In recent years, Saapato has released a wave of immersive and beautifully crafted music. His sonic landscapes are vibrant, weaving melodic echoes and organic textures into rich, emotive expressions. Transient patterns evolve into expansive sonic meditations, where gentle movements give way to deep introspection.
His latest work, Decomposition: Fox on a Highway, pushes these explorations even further, expanding both the conceptual scope and the collaborative landscape. With an impressive roster of contributors—including Laraaji, Patricia Wolf, KMRU, Gregg Kowalsky, and Green-House—Saapato’s world expands into a universe of boundless possibilities. A fusion of electronic textures, field recordings, and voices coalesce into an enveloping listening experience, drawing the audience into its intricate depths.
In this expansive interview, we dive into the album’s themes, the creative process behind its many collaborations, and the ever-growing sonic universe of Saapato.
Decomposition: Fox on a Highway will be released on March 25. Digital versions are self-released (available HERE) and Constellation Tatsu will release the cassette edition.
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I always like starting at the very beginning. I’d love to hear about some of your earliest memories of music and sound – are there certain things that stand out to you as memorable or formative from when you were younger? What are some of your first memories related to music?
Lots of classical music. My dad is a big fan of Debussy, Chopin, and Liszt so they were played a lot around the house. The first specific piece of music I remember having a memory/connection to though is Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik – whenever that came on when I was three or four years old I remember I used to strip naked and run all over the house dancing to it. My dad also studied under Herb Deusche at Hofstra University and is a huge jazz and electronic music head so when I was young I remember hearing lots of stuff like Jean-Michel Jarre, Tomita, and Chick Corea in the car.
When did you start playing music and creating your own works? Was your family supportive?
I started playing upright bass in my elementary school orchestra when I was in third grade. For a while that was it but since my dad is a musician and had a lot of electronic instruments lying around I started messing with synths and DAWs in middle school although not much came of it – I was more so just experimenting with stuff and clicking through presets. Making actual compositions came much later on. My family has always been super supportive of my music-making – my dad bugged out when he heard I was playing with Don Slepian last year hahaha.
Let’s talk about this wild new record, Decomposition: Fox on a Highway. What a title, and obviously there’s a story behind it. Can you describe the moment you first saw the fox on the side of the highway? What emotions did it stir in you at the time?
For sure – I saw this fox every day on my drive home from work. This was back when I lived in Philly and sorted furniture at a warehouse out in suburban PA. When I first saw the fox my initial thought was that it was alive and I wanted to stop the box truck full of carpets I was driving to help it off the road! It was in the shoulder of a major road and it was rush hour so I couldn’t stop. As I got closer I realized it was dead and then was just totally bummed out by it. What a waste, you know? This beautiful thing killed for nothing.
Seeing it there highlighted humanity’s complete disregard for the environment to me in a new way. It was like this thing I always knew to be true and always hated but for some reason the fox just caused all of those feelings surrounding climate anxiety and anger to double down.
What was it about that experience that made you return to it as a creative focal point?
Well, I kept seeing it! So as I kept physically returning, it started taking up more and more of my mental headspace. Every day I’d pass it and over the course of about eight months, I watched it change from this taxidermy-quality specimen into a mangled carcass into a pile of gore, and finally into just a dark patch on the asphalt. I’d just sit there in traffic thinking about how badly our entire society is handling the earth’s climate and its resources and its non-human inhabitants and it made me nuts. After a few weeks I started talking to the fox as I passed; apologizing to it out loud when I would drive past, promising it that I would try and somehow convey what it was making me feel through an album, it really had a hold on me. I had this dream at the time that was just a demented close up view of the fox along with an unbearable high-pitched hissing. I started clenching my jaw at night around this time and I can’t help but think it was in part due to that dream. It was cursed.
At some point, I started reading about animal decomposition because, alongside the despair/acknowledgment of climate change feelings I was experiencing, there was also this really curious, pseudo-scientific layer to it that began to emerge in me. What happened to the fox? Why wasn’t it being removed? What was leading it to undergo such dramatic changes? What are the factors responsible for each step? How are the steps of decomposition classified? How many animals die this way every year? The questions kept coming. (The answer to that final one by the way is over two BILLION vertebrates are killed on roads each year by passing cars)
Anyway, the more time that went by and the more fucked up the fox became the more it continued to impact me in a variety of ways. The inability to let a thought or feeling go is often where I turn to for creative inspiration – I’ll look toward that mental cycle in an attempt to both observe it and break through it by asking questions such as: what is it about this particular thing that won’t let me be? What is it trying to teach me or tell me? How can I give this repetitive mental loop a voice? What world would emerge if governed by this thought/feeling pattern?
