On Touchdesign and Sound Engineering: In Conversation with Neles0n

I create things because I can’t put them into words, which is why I work audio-visually. If I were good with words, I would write a book. Generally speaking, my work always deals with multi-sensory perception and storytelling.

I think a big inspiration to me are children and how they behave; They are so raw and intuitive which I think is really important when you work as a creative because it gives you room for experimentation. As well as the “fear” of not knowing. And shifting this feeling of fear into a power. For me, that is always essential, because in a project I never exactly know what the outcome will be and that its good to get comfortable with certain X-factors that are not yet predictable and you need to figure out during the process. Facing this fear and stepping out of my comfort zone gives me a lot.

What it gives back to me is seeing how people perceive my work and how it impacts them on different levels. Through my work, I feel understood in a way that I often don’t on a verbal level. It gives me a lot of joy.

I actually come from an analog, visual field. I always painted and crafted things by hand. I have always used different media and techniques, but I also had to realize that everything I use is nothing more than a tool, and that a vision in the making process is what is really relevant. At some point I started working sonically. Sound is such an intense medium that played no role for me before, and now I would say it dominates everything. 

I came across sound through a uni project called “Handwriting as an Instrument”. It was about transforming the physical act of writing into sound in order to figure out whether the act itself could be perceived more consciously.

For this one, I bought an audio interface and worked with a DAW for the first time. That was a very significant moment, because from then on I suddenly thought, Okay, wow, sound, I want to do more with it. That was a year and a half ago. From there it developed into making my own tracks and live performances.

I’m currently working on my first solo show. It will be an audiovisual live performance, and I’m composing an album for it. I will have this show on March 13th at the Berghain Kantine, together with my friend Moritz Simon Geist.

For the last three months, I did nothing but travel and make field recordings. That means I collected lots of sound assets and put myself mentally into the state of knowing, “I’m going to make an album now”. It all starts with experiments, trying to create this world in my head and get into the mentality of this world.

I also rediscovered many archived projects that had ended up in random folders. I’m reconstructing them and bringing everything together to build a foundation for this album.

The album will be called The Internet Does Not Exist. That much I can already say.

I think what influences my art the most is definitely my degree program, Integrated Design. I think you can see in all my work that I’m increasingly impacted by it. I used to make art not for a reason but only for myself, and I didn’t really care how others would perceive. Design has definitely changed my approach: I now think more critically and work more conceptually. Things aren’t just random. I try to put everything into a context and make it tangible for others.

Social media is actually a by-product of what I do, and it happened very naturally. I didn’t start making content to gain reach. It’s more like a personal archive of my development and experiments.

I started with TikTok because I was always a bit afraid of being less anonymous on Instagram. TikTok was a safe space for me, with random people from the internet. Five or six years ago, during Covid, I started making fashion videos and Get Ready With Me videos because I was in quarantine and bored. That’s when I blew up a little on TikTok.

At some point it stopped giving me as much, and I eventually pushed myself to post on Instagram as well. And not just anything, like those Get Ready With Me videos that I forced myself to make because everyone did  them, but simply what I do and what I’m passionate about. Instagram led to many things. The platform is a network for connections. Someone writes to you, you travel there, and you meet them. Everything keeps getting bigger and more tangled, and then you reach a point where you think, How did this happen? 

It’s definitely the people in New York, especially my friend Jack Haven who is an inspiration to me. Jack is also the reason I originally came to New York, because of a magazine they are running, it is called WAIF. I was twelve years old, sitting in my room, editing pictures in a free software program and sending them to the magazine, until at some point I flew to New York. That allowed me to meet wonderful people, and this network opened up for me. Also, Jack taught me how to stay honest with myself. I’m at a point right now where my passion is becoming my job, and that can be difficult sometimes.

You need a balance somewhere: building a career while not burying your passion, because it’s easy to slip into a place where nothing is fun anymore and it’s only about money.

In New York, every person I’m friends with is creative and passionate about something. It’s so inspiring to see how people stick to their passions and don’t give up. Above all, there is so much power in collaborating there and not seeing creating as a competition. It’s more like a big pool where people can find each other and make quantum connections, and it gives me so much. I feel like everyone is very honest about who they are. When I go to Berlin, I feel that more people want to be someone rather than just do things. I think that has a lot to do with boxes and labels. Of course, that gives you security, if you can put on such a label. But in the end, you need to accept that you are no one. And I feel that in New York, that is much more the spirit.

I can refer again to “Handwriting as an Instrument”, because it opened up the world of sound for me. Besides that, there’s the live performance my friend Lio Vast and I had in January at the Berghain Kantine. It was my first live performance and the first time I was on a stage. I composed sound for the first time, together with Lio, and worked within a production team of 6 people. Besides performing, I did the creative direction. I realized that I want to stick to working in big productions at some point and to be the creative lead.

I definitely want to build a custom modular synthesizer myself, completely from scratch. It’s something I think about every day, but I don’t have the time for it at the moment. For every performance request, I develop an entire format from scratch each time, and that takes up a lot of time. Above all, you then have to start understanding circuits and read up on a whole crazy subject. It would be worth it, though, because you gain a closer connection to the object that makes the sound. It’s completely different from buying a synthesizer.

The performance called UR1/VRR was a 15-minute sound-light performance with a chapter based storytelling. Lio Vast is a sound engineer and a friend of mine who has 15 years of experience with sound. Together we composed the track, and we had a special guest, Dada von Weiss, who sang the vocals for us. We had MiMU Gloves, gesture-based MIDI controllers, with which I could control an entire light show.

For me, everything starts with analog synthesizers. The best thing for me is not having to open my laptop. I also just like the idea that it’s fundamentally math. It is funny to think that you take frequency waves , shape them, and combine them so that they form a kind of fusion. And I can interrupt and sequence these waves. And then there’s the sheer power of the sound. I also like that there is so much physical pressure when you play an analog synth and you feel it in your body.

My favorite synthesizer is the Rev2. Lio and I had it in the studio for producing. It has really grown on me, and is my favorite instrument to start composing something. Although my heart actually burns more for modular. A few months ago, I had the chance to borrow a Doepfer system and play around with it for two months, and it was the best experience I’ve ever had with sound. You have these endless cables and knobs and just sink into it. I can do that for 20 hours straight and just be gone.

More critical thinking rather than cancel culture.