On a relatively little-known Lil' Wayne song from 2013, over one of the most ludicrous TNGHT instrumentals ever released, the New Orleans rapper cracks, "Might as well go stupid since this is a stupid beat." That line has always stuck with me as a perfect encapsulation of (almost) everything Ross Birchard, better known as Hudson Mohawke, has done over the past decade-and-a-half since he first emerged as one of Glasgow's most brilliant and idiosyncratic beat-makers. Balancing a uniquely Scottish sense of humour with epic production chops and grand swells of emotion, he has helped push the sound of not only UK underground electronic music but also rap music, working with artists like Drake and Pusha T as well as signing on with Kanye West's now-defunct G.O.O.D. Music label.

Birchard has already gotten plenty of attention for his mainstream rap beats. Lately, he's had viral attention, too, thanks to a Reddit post about having sex to his track "Cbat," a 2011 EP cut that sounds like a melting ice cream truck jingle set to a hip-hop beat. I'm at his Northeast LA studio to talk about his solo work. The small and sunny space, which sits in a secluded neighbourhood populated by a remarkable number of musicians and industry figures, holds an array of keyboards, drum machines and other devices that sit around a gigantic keyboard monitor. He is a proud user of FL Studio, the for-beginners DAW formerly known as FruityLoops that he's been using since the very start of his production career. In the back is a well-stocked fridge full of non-alcoholic beverages that he chugs in between chain smoking cigarettes.

Our conversation starts with his gear and quickly moves into more cerebral territory. It's not just about the act of production, but the meaning: How does sobriety affect the life of a dance music producer? What's the LA lifestyle like? And of course, what's it like to go viral? The spread of "Cbat" across Reddit and TikTok has propelled Birchard to higher heights than even the biggest rapper could take him. It was in the wake of all this, and the release of his new album, Cry Sugar, that he sat down with me and had an almost two-hour conversation about his studio and how he makes music these days.

So, why don't you start by walking me through what we have here.

Basically, I never switched from FL Studio. I've tried other things, and I've kind of always stuck to this because it has this weird, idiosyncratic way of working that is not entirely logical, and doesn't immediately make sense. But once you figure it out, it leads you to making things in a different way than, say, looking at Ableton all the time (no shade to Ableton). It has a strange workflow that is incredibly quick. It has its drawbacks and it's prone to fucking up at crucial moments. But I still love it, and I can't move away from it. So that's the core of everything. How I use it is not really how it's supposed to be used, and it's not quite as good as Pro Tools or other things like that. But I've managed to put together a way where everything in the room kind of works off of FL Studio.

The first semi-pro keyboard I got was this Korg M-50, which I got in 2007. I've pretty much used it on everything since. It's kind of corny sounding but in a very pleasing way. It has those pivotal house and techno sounds, they're kind of cheesy but naive, honest. And I like that a lot of the presets don't sound anything like the instrument that they're trying to sound like. I've also been using this Alpha-Juno 1 a lot. I got it from a guy who was in one of those Mexican house bands, and his son was selling it for him on OfferUp. That one also has a lot of sentimental rave sounds, the original Hoover sound. It also has the chord function where you can make a setting from whatever pattern of notes you want, hit it as a chord, and then every time you hit it, it's those three notes. That's where rave stabs originally come from. I like using it even though it's not very easy—it's from that era where things were shifting to screens and they hadn't really figured out how to do loads of menus.

I really like this Prophet 6 which has a lot of Blade Runner-type sounds. Some would say it's a second fiddle to the classic Moog sound, but I lean towards the Prophet, I think it's a little bit richer. Those three keyboards are what I currently have set up. I have a bunch of stuff that's not set up in the basement. This weird Alesis keyboard is another one that I got from OfferUp a month or two ago, it's also from the early '00s, one of those ones that has similar palette of sounds to the Korg and Roland, but the Alesis ones were never super popular, so their versions of these sounds never became played-out.

It has its own character.

Yeah. The same cheesy sounds, but not so recognizable that you know the sound immediately. That's been fun to play with. The newest, but a bit fucked up, is this Jupiter-X keyboard, which is an all-in-one with gear for the the Juno, SH-101, the JX, the XP and it also has the classic Roland vocoder on it. It does everything, and it's very hands-on and doesn't have a lot of menus. It's nice to fuck around with.

What else... This Hydrasynth here is made by ASM (Ashum Sound Machines), which I believe is a guy who left Elektron to start his own thing. I use this one all the time. It's not crazy expensive. Sounds amazing. It has this 'random' button on it that you can use to forever generate random parameters for every parameter on it, and it'll just make that sound. Sure, it might be totally unusable. But after you do it a couple of times, then you've got a sound that's never been made before.

