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Your work has always touched on these ideas of digital worlds, concepts which are much more sinister now than they were even five or six years ago. It was very dense, all this stuff, that I then somehow applied to music, right at the end of my upbringing. That's how I suddenly realized I was actually really into music technology. I was just very into putting things together and visuals and stuff. So I was like, 'Okay, I'll record this.' And it was kind of genreless as well, because I wasn't even coming to it from a particularly trendy music angle. I was a slightly more nerdy guy who was better at GarageBand or something. I really only got into music as a late teenager from trying to socialize, play in bands with friends.
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It set a really high bar for what was normal or day to day and what was considered art or anything like that. I was really heavily exposed to that kind of stuff, which I think was super formative. Not just regular architectural stuff - borderline robotics, a building you could wear, neon green rooms and stuff like that. I was surrounded by books on it, and they did a lot of teaching and I was an only child, so I was always taken to all these lectures and exhibitions and funny meetings. Cook: It was funny because it wasn't particularly musical, but both my parents are slightly avant garde architects. The FADER: What was your upbringing like?Ī. “Even when I'm doing something like “Oh Yeah,” that's really overt it's still a bit like, ‘Oh, isn't that producer like, dancing now? What’s going on?’ That’s the tone and the personality that I want to evoke with it rather than it being like, ‘I've crossed the line.
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Despite donning a shiny shirt and putting his face in the videos, Cook says, it’s still an extension of the lines he’s blurred in the past - moments when he would, say, stop a DJ set to perform a song on the piano.
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“I've always had this experience as part of PC Music, where I had a sort of producer role, but everyone's producer role is also a bit of a performance role,” he says. Speaking over Zoom one Tuesday evening from Montana, where he’s waiting out the pandemic with his girlfriend and collaborator, musician Alaska Reid, Cook - exuberant and quick-talking, eloquent and considerate with the way he considers his own career and pop as a whole - seems unfazed by this new, more visible phase of his life.
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