This album is the result of years of that kind of process and I feel like it really captures where my head was at after watching the fox disintegrate.
How did you translate the biological aspects of decomposition (like bacteria, fungi, and scavengers) into sound and texture?
Truthfully there was no methodology aimed at trying to recreate specific decomposers. It wasn’t like a “granular delay represents maggots and reverb represents bacteria” sort of thing. It was more about engaging with processes of sonic decomposition to reflect what happened to the fox. A few ways I did this:
- taking musical ideas and feeding them through systems of destruction (ie: running stems repeatedly through tape and/or creating fully wet effect sends and reamping those).
- composing pieces of music and then removing the “most important” or central sound and working with whatever was left.
- taking small loops from previous works and stretching them into something new with heavily layered processing.
etc. etc. – the whole time keeping in mind “where this starts is not where this can end.” That mantra led me to work in a really frenetic and sort of detached way. I knew whatever was happening at any moment would not be where it would end up, which was a super liberating way to experiment. At a certain point though I realized that I would eventually have to stop and at that point, I still would have had too much control in the final product for my liking. This was where the idea of other “decomposers” came from. I didn’t want to have control. It clicked that it also would be disingenuous to the process of decomposition for me to be the only sonic contributor. There are dozens of biotic and abiotic factors that aid in breaking down organic matter. Once I had the idea of having others interact with what I had created, the next phase of the album began to take shape and quickly became a core tenant of what this record is.
You initially created “skeleton tracks” that other artists then reworked—what was it like to hear your original material transformed by your collaborators?
It was really crazy. So god damn fun. The experience was unlike any other collaborative project I’ve worked on. The mixes trickled in slowly over the course of about 18 months and it was such an exciting time for me. I woke up to use the bathroom one night at around 4 am and saw an email had come through with one of the tracks and bolted to my computer to listen. Each one was a little gift that would appear at a random time. Often too, the collaborators would send through a little blurb about how they had interpreted the prompt and altered the source material. The myriad of ways they all morphed the originals was so fascinating and exciting to read about. I’m beyond grateful to have had the chance to work with so many incredible musicians on this.
With such an impressive roster of collaborators, how did you approach curating the right artists for this project?
Haha, this is going to sound crazy but for 90% of these tracks, I just cold emailed artists that I’m a fan of and who I felt would have something meaningful to contribute to the vision. I looked through my tape collection and Bandcamp library and made a shortlist of musicians I wanted to work with. I didn’t expect many people to respond, to be honest with you so I sent out tons of emails. Way more emails than I had tracks. Actually, when this all began I only had around eight songs prepared. Almost immediately after sending out the emails though I was getting messages back that were almost all extremely enthusiastic. I was shocked. After a few weeks I had more people who were on board with the project than I did songs to send them. And uh… there was no way I was going to turn any of these folks away so I just locked myself in my studio and started writing more music like a madman. I became really monomaniacal; I was writing multiple pieces a day, listening to those pieces obsessively whenever I wasn’t composing, and working to build a library of tracks that the others could work with. When I started this record, I had no idea that it would become this massive collaborative double album, and in a funny way that was exactly what I had aimed for – to be at the mercy of the decomposition process of the original thing.
A lot of people view decomposition as something grim or unsettling, but your album seems to embrace its beauty. Has working on this project changed how you see impermanence?
Funny enough, I think that if you heard my pieces before the collaborators got their hands on them you might not be asking me this hahaha. The original material feels much darker and more ominous to me. As I started receiving the collaborators’ versions though a trend emerged – the pieces that were originally more macabre felt much more dream-like and lighter to me. Mind you, none of the collaborators were in conversation with each other throughout the process so the more serene and gentle qualities that emerged were somewhat of an invisible string that tied together how the composers interpreted and treated my music. I was totally stoked and blown away by that. How cool that these people used totally different methodologies and instrumentation and yet unconsciously the final versions all had these really strong similarities in emotional content!
After completing this record, one opinion about impermanence that’s shifted is definitely how simple it is. Lights on / lights off is maybe how it works for the consciousness of living things but certainly not how impermanence works when viewed through the lens of the entire living world being one interconnected thing, which it is! There’s something refreshing about that to me, some of the time at least.