It's basically generative.

Just completely random. But every fifth time you'll get a great sound. And unless you specifically save those parameters, you'll never have that sound again.

Is there anything particularly memorable that you've made with that function?

There are a couple of things on the new record that have these randomly generated sounds. Every so often I'll just spend an hour cycling through random patches, sampling them and keeping them for later use. I don't know how they managed to do it, but the keyboard is around $750, which is not that crazy in the grand scheme of things. It's really excellent. I don't know how deep you want to go with...

Let's go as deep as you want to go.

OK. I love these two rack units from an English company called Cranborne Audio. And they have basically come up with this concept where essentially... well, this sort of format existed already. It's called lunchboxing. You build your own ideal rack with these little units as your inputs. The old way of doing it was that you would run your synths, and wherever you're doing vocals, through these little input units. And then you come out and you go into the input of your interface, and you might have this beautiful preamp you're running it into, but you're sort of degrading it by running it through your audio interface or whatever. So they came up with this way where the lunchbox unit itself does the analog to digital conversion. So you're never relying on the weak points of your system, which is usually the inputs of your sound card. Manufacturers generally cheap out on those parts, because you're getting loads of them on most interfaces.

So does everything that goes into the DAW go through there?

Yeah, everything. And that's really only half of what the thing can do. You can also do summing through it, and various other things, but it's a really interesting concept. And again, it's weirdly competitively priced for what it does. I think it's $1500.

I also have a little bit of modular stuff, but I'm not in the slightest interested in noodling on modular forever because you can do that until the end of time and never finish anything. It's very cool, but it's difficult to make something more direct with it. Generally you're either making noodly ambient stuff or random techno.

But my friend Dave Sitek, who lives up the road and was in this band called TV On The Radio—he's from a generation before me, and still likes things to be not too technical. He came up with this way of working: I have this little unit set up over here [points to modular units], and it's just a bank of samples and a sequencer. I don't have any synth stuff in it, so it's all sample-based. It's all one-shot drums and things like that. I don't want any oscillators or anything. It really sounds like an old drum machine.

And you can sequence the drums with it. How long have you been using that?

I think since 2019. I was very hesitant of everything being "random," or of myself not being the driving force of what's coming out of it, but this seemed like a way of working that still felt in line with what I do. I can make rap beats with that.

Did it alter the feeling of the music at all?

It's in the same wheelhouse, sonically. But it's almost like using an SP-1200 or an MPC, it's really raw. I struggle with this a lot in any DAW situation where stuff doesn't sound direct enough and needs lots of EQ work. But this comes out sounding kind of dirty in the right way.

What role does sampling play in your production?

It's all sampling. I think it comes from the background of making stuff in a DAW as opposed to being a band producer. If you record bands, you treat recorded instruments as instruments. I think if you're working in a DAW, you're treating anything recorded as a sample, so even the live recorded instruments I've used, I would still treat them like a sample from YouTube or wherever.

And how much are you still sampling from other records, or YouTube?

To the point where there are still multiple really annoying clearance situations. Like with the new record. It's a relatively new situation with these venture capitalist companies buying up old catalogues, and then waiting just before something is due to be released and then being like, 'OK, we'll take 100 percent.' And then you're fucked.

Even ten years ago that wasn't the case. If you used a little sample of something, you could reasonably clear it for an appropriate percentage. You weren't being strong armed or held hostage like now. One of the reasons I got into production was because I really loved sample-based hip-hop production. It's unfortunate that the business side of that then means people are just like 'Yeah, we can't sample that.' It just doesn't work in anyone's favour.

Were there any, erm, attempted samples on Cry Sugar?

There was one song called "Redeem," which I made with [Neptunes member] Chad Hugo. After it was finished, when I put the album together, I put this gospel vocal over it. It was a recording of a megachurch from the '80s—which was fairly released and above board and everything—but the sample was not owned by that person's estate. It was owned by this other company. They didn't get back until like a week before the record was gonna come out. And then they're all, 'Yeah, perfect, [we'll take] 100 percent [of the publishing].'

Where does that leave me, then? This is an additional element on a track that already existed. I could see it being different if I built this track around your sample, but this is just something that was added after the fact. And they were just like... 'No.' So I said, 'Fuck you, I'll just take the sample off.' We had to clear it for the copies that had already been pressed. That was particularly frustrating because, at that point, even on their end, they essentially get nothing. Just 100 percent of a very small amount of records that already exist. So then everybody's fucked.

You've added quite a few pieces of hardware in the past couple of years. How has it changed your workflow for the past few records?

