Around 2013, Maayan Nidam stepped back from releasing music and embarked on an extended period of studio research. Despite having released two albums and numerous EPs of airtight designer house in the preceding years, she felt her sound was missing something. Rather than focusing on maintaining a release schedule, she visited her studio religiously to experiment with connecting her instruments and processors in every possible combination. "My friends would make fun of me because every time they'd call me up, I'd be in the studio and say, 'Sorry, I'm rewiring,' but I was never making music," she told me. "Yet through this process, I slowly found a way to make my sound very big and express what I always wanted."

Following 2016's Deep Under Sobriety Regime, and especially with her new album, Sea Of Thee, Nidam's music has acquired a magnetic sense of immediacy. Her performative workflow translates into a feeling of being led by a presence that's sculpting and interacting with the music as it comes into form. (There's a couch half-submerged in gear in her studio, but if you're making music, you'll need to stand). Thanks partly to a collection of bizarre guitar pedals and the processing techniques she discovered in her research, the textures and spaces in her music have become uncanny, organic, overheated and pressurised. A stronger melodic sensibility has also given her work a more imposing sense of form—take "Die Sonne Innere"'s stealth-mode bass and "Looking Through A Glassy Mind"'s gently glimmering lead.

Thanks to her commitment and research, the character in Nidam's music grew. As is so often the case, the sonic breakthrough brought with it a more relaxed, less self-critical attitude. When I visited her Berlin studio to talk through her creative process at the end of last year, she told me that the point of producing is "to enjoy, not to suffer." That feeling has become self-evident in her music and may just be its greatest strength.

How important is experimenting with signal flow to your music?

I really like to explore the different ways I can wire the machines and processors together, so I'll switch things around every six months or so. According to what combination or flow of pieces I'm using, I'll change the location of the gear and the furniture to suit, which is why I built these shelves and the pedal board some time ago.

The pedals are a big part of this process. I usually divide them into three chains. With each separate chain, the pedals are connected in series, so I'd have, say, a synth going through one and an auxiliary channel from my mixer sending other sounds into another. Obviously the selection and order of the pedals is going to have a big impact on the result. For instance, putting a saturator after a reverb will sound totally different to placing it earlier in the chain.

All three chains used to sit on the floor in the pedal board, but I found this a bit restrictive. Now I pick them up and place them next to the machine I'm using, so I can perform changes with both at the same time and get them interacting in a certain way. Pedals are perfect for this workflow where you're changing and rearranging all the time because they're so small and easy to power—my rack has all the 9V connectors I need. The wooden room we're in acts like a giant speaker, and I'm often impressed with the way the pedals help to get the sound swirling around the space. There's a real physicality and presence to it.

A lot of these don't look like standard off-the-shelf pedals.

Most of them are handmade by companies in the States. Many of them are from Portland, which seems like the capital of obscure pedals. I just love when small manufacturers get crazy with their ideas and try do something special. You end up with a lot of personality in the sound, the look, the interface. There is some Mr. Black stuff here and pieces from Earthquaker Devices, which didn't used to be available in Berlin but now they're easily accessible. I have a vintage Proco Rat distortion and other saturators, but it's mostly delay, reverb and spatial effects that move the sound in time so you can really shape what you're doing. The Rainbow Machine is really interesting for this. It's a pitch delay but it's much crazier than your typical Eventide sound with the laddering, ascending pitches. It has a switch labelled "Magic" that makes things sound like a unicorn shooting rainbows.

I tend to gravitate to designs like this. The weirder the pedal, the better. I also really like this Repeat Offender delay from STiFF Amplification, which reminds me of my original Space Echo. When I was playing live shows with a band, we needed something to help transition between tracks. So somebody would bang their guitar and I'd turn up the feedback on the Repeat Offender to create, not quite a drone, but something more atmospheric and stronger, a real wall of saturated sound.

So the appeal here is the strange, powerful sounds, but the interface and portability is just as important.

I have a bit of Eurorack stuff that I use and enjoy a lot, but pedals are just so easy. They're strong and sturdy. You can move them around, pick them up, put them somewhere else. Two cables, one power supply and that's it, you're done. They are like toys. Most of them have a lot of big knobs because they're built for guitarists who can't look in closely at the interface. So they have to be intuitive and immediate by nature.