The album explores the balance of creation and decay. How do you personally relate to this theme outside of music?
Oh boy. Big question. There are four ways I could answer this and all of them would take more words than anyone wants me to write I’m sure so I’ll try and touch on the first few things that are popping into my head.
I constantly feel like I don’t have enough time like there’s more I want to explore and learn. It’s a big world out there and a short time we’re given to swim around and bear witness to its beauty and horror, let alone play our part. This truth leads me to go through cycles of feeling totally impassioned and excited by the possibilities of what can be done with a life and then crashing out when I recognize I won’t get to see and hear and taste so many things that given another reality where we all live multiple lives, I could see myself dedicating an entire lifetime to. For example, I love traveling and if I had another life I could easily see myself spending it living out of a backpack, going all over the place doing odd jobs whenever I needed cash, and seeing as much of the world as possible. But that’s not in the cards for me this time around, other things feel more important, which means it’s not in the cards for me ever, which I sometimes grieve for.
As I get older, I’m trying to let that idea go and be more at peace about following what brings me the most joy; making music, being out in nature, cooking, spending time with friends, working to build community – these are the main things I try to focus on. I’ve also recently taken up beekeeping which is giving music a run for its money in terms of how enamored I am with it so I’d add that to the list! As far as what I don’t have time for… I’m getting better at being okay with the limited time I have on Earth but at times it’s easy for me to slip into focusing on all the parts of myself that are “decaying” because there isn’t enough time/space/energy for me to address them or follow those passions. I’m actually working on a record right now called As Paths Collect Dust that explores this exact idea.
Another thing that feels relevant to this question is… I’m trying to not create hard lines between things that appear to be in opposition. Creation and decay for example don’t seem like opposing forces to me. They seem to always be in a state of conversation/symbiosis for sure but is that opposition? I don’t think it is but I think it can feel that way. It feels especially true when you observe creation and decay from the primal brain’s first-person perspective of “One day my life started and one day my life will end.” Like obviously that’s a reductionist view and a personal projection onto what creation and decay are but it’s also a really difficult one for 21st-century people to step outside of – or maybe that’s just me? This question is sort of breaking my brain, I hope I answered it somewhat sufficiently hahaha.
Were there any unexpected challenges in shaping the album’s evolving sound, given its conceptual depth?
Sound-wise I think I was able to pretty easily shake off what I would have considered to be challenges if I were making any other record. Like I mentioned, I really did not want to be in control once I handed the tracks off to the collaborators. I was very explicit about this to all of them. I kind of encouraged them to really maim the source material and rework it to their heart’s content. So to be honest, no – production-wise I found this album very smooth to make. The concept took on a life (or death haha) of its own and I just rolled with whatever came through.
Logistically though…curating was tough. Lots of cooks in the kitchen meant lots of emails, wide gaps of time between steps being taken, and a lag in things getting done. Busy world, busy lives, and over two dozen people involved in getting this thing across the finish line… It was tricky. Feels like a good time to say once again how grateful I am to everyone who played a part in making this album and helped me to actualize what I was trying to create. It’s been such a fun ride and I will for sure be working on a sequel to this release. I’ve already got the organism that it will pay tribute to identified – I found a blue jay in my berry patch netting a few weeks ago that couldn’t untangle itself and I can’t stop thinking about it, poor thing.
What surprised you about the process of making it?
I think the similarities in dreamlike sounds that emerged in many of the pieces were the biggest surprise. I didn’t expect the final album to feel as cohesive as it does to me. Also, people’s willingness to be a part of this project was a huge surprise. Finally, the creative lengths people went to and the methods they employed were such a treat to hear about. I loved learning about all of the unique ways each artist treated the original tracks; everything from converting melodies into MIDI and running them through modular rigs to playing the songs out of multiple boomboxes and karaoke machines were employed. Crazy, fun stuff.
And to close, as always, what are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
So hard to choose but here’s a short list of favorite sounds that come immediately to mind:
- all frog noises
- any slow-moving, low-pitched water
- refrigerator hums
- loons
- whippoorwills
- biting into a juicy apple
- gas bubbles in carbonated liquids breaking the surface
- Louvin Brother harmonies
- alpenhorn
- anything playing in F# Major
- katydids
- bees
- the ocean (duh)
- skateboard/rollerblade wheels on smooth surfaces
- the shift in sonics when elevator doors open or close
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
