Quaint Conversations With Craftal

Ian McKenna, better known by his producer moniker of Craftal, has been creating breathtaking and thought provoking music across the last seven years and running. Craftal employs a diverse range of influences to sculpt his own impactful and refreshing sound, and has carved out his own space amidst the backdrop of psychedelic art. His releases on labels like Danktronics, Headroom, Wormhole, and Lost in Sound have opened doors for Ian like a revolving kaleidoscope. His drive propelled him onto the Sub.mission team at the Black Box in Denver, where he is currently a sound design instructor, and his knack for novel compositions keeps his discography in constant rotation.

Ian’s album Lullabytes, released by The Rust Music in 2020, features a heavy focus on glitch-hop and downtempo stylings, and is indicative of the maturation his catalog has undergone over the last few years. Yet, even stretching back to his earliest releases, tracks like “Nanobot Cave” and “Valley of Darkness” feature his traditional hallmarks of asynchronous arrangements and jubilant textures. Through patience and concentrated efforts, the current collection of Craftal tunes makes up for it's relative sparseness with meticulous attention to detail and overall quality, resulting in a powerful array of finely tuned tracks.

In order to get better acquainted with one of our favorite aural brainiacs, The Rust took advantage of an opportunity to talk candidly and at length about some of his artistic influences, production choices, and his potential relation to a certain 20th century psychonaut.

Alyssa Barnhill: Where did you get your name? Where does that come from?

Craftal: It's a portmanteau of the words fractal and craft, plus it's just a clever, quick, little switch of the C and the F.

Barnhill: Is that related to how you approach your music?

Craftal: Mostly it just came from when I was 20, that's when I really started doing musical stuff. I was just super into fractals, psychedelic culture, art, music and stuff like that, and my dad is actually a mathematician, who does fractal art.

Barnhill: Oh really? Anything we may have heard of?

Craftal: Yeah, actually he was one of the illustrators on Benoit Mandelbrot’s “The Fractal Geometry of Nature”, so fractal art has always been a part of my life, cuz I grew up with him and all that. And then the psychedelic art community, with all this digital shit that's been growing over the past 20 years, just coincided with everything that my dad helped Mandelbrot do, all the dance music and psychedelic culture stuff that I started getting into.

Barnhill: Where did you grow up?

Craftal: In Boulder.

Barnhill: Were you actively “in to” music growing up?

Craftal: I didn't really….like GET music. Like… I didn't really like... I hated all the popular music that I heard until like 6th or 7th grade, and then my sisters bought me a few CDs that I really loved. The only music I actively listened to before that was music from Nintendo games, which I only recently realized was and is a huge influence for me, and millions of other musicians who grew up with Gameboys and N64s and Playstations.

Barnhill: What were the albums?

Craftal: Demon Days by Gorillaz, The Process of Belief by Bad Religion, and technically the self titled Franz Ferdinand album, but I didn't really take to it like the other two.

Barnhill: What are you listening to lately?

Craftal: These days, mostly friends, which is pretty cool. Keota, Jade Cicada, Tipper, Woulg, Billain, Mr. Bill, 5AM. If it's well made, it's well made. Lately I have been going back to middle school and high school stuff and listening to Bad Religion. My sister got me this book for Christmas: Do What You Want: The Story of Bad Religion.

Barnhill: I have heard really good things about that book.

Craftal: Yeah, they are the only punk band that I like. That I have ever liked. Because they’re like philosophical punk. Even in this book they detail how they never wanted to be topical, they never wanted to be like against any specific administration, it's always just been about people thinking for themselves.

Barnhill: What’s your favorite synth or plug-in right now?

Craftal: These days I really like Vital, which just came out a couple months ago. Pretty fucking great. Mostly before that it was just stock ableton stuff, like off operator. Super versatile.

Barnhill: What do you like about it?

Craftal: There's a lot of stuff I love about Vital. I love that any LFO can be turned into an FM oscillator. I love that there's a stereo option for individual modulators. I love how easy it is to understand what's going on visually. I love how powerful the remap matrix is, although I haven't gotten deep into that yet. And I love how it shows how ridiculously overpriced some soft synths are by allowing you to use the whole synth for free. And it just sounds damn good.

Barnhill: Do you enjoy traditional song writing?

Craftal: I usually start with a melody but sometimes an interesting rhythm can turn into a melody. I like music where a catchy melody isn't the focus, but I think having good melodies is what makes most music memorable or timeless.

Barnhill: Would you describe that as freeform?

Craftal: Uh... I don’t know! At some point, yes, because everything is freeform until you commit to it.

Barnhill: What's your writing process? Walk me through it.

Craftal: Usually it starts with a melody. I grew up playing piano and singing. If it doesn't have a good melody, I'm just like, psht. You could have the best texture, sound, whatever in the world, but it's probably not going to be remembered for very long if it doesn't have some melody to go with it. And i'm still working on that because mostly my songs just kind of revolve around a catchy melody and lots of sound design, but i'm still working on the emotions, the journey of it. For me, yeah, it mostly starts with a melody but it can start wherever. Whatever turns the gears.

Barnhill: How much time do you give to a track or song? An album\EP?

Craftal: Too much time for both. Some of my best songs, I made in like two to three days... But that doesn't happen too often.

Barnhill: Is that a moment you walk into?

Craftal: That's the flow state that all artists try to get into. I don't know how to engineer it, yet. Or just get into it sometimes. Most of the shit I make takes like at least a month or something. I have quite tangible ADHD, so I have two modes: Hyperfocus on one single thing for 10-72 hours straight and go big mode, or shallowly get caught up in twenty different things that have nothing to do with making music for days, weeks, and months. I usually fall into the latter mode, which is a lifelong struggle for me. It’s tough for me to create art when there’s so much amazing art that’s just as good, if not better than your own, that is such a joy to observe, consume, and digest. I feel like an asshole if I don’t, because I’d like it if people did the same with my art. Or at least, that’s how I justify playing video games for dozens of hours.

Barnhill: Not every song has a purpose or underlying statement, but songs like “Testing”…, it feels like there may be a “musician-audience” conversation going on? Was there a direct message?

Craftal: I'm trying to think about that more lately actually. That was my first experiment with Vital, that synth I mentioned. So, it was a test with Vital, but it's also a test with playing with words and meaning. And trying to have something more interesting and concrete than just like, “Hey, look at these cool sounds''. And even though it's still “Hey, look at these cool sounds.”, “This is all a test” can be as deep as you want it to be.

Barnhill: Very true. So is there a reason when you are making music?

Craftal: The other day I was just humming a melody in the shower and then later that day, I turned it into a beat. Some say that music is always around us, just hanging in the ether. Whether in “the air” or in the emergent networks of your brain, it’s just waiting for you to tune in and open the faucet. Technically true or not, it certainly feels as though that's often the case. As for why, I’d say because music is a model for how to live properly, and I'm trying to align my life through music.

Barnhill: I heard something through the grapevine, that you have been a part of the new Meow Wolf exhibits here in Denver?

C: Yes, I am a collaborating artist. But I am also tentatively starting a new project focused on lyrics and more traditional songwriting.

Barnhill: Fun fact about you for the fans ?

Craftal: I can crack almost every joint in my body and Terence McKenna is not dad! He's my uncle.

Barnhill: No way? Really?

Craftal: No.

Cracking into the Craftal state of mind, it's no wonder that his music permeates with a natural creative pulse. The fusion of ideas, modes, and motifs across his catalog are the standout elements that give such a powerful draw to his art, and reflect the inner machinations of the personality behind the music of the Craftal project. Where he goes from here is anyone's guess, but we're all eyes and ears on the course of his career.

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