Artist Profile – Thystle (UK)
Multi-instrumentalist Thystle has been actively creating music on her live streams on Twitch for some time now, and this month saw the release of her very first EP ‘Patchwork Tapestries’. With six tracks of lush, drum and bass driven orchestration and with beautiful cover art to match, we bring you the story so far on this incredibly talented producer.
Thystle! Welcome INSIDE!
Hey! Thanks for having me!
Your name is interesting, but not surprising given that you’re Scottish. Tell us a bit about your early years growing up in Scotland.
Yeah! So I was born and raised up in Edinburgh. My family wasn’t really musical in the technical sense,, a lot of musical appreciation, but I was always kind of the black sheep with my technical ability and knowledge of music theory. I’ve been playing keyboard / piano since I was around 5 or 6, then picked up the guitar when I was 13.
Not long after I was introduced to the concept of electronic music when I was given a copy of Propellerhead Reason by a family friend, and I was immediately hooked. They mercifully also gave me a follow-along tutorial CD from some magazine, so I was able to learn the basics, about audio routing, CV patching, all the early Reason stuff. It was insanely cool.
I crashed through my late years of high school with very little idea with what I wanted to do. I had wanted to study something techy like robotics or AI at university, but because of my sight problems I couldn’t keep up with my classes, so I was kinda stuck. I’d started self-teaching myself music production, a lot more advanced music theory, composition and stuff, not really with any direct goal in mind I just really enjoyed making music.
When I was 15 I was pointed in the direction of a local music college, so that’s where I left school to go and do, where I learned about jazz, worked with bands, did some music business modules and lots of studio recording. Initially I was way ahead of what they were teaching, but I didn’t mind ’cause loved the environment, the social aspect of being around other musicians.
Your musical background is quite amazing. You have played musical instruments from a young age. Which ones did you start with, and which are your favourites now?
So I started with a toy keyboard my grandad bought me. I still own it, it’s an old Casio ToneBank. I forget which one, but it plays ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ when you press the Demo button. It’s hilariously cheesy.
I progressed to actual keyboards from there, then guitar in my early teens. Midway through my teens I picked up the ukelele and the tenor saxophone, I also inherited two Chinese instruments called Erhu. Truthfully, I’m honestly a bit of a magpie for instruments. Give me anything and I’ll get a tune out of it.
I have a box of random small instruments and percussion I’ve collected over the years, or had given to me, right under my desk. I’ll either play them as is, or sample them. I’m hugely influenced by producers who use a lot of real instruments in their production process, and a lot of my instruments ended up on the EP in one form or another, but they’re so far woven into the melodic texture even I forget what I’ve used!
As for a favourite, it’s really hard to pick one. Honestly whenever I get something new, that tends to become my favourite for a while, and I’ve always got my eyes on a lot of new and interesting instruments. Music shops are dangerous places for the wellbeing of my bank account. Like I said, magpie.
Yeah, collecting and music seem to go hand in hand! Completing a degree in composition and production must have been quite a challenge. I can’t imagine that being an easy qualification to gain. What exactly did that entail and where did you do it?
I did my degree down near London at Hertfordeshire University. There definitely was a lot of challenge to that, a lot of the more ‘academic’ stuff especially. The essays and written research projects were huge undertakings as I had come from a college which was predominantly practical in nature.
I was there for only two years, 2008-2010, and that’s actually where I gained my love for drum and bass. Several incredible albums were released around that time, and not to mention that’s when UKF was first established, so there was this direct conduit to the music that was totally new to me.
This is where the uni club nights kinda came in. I was still green to the whole scene, and I didn’t really know where to go off-campus, but we had a club night called ‘Delete’ at a brand new venue that opened on campus while I was studying there, and the line-ups were pretty spectacular. Having that kind of shit happening a short walk from your halls of residence, while still neck deep in writing orchestrations, ensemble work, reading through music psychology papers and all sorts of other stuff at the same time was unreal.
I was beginning to fall in love with this huge scene, but it would take me a long time to actually engage with it creatively. When I left Uni, I became a bit insulated from it, moving back to Scotland, but I always kept at it, hoping one day to really have a shot at being a part of the scene, you know?
Once you graduated you went freelance and did some teaching as well though. How did you find that?
Gruelling. I did a lot of freelance stuff, worked with a lot of really cool people, but I found it really, really hard to be taken seriously, you know? When I tried to find some endorsement or something more stable, it felt like everyone else already had a contact, a way in. I talked with studios, production houses, talent agencies, film and TV companies, sync licensors, and had my finger on the pulse for years, applying for jobs and pitching to clients.
I got a few bites, but I never found my break, really. Teaching I also found really challenging. I was encouraged to do it by my family and friends for a long time, but it wasn’t until I started really getting into it that I found my eyesight a limiting factor. You’re kinda crap at teaching piano or guitar if you can’t clearly see the students’ hands, you know?
