There’s something about the way nostalgia crystallizes around technology, how the limitations of old machines become their most expressive qualities, how the crude becomes luminous through the alchemy of distance. Joe Bastardo understands this transformation intimately. Working as Bastian Void for over a decade, he has spent years excavating the emotional residue left by vintage software and forgotten sound chips, finding in their constraints a kind of generative poetry that speaks to both childhood wonder and adult longing. Polyshades, his twelfth release and first on vinyl, represents a culmination of this archaeological practice, drawing from the immersive worlds of MS-DOS soundtracks, vintage electronica, and the Environmental Music of the 80s and 90s.
This is music that understands the difference between nostalgia as sentimentality and nostalgia as a legitimate emotional technology, a way of finding new methods to inhabit the beautiful ruins of electronic music’s past.
Polyshades is out now on Moon Villain.
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Do you remember an early moment where music really stuck for you? Something that made you realize sound could be its own kind of world? Were you drawn more to texture or melody as a young listener? Has that shifted over time?
Back when CDs were new, my friend’s dad put on Nirvana’s Nevermind and remarked at how much cleaner it was than the cassette or LP. I think that was the first time I ever realized you could listen to how music sounds. The fidelity and quality of the music were separate from the melodic content of the song.
Ten years later, I would have an opposite sort of awakening when I heard The Microphones’ “The Glow Part 2” and I couldn’t believe someone would make music so intentionally lo-fi. It was then that I realized an artist could use fidelity to express themselves. Polish was by no means a requirement for powerful music.
I’ve gone through periods of exploring texture rather than melody. That balance ebbs and flows. I’m always looking for new areas of creative growth. Recently, I’ve focused more on the melodic forms in my music. But stumbling upon an inspiring texture can often lead you in a melodic direction. So the writing and patching are usually simultaneous. I’m fascinated and inspired by the way texture can be used to affect your feeling of a melody. In my mind, they’re equals.
You’ve spoken about vintage software and hardware, so I’m curious if there were specific programs or machines that felt like revelations early on?
It’s kind of an interesting scenario when you think about the fact that cutting-edge technology was used to make video games for children. I was captivated by the sound of my Sega Genesis. Some of the music in the games had an otherworldly and affecting quality that drew me in and sparked my imagination.
I love that as young kids, many of us were casually introduced to the idea of instrumental, immersive electronic music through video games. To my ears, it was just as legitimate as any LP my parents would put on the stereo. I found out later that the Genesis had a Yamaha FM synthesis chip inside it. The console was a very audio-focused machine. But games had to be back then. Interesting audio was one way to enhance the experience when graphics were in their early days. [A lot of this music was explored in my mix for Digitalis a few years ago!]
A few years later, we got a Macintosh, and we were members of a shareware mailing list. Every month, they’d send you a disc full of software to try. Once, we got some MIDI composition program. You could pick different pop songs and assign them to different MIDI instruments and mess around with them. I used to loop certain parts or change the instrument sounds. I got a huge kick out of it, and I remember thinking, “I’d love to make my own computer music from scratch!”
I’ve tried to recapture some of that wonder in my music, especially on Polyshades. Using MIDI and messing around in a lot of the same ways that I did when I was a kid playing on the computer. Only now I’m building these generative sequencers or using a tracker to send MIDI out to my whole studio of analog and digital synths as well as soundcards and samplers.
Did you grow up with access to computers or gear, or was it something you sought out over time? What was your learning process like?
When I began to get interested in making my own electronic music, I had no idea what to do. But I had a laptop with GarageBand. So I just started looking for any electronic junk I could find. That often meant toy keyboards and effect pedals. The way you could warp sound so immediately on an old Boss delay pedal was another revelation. Not only did it feel powerful and rule-breaking, it also demystified the idea of “parameters.”
I was lucky to catch the tail-end of affordable prices on vintage synthesizers. I got hyper-fixated on synths. Over the course of a few years, I had accumulated some Roland and Korg instruments, then began to assemble Eurorack modules that would be compatible with those.
