Futureproofing #23: An interview with Ben Bondy
The American artist talks teaching (and learning) music, cringe, and the creative process.
Edited by Tom Gledhill
Ben Bondy is part of an informal (and very online) network of artists who make ambient music laced with pop, rock, techno, and the avant-garde. Think labels like West Mineral Ltd., Motion Ward, or 3XL, which is run by Bondy’s partner Shy (AKA Special Guest DJ). These labels have helped change the story of ambient and experimental electronic music over the last seven years into something aglow with warmth, marked by condensation, human fingerprints, and above all, a sense of humor.
The humor is what I love most about Bondy’s music specifically. It’s not ha-ha funny, but it plays with clichéd tropes, lowbrow aesthetics and jokey references in a manner that might feel like trolling if it weren’t so earnest, which is a line I love to toe myself, too. That heart-on-sleeve quality is the foundation of Bondy’s new (and best) album. XO Salt Llif3 is his singer-songwriter record, made in a transitional period where he felt like spilling his guts. The album sounds gorgeous, but it wasn’t even finished properly—what came out last month was an in-progress version that Bondy was stuck with after a catastrophic hard drive failure. It’s lush and deeply layered for what amounts to a demo album, which makes his talent for making intricate, complex music seem almost effortless.
XO Salt Llif3 is Bondy at his most intimate, and his most adventurous. The album brings together the laptopcore detail of his previous solo records, the melodic electronics of shinetiac (his project with Pontiac Streator), and the emo proclivities of Kevin (his band with Mister Water Wet). Though the record is full of love songs, fear songs, spoken word pieces and meditative instrumentals, it’s actually a pop album—one whose borders are blown out and smudged into instinct shapes. Or, in dance music terms, Organ Tapes if he was more into shoegaze and William Basinski.
There’s also a surprising amount of slide guitar (courtesy of multi-instrumentalist more eaze), which makes the music swell with more straightforward emotion than we're used to from Bondy. Listening for the first time, my thought “is this country?,” which made me feel kind of crazy, until Bondy himself brought it up. The slide guitar is a hint at Bondy’s love of what he calls “cringe music,” or in this case specifically, mainstream country pop artists like Morgan Wallen and Luke Combs. But I don’t think Bondy’s music is cringe (nor is the slide guitar playing, which is beautiful and full of feeling), even when it leans into the idea of cringe. Besides, cringe is in the eye of the beholder.
There’s nothing all that ironic about Bondy. He speaks from the heart and makes music from there, too. If he’s referencing some other music, or dropping it into a DJ set, it’s because he loves it, not because he wants to make fun of it. But there’s also something deeper going on under the surface, taking the most sophomoric of music (or at least music associated with a certain Middle American audience), and bringing into a world defined by its queerness and otherness. In the interview below, Bondy says what brought him together most with his collaborators was just “being gay on the internet.”
The community is the other definitive aspect of Bondy’s music. Even if this is his most personal heart-on-sleeve record yet, it was made by a village: more eaze, Ultrafrog, Shy, Nick León, and many more. It’s the endlessly collaborative nature of this open-borders crew that allows the scene to move so fast and develop so quickly, because no one is really working alone. That’s the same impulse that drives Bondy to be a music production teacher, his drive to help other people express themselves and connect them to other people around the world who might have similar interests. As he himself said about the new album, “I didn’t think I could complete all these ideas that I wanted to have in here. I couldn’t do it on my own.”
We spoke a few days before the album came out over Zoom, with Bondy fresh off a weekend at Honcho Campout. We talked a bit about the album, but a lot about the creative process, teaching and learning, and, of course, country music.
Also, while I’m here, I implore you to check out 3XL’s other recent releases. Special Guest DJ’s album Our Fantasy Complex is made of timespace-continuum-shredding ambient loops, Stone’s Dream Curtain Eternally Gentle is rich, luscious ‘90s electronica and trip-hop, and Cortex Of Light’s ILLUMINOTECNICA is an unbelievable record of IDM that connects the dots from Autechre to Mark Fell to gay ambient music.
The interview
I’ve seen you advertising music production classes a lot on Instagram. What’s up with that?