The main thing that has changed is that I was very prone, for a long time, to thinking that everything I make is dog shit, and abandoning or deciding I wasn't feeling the inspiration that day and just saying 'fuck it' and giving up. For years I would just have endless unfinished things, just waiting for this magic moment to come back to it. I started thousands of unfinished projects, and I didn't know what any of them sounded like because I never bounced any of them. I was like, 'Well, this is rubbish, so we'll just close this and forget about it.'

Now, if I don't particularly like something, I'll just bounce it and then leave it, thinking, 'Well, at least I have a bounce of it.' And then I'll randomly skip past it at some later time and realize that, oh, maybe that sounded shit at that day, but it could work in another context or could be incorporated into this other thing. It sounds like some very fucking bullshit LA talk, but not waiting for a lightning strike of inspiration is a big deal, and takes a lot of pressure off. Usually I'm like, 'If this isn't the best thing I've ever made, then I hate it.' So that's the main difference in approach now.

Technically, I don't think that there's that much difference. I'm still very tied to FL Studio. I love that way of working and I don't have any desire to change.

Let's say that you get sick of a track, you bounce it and then you come back to it and like it. Does that mean sometimes you decide a track is done just because you get sick of it?

It's 'done' to the point where I'm like... 'I don't know where to go with this today.' But I remember, I think it was a Mark Ronson and Pharrell podcast last year, where Pharrell was saying that he makes a bunch of random shit and doesn't need to think about it. You don't always need to have these massive expectations of everything you make. A lot of the time you don't even like the things that other people pick for themselves. Like, if someone else wants your instrumental, it's rare that it's your personal favourite one. I have no fucking clue what people want. Anytime I try to make something with a specific artist in mind, it might be exactly the opposite of what they want.

So how often are you going back through what you've bounced but not finished?

Fairly often, because... well, I don't do loads of this, but when I have people in for sessions, we often start from a ten-second loop of chords, or a particular riff I had, to provide a jumping-off point. There's a bunch of things on the new album which came together, like, 'Oh, wait, actually if you take this riff and shift it up three semitones, it works perfectly with these chords.' It's kind of like a jigsaw puzzle way of working, which I'm quite fond of.

Do you just come into the studio every day and see what happens?

Yeah. That's another thing I didn't do for years—or I would come into the studio and dick around and just get fucking wasted, and then wonder why I have multiple years where my bounces folder only has ten things. Now I'm relatively regimented with it. It's a weird LA thing again. I think the UK perspective is like, 'Fuck LA, I want nothing to do with that.'

But I did always have this fascination, because I'd been coming here to play shows for 15 years and I never liked it. But simultaneously I was like, 'I need to figure out what's going on here.' Being here, and seeing that if I need keys for something, or a vocalist, I can text someone and they'll be like, 'OK, let's do it today.' That doesn't happen in London. That doesn't happen anywhere else I've been. Usually it's 'let's get together in a couple of weeks.'

Do you think being in LA gives you music more opportunities to try different things?

Well, one of my stumbling blocks was that I was always frustrated with myself and so precious about things that nothing got finished. And I had this self-imposed rule where I had to get things done working by myself, which I'm trying to overcome. It's nice to get to work with people who are really good at their specific thing, whether that's songwriting or just a totally different approach to production that I'm not familiar with at all. I'm curious about this stuff and I want to learn as much as I can, not shut myself out. So being exposed to things like making a good fucking rock record—it's not something I would naturally gravitate towards, but I'm curious about the process.

So you have finished songs that are a minute long and other songs that have a longer verse-chorus-verse structure. How do you take all of that and make it into an album?

Well, usually something shifts—and I don't always know it at the time—but something shifts and I feel ready to make a solo record. Annoyingly it seems to be about once every seven years, but usually I'll have five or six things put to the side and then I can start to vaguely see where it's going. Then I'll start to build things around those projects. It's probably coming from a DJ background, but I'll usually approach a solo album as if it's like a mixtape. I'm not that concerned with needing to be constrained by BPM range, or if it should all fit into certain fucking category in the DSP [digital service provider]. It's the same way if I'm DJing or putting together a mix. I don't think I've ever done something which is just one genre or one style. I'm actually envious of people's ability to do that, because I think you can often scare people off with DJ mixes that are too wide-ranging. I'm always just going to be making things that are, across the board, my tastes in general.