In 2017, I met the retired professor and former member of the original Moog company, Tom Rhea. I worked as the graphic designer on his book Electronic Perspectives for over five years. He taught me about the history of electronic music and about music composition in general. I think my work has grown as a result.
Do you remember your first experience with a synthesizer, sequencer, or any kind of audio software? What did it feel like to start experimenting?
I spent many years just bashing out raw ideas. Crashing texture up against melody, I guess. It felt totally empowering to start multitracking weird sounds in GarageBand. There were no rules at all. Of course, I have to mention that those carefree days were documented on the tapes I did for Digitalis.
Even once I had “real” synths, it took many years to figure out how to get all that communicating properly. Eventually, I began to dip my toe into MIDI, which reinforced a deeper dive into song-writing beyond collaging patches together. Now it’s like a big puzzle, figuring out how to get everything to communicate across generations. I spent months getting my new studio set up to the point where everything is just ready to go. All signals routed!
Polyshades marks your 12th release as Bastian Void, but also your first on vinyl. Did the shift in format influence how you approached the material or its structure?
Absolutely. With tapes, there’s less pressure to be perfect. The format lends itself to a lofi looseness. I don’t think of all my old tapes as albums. They’re just “tapes.” Maybe a couple of them are actual albums. For better or worse, you can essentially track the progress of my music from its raw, amateurish beginnings. If it weren’t for the modern tape scene, I probably never would have tried to make electronic music in the first place.
I love the vinyl format, and I’m inspired by the way its limitations have defined home listening culture. I see 20-minute sides as tradition basically. I wanted Polyshades to feel vast yet succinct. The sides have distinct moods. I think of the sides as contrasting between day and night, and each side also ends on a cliff-hanger, giving it a cyclical quality.
On a practical level, the odds of an LP being played on a real stereo are higher than that of a tape or digital file. So I felt encouraged to really focus on the details and make the production as clear as I could.
You’ve cited MS-DOS soundtracks, vintage electronica, and environmental music from the 80s and 90s as core inspirations. What is it about those particular zones of sound that continue to draw you in?
What ties all of that together for me is the immersive quality. All of these types of music eschew pop formats and lyrics and instead communicate through imagination. I love the idea of music transporting the listener to a place and letting them sit there for a few minutes.
I tried to lean into this with Polyshades. The music came before the concept, but I realized that what I appreciate about immersive electronic music is the ability to paint pictures without lyrics. I made a decision to try and describe my inner-visions for each track under this theme of “Shades.” So each track is like a little window into a world.
There’s a really lovely contrast throughout the album between lush ambience and more rhythm-driven tracker pieces, though all of it has some feeling of movement, I think. How did you think about pacing and flow when assembling the record?
The mixture of ambient and beat-driven pieces is just a result of making what I like to hear and knowing my place in the greater scheme of things. I’m someone who likes to sit down with a book and listen to music on a nice stereo. My goal was to just be myself and record until the shape of the album made itself apparent. I made a conscious choice to leave traditional percussion off the B-Side of the album. The A-Side is a little bit more active and hopefully draws the listener in. Then things sort of descend into the darker shades for the B-side.
The album is pretty swiftly-paced, despite several big ambient passages. Nothing stays around for too long. Parts come and go, and will be there for you next time you listen. That was probably informed by the vinyl format, too.
Polyshades is described as your most detailed and complex work, but also your most approachable. Was that duality intentional, or did it emerge naturally as you developed the material?
The detail and complexity come from the new studio I built around 2022. It’s a whole new setup than the one that I used on my previous album, Topia. Everything is different: the mixer, monitors, interface, and DAW are all new. It also features heavy use of high-quality digital synthesis and samplers, along with old analog gear.
I wanted to make the type of music that anyone could understand if given the right context. It’s still not everyone’s cup of tea, but for years, I think I made stuff with the caveat that it’s “experimental.” This time, I strived to grasp chords. I labored over the rhythmic elements to achieve some nuance to the beats. I actively tried to make inviting music and usually did not work on any of this stuff when I was in a dark or cynical headspace.
