to do things with that piece, or how to fix it or whatever. Or people thought I was bragging or something. I hated it.

I had all this stuff in the 80s and 90s, and when artists started doing concerts with a laptop, I thought it was great. It was the future. I'm a sound designer, not a musician and realizing this opened doors for me. I can do stuff musicians can't or shouldn't. There's been too much focus on gear lately, people should focus on the art created, not what it was created with. Imagine an interview in Artforum with a great sculptor, and all he's asked about it what hammer and chisel he uses. It would be bizarre.

The words "in the vein of Basic Channel" seem to forever follow you around. Does that bother you? Is there or was there ever an actual connection?
It kind of does bother me, because it's not really true. I have ultimate respect and even reverence for their work. No disrespect intended. They really took things to another realm that people back in Detroit couldn't have ever even imagined. Especially their beatless stuff. I think my music incorporates so many bigger influences, and all anyone ever mentions is BC. Wolfgang Voigt's sample-­based soundscapes are probably 3X the influence. And 1990s ambient music. Steve Roach was a bigger influence. Manuel Göttsching / Ashra were huge for me. Brian Lustmord was a big influence. I think Bandulu taught me more about incorporating dub elements than BC did.