I started doing it when I moved to Berlin, because I was like, “OK, I don't have a visa yet, I don't know what to do.” I was getting messages online from people asking how I did certain things or get certain sounds—but to me, more than techniques or process, I wanted to just teach people how to flow. How to approach music without feeling like they need to do things a certain way, or be involved with a certain group of people, or be putting music out on record labels. I wanted to teach people that you can make anything out of nothing. That’s what me and my friends’ practices stem from. Kind of like back then when the Kansas City homies were starting Terry Radio, or tape labels. You can just start anything. I want to teach people that inspiration can be a constant thing, and you can be in a constant state of creative motion. I know a lot of people have these bursts of energy where they can make an EP or an album over the span of a month. For me, it’s an every day kind of thing.
I’m a believer that soaking up and just being a filter for everything that’s coming at you, media-wise and environment-wise, you can create something very personal, but also something that touches other people. The way I teach this class is basically asking people to pull up with a folder of sounds or music they like, that they fuck with, recordings they’ve made, tracks they’ve started. Then show them how I make music. Like when I’m jamming in VirtualDJ, which is what I use as one of my DAWs. Showing people how you can make a track in 15 minutes and pull from literally whatever sound sources.
I also would make group chats for these classes and people started sharing with each other. Some of these people didn’t even have one online friend who has the same interest as them. So creating these micro-communities, which is why I do it as a group, has been beautiful. All the classes stay in touch, and the people collaborate with each other. I really love doing it.
Do you have any kind of music education yourself?
I grew up playing violin. I started when I was like six years old—it was the product of Korean mom vibes, basically: piano or violin. And my sister was already playing violin. So I was like, OK, this makes sense for me, and I was vibing with it. As a child, I was really entrenched in classical music, but then in fourth grade, I bought Enema Of The State, which was an “oh shit” moment. Like, “OK, there’s fucking crazy music.” So I wanted to play guitar. I took a month of classical guitar lessons and the teacher told my mom that he was just babysitting me and I was only playing rock and punk songs. I still played violin all through my childhood, though, and that’s how I ended up getting into college. I was in chamber groups and string quartets and I was very competitive with it.
Music was my safe haven at school. I was a big scene kid—I started going to hardcore shows when I was 12 or 13, and all my friends were in their 20s. So I started to play in bands and book shows when I was really young, doing that two or three nights a week in New Jersey. So my teenage years were all violin and classical music and hardcore shows. These things are still at the center of what I do with music. I find the same beauty and energy in raving that I find in hardcore, but I also find the same compositional and exploratory parts of playing violin in that too.
Does your classical training inform the way you make music now at all?
For the most part, no. I can’t even read music. I can tell you what notes are, and I can jam, and match the key or whatever. When I first started putting music out it was coming from more of a place of playing in bands. Then I moved to Brooklyn and started producing stuff more from the angle of the noise world, going down this path of being an “experimental artist” or whatever. Then I realized you could be a dumbass and watch stupid YouTube videos and reality TV and get inspired by that. I had a revelation in 2021—or maybe 2022—I was playing really heady live sets. And then I started making pop edits, because I wanted to challenge people, take something you probably think is ugly or gaudy, and make it beautiful and recontextualize that. It broke down these notions of where I could take my music, and also changed my mind about what I wanted to be like as a DJ as well.
You said you’re in a constant state of creative flow. Do you have to do anything to maintain that?
This has only really been a practice of mine for maybe the past five or so years. I've lived so many different ways over the past five years, I've worked full time and been back and forth between Berlin and New York. I've also been unemployed for years at a time twice in the past five years, and I've been traveling and playing gigs all over. So it’s hard to say that there’s one way of living that makes it possible. It’s more about attitude. I’m constantly, actively listening to things, even at the grocery store and some stupid song comes on, or if I’m taking an Uber and the radio or the driver plays some shit and I Shazam it. It’s also constantly talking about these things—when you find new music or sounds, sharing them with people and seeing what they think. Or just getting hyped on things with other people.
A big part of it is collaboration. For me, that’s been a big source of what keeps my fire going. It’s what my friends are doing. Or when people send me ideas or want to get together to work on music. Even if it yields something unusable, it's always valuable to me, because that has always been a massive part of my flow state—where I'm bouncing ideas off of other people, and we are flowing, and that inspires me to do things a bit differently on my own, to pull from something I’ve learned from someone else. I’m always trying to pick things up and then trying to translate them into something else.
It’s almost become a tic for me to work on music. Like, OK, I’m not doing anything right now, I might as well make music, or when I’m super busy, making music is my time to have a moment for myself.
I often think about Pauline Oliveros and deep listening. Listening to everything around you, and then the world becomes your instrument, and all you have to do is try making something. Whether you share it with anyone else or not doesn’t really matter. The pure joy that I get out of making music is what keeps me inspired.