What does nostalgia mean to you in the context of this project? Is it about revisiting specific sonic textures, or more about channeling a mindset or atmosphere?
You know, sometimes my head spins when I think about never going back in time. Technology gives us so many chances to demarcate various eras in our lives. I love holding a magnifying glass up to the rituals required due to various technological limitations of old machines. Meditating in the tedium of old gear. When I’m using a vintage piece of software like Laurie Spiegel’s Music Mouse or a Tracker, I’m putting myself in the mindset of a simpler time. Same goes for synthesis techniques on vintage synths.
Rather than make work that is fully retro-sounding or primarily focused on looking forward, I find the strand that connects the two mindsets to be the most inspiring. To me, it feels like a miracle that MIDI allows software and instruments from vastly different eras to play together so easily. I try to push my own boundaries of what kind of signals these old synths can receive, and I process the results into something that feels like a rewarding listen.
I want to talk a little about the art, too. The cover is striking. It’s fluid, iridescent, almost like oil on water or molten chrome frozen mid-motion. What was the starting point for this image, and how does it reflect the sound world of the record?
The album art uses a lot of new techniques for myself. I made a DSP chain in Photoshop that allows me to drop in any image and get that colorful, textured result. So I was looking for stuff to throw into it. You see some of that in the inner sleeve. There were at least 5 fully-formed concepts that got scrapped before I ended up with the current cover.
I knew I wanted the album to have some kind of prismatic or liquideous ephemeral quality. Something that evokes the relationship between sight, sound, and the inner world of brain chemicals and pulses. I started with a render of a chrome-like liquid flowing over rocks. Then I spent months completely redrawing it and turning it into something totally new while working underneath my modification layers.
When I was a kid, I used to lie in the tub and stare up at swirls of plaster in the ceiling. I would get totally lost in these zones. The album cover serves as a vista for the listener to get lost in while they listen to the album. On the back of the sleeve, you get little icons that represent the shade of each track. The cover tries to encompass all shades into some shifting, shimmering alien light fluid. I feel like the mind doesn’t exactly know what color it’s looking at, and that’s cool. The visual element takes the place of lyrics in my music so it’s important to me that the art represents the sound that is in my head.
The typography on Polyshades has this elegant but slightly fragmented energy. Was there a specific idea or reference behind the design choices for the title and layout?
I stole the album title off a can of polyurethane I was using while building a modular synth case. That sparked the whole concept. I had the title laid out before anything else. I wanted something that was bold but graceful; tastefully warped in a clean, geometric manner, representing my goal for the sound. I also wanted it to look like a label for a mind-altering product, a piece of research material, or forgotten software.
Do you approach your visual work as part of the same creative process as your music, or do they occupy different mental spaces?
They inform each other. About half of the tracks came first, but it wasn’t until I had a mockup of the album art that certain themes really took shape. When I finally heard amaranth while looking at a prototype of the album cover, I saw the direction of the album more clearly. I probably had that prototype art for almost 2 years before I wrapped up the final mixes and sat down to really hammer out the artwork. At that point, I was listening to the album on repeat while spending countless hours completely submerged in the design.
When going between audio and visual software, I find that there are so many correlations in the creative process. It feels like tapping directly into nature. For example, where you have amplitude (loudness) in music, you have value (brightness) in visual art. Tone and color are words that are used interchangeably to talk about timbre. Texture and sample collages are used similarly, and there are plenty of ways to “synthesize” things from scratch as a visual artist. Sometimes when I’m going back and forth, they feel almost like identical mindsets. That to me is magic.
And to close, as ever, what are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
As I write this in August, we have these amazing cicadas (or june bugs?) in the trees here in New England. My favorite one lets out the most pure, electric buzzing tone that rings out above all the rest. I find it to be completely captivating. It can totally stop me in my tracks. I really love how physical and powerful it is! It sounds like FM synthesis or something.
I also love a Roland filter sweep, Japanese train stations, a page turning, the PS1 bootup, and every little chirp my cat makes.
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.
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