I always wanted to do remote teaching, because I have my own setup where it’s accessible to me, but that doesn’t create weird barriers for students which otherwise would. (You can’t see the screen if my head is in the way) and it’s really only since the pandemic that teaching over video calls and such has been more normalized. That and UK broadband isn’t the embarrassment it used to be… mostly.
Sounds tough….The Thystle Project that you run focuses on creating music in a live stream environment on Twitch. Is this how the EP was written?
Entirely. I was actually inspired by the streams from other musicians, especially those done by Fox Stevenson, and wanted to start my own music production stream project. The main aim of the project was to actually help me get focused on making music in a more full time sense. Often I would find myself procrastinating with the DAW open in the background, really getting distracted, especially if I hit a bit of a block or lost the vibe of the idea I was working on.
When I’m streaming, I’m very much forced into the work space, I can’t just slack off and go scroll through Twitter or watch a bunch of YouTube. In the long run, though, I’ve found that it really helps me capture and maintain a vibe throughout the whole writing process, and I’ve really challenged myself to overcome those bouts of writers block, that huge, oppressive wall of fatigue and non-interest you feel when you’re stuck on a project.
When I’m live, I just keep chipping away, try really drastic tactics, letting go of my fear of failure, allowing myself to ‘fail’ and goof around, and often come back from it much quicker and creatively rejuvenated. The EP is honestly the culmination of a lot of lessons I’ve learned since I started doing music on stream.
What a fascinating way to make music! Is the aim of the project to teach others ‘in the moment’ as you create, is it an interchange of ideas, or is it more of a chance for viewers to simply watch the creative process in action?
I can confidently say it’s a mixture of all of those things. Sometimes it depends on the day, and who is around at the time. Some days people will ask lots of questions, and I can get sidetracked on production and end up teaching about sampling, audio manipulation, synths that I use or just random techniques I find useful or inspiring. I think I’m really passionate in those moments too, I really enjoy sharing and helping people get better at their craft. There are other days where people will just kinda watch over my shoulder, and sometimes offer ideas to improve the track I’m working on. It’s never full on collaboration, in the traditional sense, but sometimes something really simple can shape the direction of a track very dramatically for me.
How have you found the Twitch DNB experience? It’s at the core of this website, and we do everything possible to support as many people on the platform as humanly possible. It’s a beautiful place, right?
It’s an unbelievably supportive community, and it reflects the DNB community as a whole I feel. This is my first release, and through a lot of the friends I’ve made via Discord and Twitch it’s already reaching a lot more people than I could have first imagined. I’m incredibly grateful for all the support and kindness others have shown me.
Agreed! The time you’ve spent working with orchestral production and writing jazz comes through very, very clearly on this EP. In fact, there are some blissful moments washing through these tracks. How easy was it for you to transition those values into a drum and bass format?
Thank you! Yeah, I think it came really naturally for me, but I don’t think that means it’s an easy thing to do. A lot of the time I would create the orchestral component alongside everything else in the track, layering in different instruments and parts in the same way I would while working on an orchestration, thinking about voice sections instead of just lead, chords and bass.
I didn’t stick with just sampled orchestral libraries either, I really love the texture you get from older tech, like the mellotron, and ’80s and ’90s ROMpler banks. Melodically though I think a lot of it speaks to my background in learning jazz piano and orchestration for sure.
Having heard you say that then, I’m guessing that you are the polar opposite of a producer who works solely ‘out of the box’. If you’ve always been a person who plays live instruments, then it must be far simpler for you to simply pick up a guitar for instance and play it live over a drum track, rather than manipulate the notes in a program. Does this mean you spend a lot of time doing takes to get things perfect?
Not at all. While I do much prefer working with physical instruments, I think it’s important to keep in mind that I’m still making dance music. There is a lot of good to be discovered in the realm of digital manipulation. I’m definitely not shy about comping and correcting some of my timing or pitching, and as long as it doesn’t hurt the groove, I’m all for it.
There are definitely some instances where I will spend a long time getting a particularly emotive part down through an instrument, piano especially as notes drawn in with MIDI can sound very robotic and mechanical. Sometimes I’ll go for a middle ground, making sure the first chord of the bar is on grid, and leave the rest. The tools are all there, and I strive to make full use of them, there’s no pride lost in taking shortcuts, for me. As long as I’m happy with the end result!
One thing I can say for sure is that the music you create is wholly original. I don’t think I’ve heard many people make drum and bass like this before. I’m hearing the full orchestration of many instruments in there. It makes for a lush soundscape! Do you write your music ‘on the hoof’ or do you compose it in the traditional sense first?
