Ferry Mellegers AKA Buunshin has risen from a relative unknown to one of the most innovative and well-respected producers in drum and bass in just three years. It takes some producers decades to reach this level of success, so what is it about this intricate young artist with a Bachelors in Sonology from the Netherlands that has led to such an exciting trajectory?
With a brand new 6 track EP – Steel Wings on Critical Music – encapsulating Buunshin in various degrees of deep contemplation and inner feeling, we caught up with him to find out how it feels to be releasing music that is more than just aimed squarely at the dancefloor and where he’s heading in terms of artistry and composition.
Firstly, please accept a very warm welcome back to UKF! It’s been 3 years since you were here last. A lot has changed since then. Give us a brief history so far.
Well, I started making music when I was 20 years old. I’ve always been a very creative person and music wasn’t necessarily the first thing that I found on my path of creativity. I started drawing when I was young and I started dancing soon after, then I wanted to be a cook and then I wanted to be a 3D visual artist, then I wanted to be a fashion designer and so on and so on. I wanted to pursue all of those things, which is why it took so long to find out that I loved making music.
When I was 20 I was introduced to the software environment in which to make music and I was instantly hooked. I had already had so many creative endeavours that I was yearning for something that I could make my own. With all the other things, I felt like I was decent at them, but not good enough, and I wanted to be 100% good at something.
This led me to lock myself in my room for about a year making music, because fortunately my circumstances allowed for that. After that year I was accepted into the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, which is quite a prestigious Conservatory, and in my first year there I discovered that I actually really liked making drum and bass. I’d been dabbling with it for a little bit, but I wasn’t that skilled at it, and it took me many hours to learn to understand it. I think what worked out for me in the end is that I don’t give up easily. I’m not easily discouraged by a hard task. In fact, I think I’m easily encouraged by a hard task, to try to get to understand something.
The idea behind my alias Buunshin? I don’t mind admitting that at the time I wasn’t doing so well. I was in a phase of my life where I wasn’t happy with what I was doing. I felt like I had tried so many things, but I wasn’t skilled at those things. In the meantime, all of those people who I had around me were growing in their own expertise and doing Bachelor’s degrees and I was doing nothing of the sorts. I felt like I couldn’t allow myself to feel sorry for myself anymore, so I put my feelings aside and I spent some time trying to hone this skill. Whether or not I felt like it, I followed through until the end, and now I am where I am.
With the motivation thing, I believe that even if you’re not initially talented at something, you can make up for that by working really hard.
You went from being an unknown producer to a big name in the scene in a very short space of time. How did you find the pressure of becoming a well-known artist?
I started off with the Presence EP which was released on DIVIDID, and I couldn’t have been happier with the reception it got. As my first release It became a number one on Beatport and the reception throughout the scene was like ‘okay, so this is different’, but It was accepted for being different, and that was what I really liked about it. Throughout my whole life I felt like I was the odd one out, but by being the odd one out in this scene I strangely fitted in better. I saw that huge artists who I had never dreamed would reach out to me were telling me they really liked the music, and that led to subsequent releases on Mau5trap, Neosignal and Critical.
So, what have been the main personal changes since your first release?
I have become a happier person. I was struggling a lot with the idea of not being good enough generally. I think part of my sound, especially back then, was focused on finding some sort of understanding on the definition of perfection in music. I was so convinced that music was for a very large part a science (and I still think there is some truth to that) but I also started neglecting the soul that is in music. I started out by totally ignoring my feelings, others emotions and the influence the vibe of a track can have on those two.
I’m positive that I can still hear that in my older music, but that doesn’t necessarily make me dislike it. I see releasing tracks as like getting a bunch of tattoos. Once they are out there, they are out there. You can’t change anything about them in the long run, and you need to accept that they are not necessarily going to stand the test of time, but you can still be proud of them in hindsight.
Listening back to the older music, I can hear that I was frustrated with my own self confidence and my own desperate endeavour to convince everybody that my music was good. Right now, I’m feeling much better. I also like making music that resonates much more with me personally, rather than to please everybody. I think that’s one of the biggest differences, because now there is space for people to perceive my music how they want to, rather than how I try to dictate people’s feelings in a uniform direction.
One of the things I noticed about your older stuff is that it feels very technical. The newer stuff feels more relaxed.
Yes, to me now my new music feels more laid back and more “human”. To me, this latest release feels more like it tried to mirror the real world, where the sounds contain its depth, character and layers. The early stuff I made feels more robotic or more like a conveyor belt presenting sounds.
There were no solo releases from Buunshin during 2021. Only remixes. Why was that?
I was on a journey of discovering what I’m working on right now. I wanted to learn how to write songs, music that has an emotional meaning, music that sets a vibe, rather than me wanting to execute a formula. I didn’t want to think about doing anything too complicated or doing anything related to music tech or sound design. Simplicity is the key to understanding, and therefore the key to empathy.
I wanted to discover what it takes to write a song that communicates very well. Most musicians learn how to do that by playing an instrument, or playing in a band, but I don’t have any experience of that. I tried to learn to play guitar when I was 12 or 13 and I failed miserably. I had a great teacher, but I just didn’t get it. I was too young. I was also way too scared of actually opening up to playing in a band, which is probably where the most valuable experience comes from when collaborating with another musician.
With your later work, and in particular with the brand-new Steel Wings EP, you are composing music rather than just making it. There is a distinct difference in the structure of the music.