Around 2005, I tried to start producing more, and that was right at the point where I started working at Sub Club in Glasgow, I was working behind the bar there. I was seeing Optimo every week. Both of them are gods to me really. And seeing that they could have this party which wasn't really rooted in a specific sound or genre—it wasn't even a 'mentality,' it was just shit that they liked. At the time it would be a bunch of DFA records and then Stevie Wonder, just a collection of amazing shit. That was a big influence on me in terms of not being constrained by a particular set of parameters, by making music that has to fit into some kind of exact world.

Your music has a lot of vastly different moods, but there's usually a grandiose quality—a lot of strings and horns. On Lantern, you have songs about warriors, and it's all very dramatic, triumphant stuff. Where does that sensibility come from?

I think it's a combination of the rap that I really love plus rave and happy hardcore. Both of those things have this aspect of being punishing but with grandiose production and lyrics. Like how we were talking about the sounds on that keyboard that have this bombastic naivety, almost. Bold and raw. I think that usually gets written off as cheesy. I think that stuff is what has always drawn me to a lot of rap records: sample-based rap records from the early '00s—very straightforward, heart-on-your-sleeve music.

I've always been turned off by music that feels purposefully brooding. Music that seems like you're trying a bit too hard, that's not very fun or that's noodly for the sake of it. My ears will always gravitate towards in-your-face sounds and chord progressions. Things that are not subdued.

Earnest.

Yeah.

Are you an emotional person?

I think I am, but I'm not an incredibly vocal person, so it doesn't always come across. My favourite music is always stuff that's going to make you cry, or elicit some strong sort of strong emotion. For whatever reason that has tended to come from chords; I get spine tingles from a good, satisfying chord progression.

So much of your music involves horns and strings. Where do you get those sounds from? They often sound either very synthetic or very lifelike.

A lot of them come from the Korg M-50, the more synthetic-sounding stuff. For a couple of things on the new record I did have some live strings. Not a whole string section, just this one person who came up to the studio, and we layered up a lot of takes. I don't think I've ever done live horn stuff. I just have a number of deeply convincing sample library horns. But that's another LA thing—I can just call up a string player and get them to come here. I did some live saxophone action with a guy I met in Alcoholics Anonymous. I would never have thought to do that in London. Obviously that exists in London, but people are working in different worlds and are a little more separated over there. Here, people are involved in things you would never expect them to be involved in, working in multiple worlds.

When you're using these horn and strings sounds, how many layers are there?

Usually with the horn stuff I want the most direct sound, so often just one layer. For strings, sometimes there are nine or 12 parts at the same time. But even that is nothing compared to when I see people doing strings for a major label record and there's a full fucking orchestra. I've tried to figure out how to work with just a few people but make it sound like there's loads of people involved. It comes from my self-imposed isolation, not feeling that comfortable working in a room with a group of people. But I'm always trying to improve on that, trying to make things sound more symphonic.

So how do you do that? What have you learned?

Well, like I said, there are ways of working where you can record one or two people and essentially have a full orchestra. A friend of mine, Johan Lenox, has done string arrangements for artists like Travis Scott and Kid Cudi, and I started doing some stuff with him. He did some of the string arrangements on the new record. And it's all one person, but you could imagine a full orchestra.

You have a lot of keyboards. What are you using them for aside from string and horn sounds?

I have a bunch of drum machines too. The Vermona is a really nice, weird sounding drum machine. But, for example, the Prophet is good for less synthetic-sounding, or less 'fake' instruments. I have this weird thing called "The Pipe" that this Russian guy from Soma Labs made. They mainly make drony things. You can see it doesn't have any words or labels for the functions, just symbols. He makes these long YouTube videos.

We talked about the grand and triumphant sounds in your music, but a lot of your work also sounds kind of silly. I'm talking about the elephant in the room...

Yeah...

A large part of the reason why "Cbat" became so popular is because the idea of having sex to it is hilarious. It's a very funny-sounding song. Where do those ideas come from? Is it intentionally silly?

A lot of those sounds are influenced by Neptunes productions. There was also this specific Missy Elliott demo, "Fire," that T-Pain made that leaked around 2008. I really loved that stuff.

And there was this split developing in what you would now call UK bass. One side was more solemn, and the other end was like ridiculous US dubstep. Those were the two ends of the spectrum for me and none of it seemed to fully encapsulate the more fun aspects of it all. So a lot of those sounds came from what I perceived as a lack of fun. Other people were doing it too, like Rustie, whose stuff came from an electro and techno background but was incorporating a rap sensibility. I wanted to exist in this middle ground where it was high-energy, fun music that wasn't overly obsessed with being cool or serious.

Your music generally has two main styles—one is really informed by sample-heavy hip-hop, and Mannie Fresh and stuff like that. The other half is really minimal Neptunes kind of stuff. Are you surprised when people react to "Cbat" like they did—like it's some sort of joke, or making fun of listening to it in different situations?