Do you ever think about what kind of music you want to make before you sit down and make it?
There’s certain moments where I feel like I want to emulate something. Like with The Blessed Kitty, we wanted it to be dubstep at first. Even though it ended up not being dubstep at all. Even when I try to approach things with a certain idea, it either doesn’t work at all, and then I get bored, or it ends up being totally different.
With XO Salt Llif3, I wasn’t even planning on making any music. I wanted to take a break. But then I blew up my life in New York and left. I moved to my parents house for three weeks. My dad is in a cover band, and he leaves their gear in his basement, so I just locked myself in his music room and made all of this stuff that just came out. It just appeared. I recorded almost all of the instrumentals there. Then I moved to Philly in December 2023 and moved in with my friend Pontiac Streator. One night I had to go to New York to play a party and finish moving out of my old apartment, and while I was doing that, I finished the lyrics over the span of two days and went back to Philly and recorded them all. It was just an explosion—it just happened, almost out of my control.
This was also a time that music was making me feel really empowered. So that’s why I brought my voice up so high in the mix, and had clear lyrics for the first time. I wanted to be fully myself, where before I would bury these feelings and thoughts. I used to bury a lot of secrets, or just leave little breadcrumbs in my music, emotionally. When I made this one, it felt cathartic to be upfront with the songwriting. It plays more like a mixtape—all of the tracks are a different style—because I didn’t set out to make anything specific. At first, I was like, “Am I making a country record?”
Yes! Some songs are very country.
This actually clicked for me when I started touring. I remember the first time I went to Berlin and my friends were kind of wigged out by my obsession with cringe music. I wanted to bring this American attitude—or what felt like a New York attitude—to other places. So when I started making XO Salt Llif3, when I was moving out of New York and moving to Berlin, I thought maybe it would be my country record. It’s all the sounds I hear on the streets, or especially driving in the suburbs, or at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. I wanted to find a way to connect all these sounds together. That ended up being this thread that tied all the tracks together. I’m literally sampling some Luke Combs lyrics.
Do you like that kind of mainstream country music, or is it more of a fascination?
I’ve had some incredibly deep moments with some of that music. A couple summers ago, Morgan Wallen’s music was really touching me. And Luke Combs’ cover of “Fast Car” really fucked me up for so long. So when I was making the album I was listening to a lot of that stuff. I do love it, but it also is a fascination—a trope I was interested in playing with as an experiment. Like, what could I do with those influences? Especially when DJing. For me, the practices of making music and DJing are so intertwined, and really inspire each other. I could feel the way that playing a Luke Combs track out would fuck people up, would make people cry.
It was really nice working with more eaze on that country-ish stuff, because she’s really a masterful slide guitarist.
There are a lot of collaborators on the album.
Once I realized that this was basically a singer-songwriter pop album, I didn’t think I could complete all these ideas that I wanted to have in here. I couldn’t do it on my own. As much as this is a solo record, it’s also a record by everyone in my life. I wanted to have as many special people involved as I could. Even down to my friend Sean who used to be in the band Perfect Pussy and is more versed in producing rock music, letting us track some bass at their house in Philly. It’s ultimately a massive community effort. It felt like rallying all my friends together to make something.
So how did you end up in this community?
I met people online, on Tumblr or Facebook. It’s funny, because I was living in New York, and all of my friends when I moved there were older gay men. I was 21 and they were in their late 30s and 40s, and were more into ‘80s music, an old head tip. I was just getting into house music then, and more into like, ambient jazz, Fourth World-type music or whatever you want to call it. There wasn’t really this kind of music we make now back then, so we were all sharing what I call YouTubecore music. In 2017, Shy asked me to make a mix for Terry Radio, which is how I connected with all the Kansas City and Chicago heads. I made a crazy mix that was very weird and noisy, a lot of my own stuff, very submerged. Oh, and the c- series that year too. I probably had like 50 SoundCloud followers at the time and Ryan was happy to put me on. Also, honestly, it’s just from being gay on the internet.
You said “YouTubecore.” What does that mean to you?
Just like, the YouTube channels that would be posting very specific and obscure tape music, or archival stuff—and all that lo-fi house music as well. And I was discovering deep house and disco, and a lot of Jon Hassell-type stuff. And then we were watching people rediscovering stuff on YouTube and then pressing it to vinyl. One of the dudes I was working with at the distro was a source for the Vito Ricci record they ended up reissuing. I was very entrenched in all this stuff, and with all these people at the time—the Terry Radio crew and the c- crew and all these Midwest internet friends I had.