This one with the joysticks looks particularly hands-on.

This one is insane, the Janus. It's another handmade piece that I think they build to order. You can ask them to put the inputs on the top or the sides of the pedal in order to fit with however you've set up your pedal rack. Ironically, if I'm playing guitar with it, I can't really interact with the joysticks, but when I send drums or synths to it, you can really play with it. It's a very intense sound. Most of the pedals I have really lift everything up and produce a hot, strong, very ballsy sound.

Another one I really love is the SuperMoon Chrome by Mr. Black. I have two because I take one for live shows. They made another batch a couple of years ago but for a while it was really hard to get. The cool thing about it is the reverb sways and modulates in pitch. It's beautiful because the decay never ends but the pitch droops and rises. You can go home and come back the next day and it'll still be trailing off. The Sway control makes everything sound very lonely and sad.

Great adjectives for a reverb.

Whether you're running a voice or even a bassline through it, it produces so much emotion and emphasis. When I'm using it live, I keep the decay really low so it's not too crazy. But it really adds something to the sound of the room. You never know what sort of space you'll be playing in, and they all demand different approaches to reverb.

I wanted to ask about the period around 2013 and 2014. When I was trawling through your discography I felt like your sound was beginning to develop at this point. What was going on then?

It's funny that you mention it because I was spending a lot of time in the studio in those years. My friends would make fun of me because every time they'd call me up, I'd be in the studio and say, 'Sorry, I'm rewiring,' but I was never making music. Yet through this process, I slowly found a way to make my sound very big and express what I wanted. Even though I was using similar machines before, my sound was always very small. I started experimenting with routing sounds through different chains of compressors, filters, distortions and so on. Now no machine is tracked from the direct outputs, it's always having a specific character stamped on it by the processors. Through a lot of trial and error, I arrived at this sound, which I jokingly call the "crazy amaze-y" sound.

I was also touring in a band in 2014, and I was happy to hear I could translate the power of what was happening in the studio to all sorts of settings. Even in small spaces, I could make things feel big and engulfing. So maybe that's why you heard the change in my music. It was a gradual process with the sound but also my attitude was changing. I was becoming more confident in my music. Before, I was always hiding in the sound, always taking things down. It was small and shy.

It's interesting because, with something like EQ for instance, there's this idea that you should be looking to subtract frequencies and to be wary of adding too much to the sound. But this is the process in which you stamp your own character on the music and build your own colour.

This is very true but it's also important to point out that a lot of testing went into this result. I was treating the studio like a laboratory. I'd connect this synth to that pedal to that effect and so on, all the while checking my reaction to the sound. I was trying to understand what is possible from every single combination. Obviously there is a lot of back and forth doing this, which is why it took me so long.

You'd already released a sizeable amount of music before this point. What made you stop and say, "I need to figure out a way to improve this?"

It was really just the stale feeling. Of course, this is natural in any kind of creative work. But I realised things were not exciting for me. The lucky thing was that, back then, I had plenty of time to experiment. I wasn't really striving to release anything and I was making music purely for fun. When it wasn't fun, I wasn't in the studio. I got really addicted to the process of checking out the different sound possibilities to the point where I thought I should stop making music and just work in a studio.

Apart from the distinct space and texture, your recent music also has a great deal of pressure. It's not that the dynamics are squashed, and the word "pumping" isn't quite right to describe it. It's like the background of the track is pushing up against the foreground.

Generally we'd think of routing a dry sound or group into a compressor and then add effects after it. It's no secret, but what I found is that having longer combinations of effects running into the compressor opens up another world of results. With parallel processing, first I'll send the dry sound through a reverb and then into the compressor. I'll set it to compress the shit out of it, which flattens and changes the depth and overall mood of the space. Then I send it to a Moog filter, where I'll drive the signal more and play with the resonance and cut-off frequency until it's adapted to the overall colour of the track. I'll bring this up on a fader until it's about half of the original level. It gives things warmth but the background also becomes weirdly sinister because the tails of the reverbs are closer to the front of the sound.

Reverb before compression is interesting. It's almost like a rock engineer over-compressing the overhead mics of a drum kit.

I also hear it in older hip-hop. The sound is breathing but it's also a bit claustrophobic.