I mean, "Cbat" is not an entirely serious track to begin with. So in that regard it's pretty fitting for all this shit to happen. I think what has drawn me to tracks like that, or that T-Pain demo, is that there's a simplicity to it, and it immediately grabs your attention. Right away you're like, 'What the fuck is that?' From that perspective I can understand. And the other thing is that "Cbat" has already had a great life in another universe. So I'm fine with it being perceived however people want to perceive it. Maybe I would feel differently about it if it was a brand new thing. But you can't fucking predict these things anyway. What else are you going to do other than just run with it?

So are you in a different headspace when you make something like that than, say, the Cry Sugar title track?

It's a slightly different headspace, but the thing with something like "Cbat" is that, ten years ago, I was able to gauge the reaction from playing out all the time before the music was released. It's nice to know already that people dislike something, or that it resonates with lots of people. A lot of those types of songs were made in an era when I was doing multiple shows a week. Now I want to step back from touring. When I moved to LA around 2016, I was partying too much, fucking wasted all the time, not making shit, just existing from party to party. And I'm not really the heart-and-soul-of-the-party kind of person. Existing in that world is already at odds with my personality.

I'm taking a step back for now. But, in a roundabout way, it took me back to a place where I was making things for an imaginary party, rather than, like, 'This is gonna make people go crazy, tomorrow, at this specific place.' It's more like what it was when I made my very early stuff, when I didn't have anywhere to go or anyone to play it out to. So weaning myself off touring means I'm back to that situation of making stuff for an imaginary party in my head.

Do you think it comes out differently?

I think if you're playing all the time, there's a tendency to make shit that you know will work for an audience. And that's a great formula. But that doesn't always lead to expressing yourself in a personal way. And if you're not making it for yourself, then why are you making it?

Can we get personal? Since you've moved to LA and gotten sober, how has that changed—

—Even that sentence sounds so corny.

We don't have to get philosophical, but... how has it changed your workflow?

I first got sober in early 2017 and had a lot of ups and downs since then. But I've now been newly sober since about six months pre-pandemic. I'm very prone to putting a lot of pressure and high expectations on myself. And when you have a spotlight on you and you're not naturally comfortable in the spotlight, then the tendency is to block out as much of it as possible. So I definitely got to a situation where I was like, 'Oh my god, all my goals and my dreams are coming true. And I can basically just do whatever the fuck I want and exist in this debauched limbo state, and everything will work out and be great forever.'

That's by no means unique to me—it's very common. And I think it's good—as much as it is majorly disruptive—it's good to have it all come crashing down, it's humbling. I've had a bunch of relapses, and that's not uncommon at all either. It takes most people years to even begin to rein it in. I spent the first couple of years of that being like, 'Shit, I'm never gonna be able to have fun ever again.'

Does your understanding or appreciation of parties and making dance music change when you're no longer 'partying?'

I think it's unavoidable that it will change to some degree. But I have a number of friends who continue to exist in that world and not go crazy and have a really good time, and I take some solace in that. I had a long period of thinking like, 'Shit, what if I can never do what I love ever again, because I can't even walk in a club?' Thankfully I feel like I'm just past that point where I can go out and enjoy a party and not feel I have to be blacked out.

But there's a lot of people that I look up to that either maintained a really healthy obsession with their craft or their career after getting sober, and a lot of people who didn't even fully come into their own until after getting sober. But there'll never be a time where I'm watching something [in a club] and won't think, 'This would be way better with a couple of pills.'

Has your musical outlook or direction changed at all since you moved here?

I feel like I'm more ambitious. I think most of that is just from watching people here and learning how they work. It's no longer some mysterious far-off thing. It's like, 'Oh, they're just making this song and that's it,' which is disarming for me as someone who builds up everybody else's shit as if I could never even aspire to be at that level. I think that part of my outlook has changed and that has made me feel like I can accomplish some things I previously thought I would never be able to accomplish.

Also, I don't think there's anywhere in the world that there's more of a wide-ranging group of sober people. Especially people who are fully still crazy but are managing to hold it together and keep sober. That's inspiring as well. A lot of people here didn't even get their shit together until they went through some really horrible shit.

If anything, my outlook has broadened in terms of possibilities, especially after a couple years prior to getting sober where I was pretty depressed despite being in a very seemingly good place career-wise and life-wise. I have a more hopeful outlook and maybe part of that is—again, I don't want to pretend like this is a situation unique to me—but it helps put things in perspective after you almost fucking die a bunch of times.