What are your music consumption habits like now?
I’ve been getting annoyed by music on SoundCloud. I used to be able to spend all day on there, but now I kind of just listen to the same album over and over again for periods of time. I have been going back in time a bit, which happened to me last summer as well. I’ve been listening to a lot of the prog emo shit like Dance Gavin Dance, or Saosin, or Circa Survive and Underoath. It’s funny too because Brian Leeds [Huerco S/Loidis] has been staying with me and Shy when he comes to Berlin recently, and he lives with Lori in Philadelphia now in my former room, which was also Ulla’s former room. It’s cute because even if we’re not talking about what we’re listening to, him and I are on the same page. I feel like we’re both in our scene kid era again.
Does what you're listening to at any given time kind of affect the music you're making at that time?
When I first started releasing music, I would get obsessed with a certain style or whatever I was listening to at the time, and think, “OK, I’m gonna try and make this.” Then once I started working on more sample-based stuff—especially the Shinetiac stuff—what I’m listening to not only inspires what I’m making but becomes part of it. Then again, what I’m making right now is very much more inspired by how I feel about the world than what I’m listening to. I’m making a lot of really dark, heavy, reflective stuff. I’m way less inspired by actual music and more about how the world feels right now, and it’s making me delve back much deeper into the techniques of making music, getting lost in synthesis and how to translate ideas into sound again. After all this singing and playing live, going back into that zone. But I’m also working on a new Kevin record with Iggy, which is very inspired by all that stuff I said I was listening to. It’s a lot more fully-formed now, what we want that band to sound like—more pure slowcore, Midwest emo vibes.
Does having all these different projects ever overwhelm you?
Sometimes. Like when I was getting ready for this tour I got a bit overwhelmed, because we're still working on our Shinetiac live set, and we’re scoring a friend’s dance performance, and we’re working on my live set, all on the road. And then digging for tracks for DJing. Sometimes it does paralyze me. But that’s where I need to be—I need to have the right amount of stuff on my plate so it feels like a lot, because I enter my flow state. I need to be busy, even if it’s just sitting at home with the TV on but I’m working on music or digging for tracks or something. I just like the stimulation, I guess.
Has there ever been a time when you wanted to make music, but you just couldn’t?
Actually, all the time. That’s the thing, right? One of my old roommates [Sam Sodomsky] told me that he was a singer-songwriter, but then he ended up becoming a writer for Pitchfork. But ever since he was 13 or 14, he writes and records an album pretty much every month. I was like, “I don’t understand how you do this.” And I wanted to be like him. Where I’m just like, fuck it. This is an album. This is an EP. This is whatever it is. He told me that making music was kind of like working out. You do it some days, not every day, but you do have to do it regularly. And sometimes it fucking sucks and, and sometimes it’s really fucking good and makes you feel amazing. For me, that’s a big part of it. There will be periods when I have ADHD paralysis or feel burned out and wishing I could focus more on making music, or when I feel stale, or like I don’t have anything to say. And it’s a struggle to get out of that headspace. Like last summer, when I quit my job to move, I was making lots of music but I wasn’t sure I liked any of it. I think that’s why I’m constantly reaching out and trying to hit people up to work on stuff, or see if people have some stems or if they want to do vocals, to collaborate. That’s what gets me unstuck.
Are you in a better place musically this summer?
Definitely. The Kevin record has been coming together really well, that hasn’t happened so naturally in a couple years. And I’ve been doing a lot of one-off tracks that might come out on some other labels. But what feels truly liberating is this album coming out, which I’ve been holding onto for so long. Last year, when my computer died, I lost all the original working files for the record, and I hadn’t done a mixdown or any detailing, or re-recording vocals. Some of the guitar was literally recorded on my MacBook mic, and I was planning on redoing it. These were basically demos, and I had all these plans to get friends to mix it and do some more processing and all this stuff.
So when I lost the working files, I threw my hands up and just thought, “Fuck this, I’m done.” I wanted to give up on it. But then I listened to some of the bounces I had done previously, and me and Shy thought, "let’s just get it mastered and see what it sounds like". And it came back sounding really good! It took me a while to feel like I was ready to let this album go, because of all the personal stuff in it. It made me pause for a minute. But it was also massively holding me up, so having it out makes me feel super liberated to do whatever the fuck I want to do again. I’m probably going to take a bit of a break from putting music out under my own name and dig into some aliases and do more collaborative work. Putting a pause on Ben Bondy as a project, and just being Ben Bondy as a person.