I've noticed there's no computer in here at all.

I am recording a lot to this Tascam MK112 cassette deck. It is a pretty important step in achieving my sound, or making it more like I think it should be. I think I was lucky with this one because I have another unit at home that doesn't sound anywhere near as good. Recently, I've also been recording to another Tascam unit, which converts the analogue sound to digital. It's the first time I've recorded to digital, but it sounds exactly as it feels in the room, so I'm really enjoying that.

Is there a reason you're not tracking into a computer?

I think losing the computer made another big difference in my music. When my sound was smaller, a friend of mine said it's ridiculous that I have mostly analogue gear and that I'm recording to computer. The minute I took the computer out, everything turned out amazingly. Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-computer or anything. It's just about what works for your sound.

Tracking without a computer means that it's more difficult to make changes to your mix and structure once you've recorded the piece. We tend to think of this as being a negative thing, but restricting your ability to endlessly make changes is vital to making decisions and moving forward.

Yes, it's an entirely different headspace that is easy to overlook because we're so used to making music in a DAW. But to be honest, I don't always love it. I have to record takes again and again and again. On the other hand, this has become an important part of the writing process. Maybe if I had the ability to change things later, I wouldn't get a strong enough feeling for what the track really needs. I need the first-hand experience of how the track unfolds to understand its internal logic. I need to know it intimately.

So every piece of music that I finish, I learn a lot about sound, music in general, and myself, too. It's a real journey. When the process is quick, I miss out on that opportunity. Even if I was using a computer, I'd have to do a lot of takes anyway because it's all performed live. I'll have all my sequencers running and mix things on the desk, then once I start recording, I realise what the arrangement and structure should be. It takes a few takes to understand the direction the track wants to go.

Does this all happen in one session?

No, I can turn everything off. Not everything has recall, like the SH-101 and the modular. But almost everything else with a sequencer has the patterns saved.

Do you need to play your tracks out a lot before you're totally happy with the sound?

I don't really like playing my tracks because I'm normally DJing at peak time and my music doesn't suit that at all. I never hear my tracks in clubs but I do at the afterhours. Still, there are a few places where I feel comfortable and I'll try out whatever new idea I've made, even if it doesn't fit the situation. But this depends on the connection to the people and the place. In this case, we're all having fun together rather than it being an official show type of situation.

Speaking of comfortable places, I notice you've got the same E&S DJ mixer as they have down at Club de Visionäre.

I got that before there were a lot of other options for portable mixers. I love the sound and the size, which makes it great for live sets. Another reason why I travel with it is the EQ. It's almost like a filter. You only need a small nudge to change the sound quite drastically. So if I feel the energy level has dropped a bit as I've transitioned between tracks in the set, I can fix it quickly.

I was DJing with this for many years before doing live sets. A reason why I didn't start doing live sets earlier was because the workflow I was using made it too boring. But with this mixer, I can really play. I connect a chain of pedals on a send so I can treat transitions like a DJ set, taking the bass off, sending a channel to the effects, doing a little trick and bringing it back in.

The sound in general is very powerful, which is really great for playing audio clips from the Octatrack. Some of the audio I have stored in there for the set are recordings or loops I've made in here, so it's good to be able to give them a push so they stay at the same level as the analogue equipment I bring with me.

Why was playing live boring when you first tried?

I was trying to do it with Ableton. I'm not trashing them at all, it just was not for me. I spent months cutting out stems from my tracks in order to use them in a set, but it didn't click. Compared to the joy I get mixing records, this way seemed like a punishment.

What was the situation when you were starting out with music in general?

I went to school for electronic music production when I was still in Israel. I learned a bit about sound at that stage, but I was going to music schools when I was younger, so I had some knowledge of music theory and experience playing instruments. In hindsight, I did get a lot of knowledge about sound and synthesis when I was there. But when I moved, I realised that people were getting way too nerdy. Maybe I was hanging out with the nerdiest people but it was so technically focused. I would sit for hours trying to figure out the sound of a snare. Of course, this is normal, and I see it also with colleagues of mine working today.

Nowadays, I'm thinking about things more in terms of vibe and how a sound fits with the rest of the music. I'm very forgiving with my recordings now. Minor errors add a lot of charm and a feeling that things are relaxed. The point is to enjoy, not to suffer.