Definitely the former. It’s how I almost always write music. Often it can just be me improvising chords, but I’ll hear the whole thing in my head, imagined around those chords. It then becomes a race to get everything down while I still have that idea in my head, and my mind is often several steps ahead of my hands, and those are the days where it’s really hard to keep up with Twitch chat!
My process often depends on that initial idea. I’ll get some chords down, some kind of rhythm, and begin layering on top of it, find a melody, a texture, some kind of hook that calls to me, and then the track expands from there. Sometimes I start with the drop, then work backwards, taking just a couple of elements from the drop to make an intro, and play with the texture, maybe hint at the melody with a different instrument, that kind of thing, but every time I sit down to write music, I’m chasing a vibe. That’s the only way I can explain it.
As you mentioned you have poor eyesight, using a program like Ableton must be quite a challenge, what with all of those tiny buttons on screen?
Ableton is actually an amazing company. They recognise the need for accessibility, and have included numerous features to make it accessible to people like me. I’ve spent so long with it that I know the layout so well, and the UI Scale makes it way more approachable. A lot of my issues actually come from other areas, certain VSTs I find really inaccessible, even with a magnifier. Windows itself still has a lot of issues with accessibility too. I manage pretty well, but I’m hoping to switch over to Mac some time in the future, as their accessibility has always been five-star, but their stuff is so expensive…
What challenges (if any) have you found while working in the drum and bass world? Have you found it an easy scene to navigate?
I think that one of the biggest changes in recent years has been the rise of Discord communities. Before, you had to know the right Facebook group, have the right contacts on Skype, or know someone who knows someone and show up at events. Nowadays, everyone has their own Discord server, and you can connect not only with the people that server represents, be it an artist or a label, but other like-minded people too.
Early on I made a lot of friends in the community, I learned about the different Twitch groups and channels, really pulling myself into the scene. As someone with sight difficulties, live events with lots of people are difficult to navigate, especially alone because of how dark the venues tend to be. It’s been a really nice to have this new way to navigate the scene and get to know people, and make genuine connections with others.
I think the biggest challenge overall comes at the start, where you don’t know anyone, or who’s who. There’s a certain amount of initial formality everyone feels, and it’s kinda hard to break that initial ice, but it usually just takes a bit of time to get over that initial awkwardness.
Talk us through a few of the tracks. What are the themes or main ideas behind them, and what messages were you hoping to convey through them?
A huge part of the theme in this release was creating music that would inspire imagination, rather than tell a story. I want to take the listener on a journey someplace with each track, and for that to be unique for everyone. The track name serves as a starting point, but that’s all since the tracks are wholly instrumental.
When writing the opening track “Altitude”, I didn’t have a story in mind. Rather, I was thinking about what it would be like to be high, high above the clouds, near the edge of the atmosphere, where you could look down into a sea of clouds, or above into outer space. What would it feel like? How cold would the air feel? Would it feel scary, to be that high, looking down?
In contrast, the closing track “Echoes” was written with a core visual theme of what it would be like if you could safely sink to the very bottom of the ocean. I felt like it would be very quiet, very isolated, almost lonely, but there would always be life around you, quietly co-existing with their surroundings, and I tried to mimic that kind of soundscape, and it’s up to the listener to decide how they got there, how they feel about it all. This is true of every track on the EP.
The artwork is stunning too, tell us a bit more about it?
I wanted to create something very striking and unique, and try to incorporate my own meaning and attachment I have to each of the songs within each of the patches on the cover. I kept the images abstract, so that they could be studied and interpreted differently by everyone as they listen. A couple of them have very personal meaning that go beyond the scope of the EP itself, but were included as a way to immortalize important aspects of my life within something I created and shared with the world. They say a tapestry tells a unique story, of both it’s maker, and of the people that it’s made for, so that’s what I hoped to create. A patchwork of tapestries.
Once this EP has circulated its way around the Globe, what will be your plans or the future?
I have plans to keep releasing music, with a lot more on the way. I will also be continuing my streaming, which I hope folks will come to see! Maybe one day to have the chance to perform live would be really cool. I feel like that’s a long way off still, but it’s definitely a goal!
And finally, what message would you give to anybody who has faced the challenges you’ve faced?
I think it can be very scary from the outside, when you’re a musician and you want to make music for people, it’s very easy to talk yourself out of really getting deeply involved. If I were to share one thing, it’s that people are more kind and supportive than your self doubt and insecurity will make you believe. Stay humble, honest and genuine to yourself and what you want to achieve, and do your absolute best. People will take notice sooner than you think, don’t let your difficulties discourage you or completely hold you back from trying to reach your dream. You got this.
FIND OUT MORE HERE:
Patchwork Tapestries by Thystle – DistroKid
Thystle (@thystleuk) • Instagram photos and videos
Patchwork Tapestries | Thystle (bandcamp.com)