Yeah, I think that’s because of a couple things. For one, I have a very short attention span, so I like to be stimulated by my own music when I’m working on it. That sometimes tends to make me want to add a lot of detail because that’s very pleasing to me. I take a lot of information in, and as a person with ADHD I think that is an amazing feeling.
At the same time, I came from this perspective where I tried to deduct everything with logic. I saw music as a science, not just designing sounds but also how to place them and where to place them. There are a couple things that I understood from the journey of trying to discover how the human attention span works when listening to music, and also the physics of sound and how sounds collide or how they interact.
Firstly, your average listener can only listen to two and a half things at the same time. They can hear the interaction between two things and then kind of hear a third thing at the back. It’s either that or their attention has gone from one thing to the next, but that is the absolute limit.
If you work with more elements than that, you’re kind of setting yourself up for making a soundscape which is too hard to grasp, and too complicated to understand. This is why I try to orchestrate my sounds so that a listener can go from one very clear element or two very clear elements to the next, but not more than that. It still needs to be understandable, it still needs to be digestible.
If you just look at the physics of sound, then they don’t like occupying the same space in the frequency spectrum. If you have one sound that’s vibrating at a hundred times per second and you have another one that’s vibrating at a hundred and one times per second, then they’re going to interfere a lot because they are not exactly mathematically related. This is why I like to choose my instruments in such a way so that they’re so far apart from each other, that they feel like they have their own space.
Even when I’m doing multiple things at the same time, I would never let instruments which are unrelated to each other occupy the same region, which is something classical composers do. That’s the reason you have different instruments, because they occupy different frequency ranges. You let them play such melodies that everything mostly is coherent, and ideally that instruments only interfere with each other when you want them to.
What was the initial idea behind the Steel Wings EP? It’s quite a departure from your previous work…
What I do in practice is I spend a lot of time thinking about how everything fits together. Even if I do something intuitive, I try to reverse engineer stuff and think in hindsight and ‘why was I doing that?’, ‘why am I doing this?’ ‘what’s the meaning of this?’. I’m not necessarily looking for the technical meaning behind things, I’m looking for an emotional meaning behind the melodies. With all of the music that I’ve written for Steel Wings, the most important factor was that I wanted to feel something. In the end, I compiled all of those tracks together because they were the tracks that made me feel the most.
Whether it is something nostalgic, happy, joyful, sad, sombre, depressed, incredibly invigorated, or glorious or feeling like you are literally on top of the world, I think it’s all in there. I couldn’t be happier with the final results. That is what I wanted to portray: manifestations of complicated emotions. Hopefully when people listen to it, some of those emotions will resonate with them in a way they resonate with me, or maybe they will feel something else, who knows. As long as the people feel something.
You’ve steered away from dancefloor rockers to develop sounds that are more experimental and mature in composition. The Buunshin magic is ever present, but there is a real depth to this collection of work.
I feel like most of the tracks contain sounds that present multiple conflicting emotions. I think that’s what makes people feel things. The music doesn’t just feel like one note, but a contrast from one note to the next. I think that all of those things are possible, because I try to translate that idea melodically, by going from a set of happy chords to a glorious sounding set of chords, or from a set of a sombre sounding chords to an energetic sounding set of chords. The sounds I use also have individually been tampered with on so many levels. On a surface level, on the level beneath that, and on the level beneath that, and on the level beneath that. They have the number of layers that a sound from the real world also encompasses.
If you ever analyse a sound from the real world, you’ll see it’s not just that sound which complicates it. There’s the sound of the person performing with that sound, there’s the sound of the environment, the sound of the microphone, the sound of the dormant electronics in your sound card which is behaving badly, there’s the distortion of all of the malfunctions in your computer. There are so many layers to all of the sounds that come from the real world that our ears can easily distinguish them from digital sounds.
When I try to make something that is fully synthesised, I try to make it so you perceive that same amount of depth, whether consciously or subconsciously. I do it to the point where I try to trick the mind into thinking that it’s listening to a sound from the real world, even though the ears clearly know it’s not. That juxtaposition is what it’s all about. It allows you to completely build your own “real world”. It makes you feel that it’s oddly familiar or nostalgic, while it’s really not. I fabricated it.
With the title track Farewell, you state that it signifies the end of a tough phase in your life. Can you elaborate a bit about that?
Yes, I’m an advocate for openly speaking about feelings. I think everybody should strive to take their feelings seriously and be comfortable with talking about them. I’m glad to say that I am not ashamed of my feelings anymore at all.
The name of my alias “Buunshin” signifies I am this other person. I am a clone of myself, I am a second body, I am an empty vessel. When I first presented the name it was meant to imply that I need to be this second person to make music, like I can’t be myself because I am not good enough. It’s like I felt like I needed to turn myself off or set myself in a different mode. I couldn’t allow for my emotions to get in the way, because I felt like I didn’t have the luxury of choice.
With Farewell I’m distancing myself from this idea, from this unease that I had with my emotions being bottled up, that I wouldn’t allow my feelings to take over. It’s mostly about me putting that phase of not allowing myself to feel things behind me. There should be space for vulnerability and really talking about how I feel while being open, honest and transparent. I started saying that I care about things instead of saying that I don’t. You don’t necessarily have to agree with your feelings, but you can at least acknowledge them and learn to deal with them. You don’t have to pretend like they are not there. It’s okay to be sad.
Buunshin – Steel Wings is out now on Critical Music
Follow Buunshin: Facebook / Soundcloud / Instagram
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