Your music now has that feeling running though it and I think that people pick it up on a subconscious level. Deep Under Sobriety Regime, for instance, ended up appealing to a lot of people who'd otherwise never buy a Perlon record, perhaps because you can sense the enjoyment running through it.

Yes, I noticed that as well. The new album took that vibe and rolled with it.

Clearly a hardware workflow is very important to you so I'm curious as to what sort of advice you have for people who are stuck with working on a computer.

This doesn't have anything to do specifically with working on a computer, but you need a little bit of knowledge to make the sound vibrant. Because otherwise it will sound like a computer. I would try to avoid working in constrained loops and clips. Get a nice MIDI keyboard and really play in your ideas over time with natural variations so it's not just this four-bar loop that keeps repeating itself. It's tragic.

I used to like taking a MIDI sequence and routing it to different instruments. With trial and error you can make things both bigger and more interesting. Also, the less the sound is familiar and identifiable, the better. When you can't judge the source of a sound, you start listening to the music. Maybe you're enchanted by this one sound, so you stop thinking about it and start listening.

Other than that, if you know nothing about sound, pick up a book and learn about it. Obviously YouTube is full of information about this stuff, but it gets diluted with personal opinions. There is a difference between opinion and knowledge. Experiencing things firsthand is vital.

At the same time, after knowing the basics, having fun is important. What if you make a mistake that leads to a sound that leads to a new genre that's going to change the world? Keeping your head and ears clear is another important thing. When I'm working, I constantly shut things down, clean my ears and come back to it, otherwise your perspective can get twisted.

Another issue with computers is that they upset your perception of time. Because you can instantly scan to any point in the track, it's easy to lose a sense of how it's evolving, so people have trouble finding the balance between things being hypnotising and boring.

This is the advantage of playing everything live. You feel this evolution actively because you're standing and physically making it happen. When it comes to the length of a track, I can't move around all the equipment super quickly, so there are always a few bars that need to be cut out later on. The recordings I make could be anywhere from ten to 18 minutes, unless I know exactly what's up.

I try to really listen to what the track wants to be. If it's centred on a lead line that needs space to express itself, the track will be longer and the lead line will come in maybe only once. Also, when you're standing and playing, things need to move. You can't just stand there. When you're in front of a computer, you're used to sitting and just letting it play. If you actually stood up and tried interacting with the feel of the track, you'll have a better idea of what's what.

Do you think you're better at managing frustration these days?

I'm way more forgiving on myself than I was before. In the past, I'd hear a record I put out the year before and cringe. But I was also listening to a set of tiny details that no one else can hear. Now that I'm more loose with it, I actually become more surprised by the results I get. When I listened to masters of the new album in a club, I thought it must have been made by someone else because I wasn't freaking out about the details. I'm more accepting and happier with the way things are.

Do you avoid deliberately comparing your tracks with other people's productions?

It sounds obvious to say, but every track has its own sound. It's about accepting the way you are, and this is crucial to moving forward. My sound now is really hard to compare to others, which is very liberating. So instead of comparing, find what feels right for you. This is also important on a general level because more aesthetics and sounds appear if people are working this way. If we hear Ricardo Villalobos play a certain track and we all try to achieve that sound in our own productions, things stop developing.

It turns into a feedback loop. For example, a lot of amazing music is being played at Hoppetosse and Club De Visionäre these days, but a lot of producers latch on to a few surface-level aspects of the sound and put all their energies into trying to recreate it as closely as possible. Again, a lot of the music is great and this feedback loop is nothing new and exists in plenty of other contexts, but it became obvious very quickly that everyone has the same goal.

That's exactly it. It's a circle. The people go to Hoppetosse, hear this great music, go home and make their own attempt at it, release it as a record, and then the DJ buys it and plays it again at Hoppetosse, so it perpetuates itself. It's nice on one level because it lets the scene grow. But in another way, it would be nice if more people were thinking about how to take it in a more personal direction.

There's nothing wrong with being inspired, but think about how you can make a sound your own. When I hear Vera playing, she's always dropping things that somehow fit the flow of a set but they're unexpected. This is a cool attitude. If a track is exactly the same as all the others, of course it's going to fit in seamlessly.