Metronome #038: Xilent

Insomniac’s Metronome series features mixes from some of today’s fastest-rising electronic stars, as well as championed legends. It takes listeners deep across a wide range of genres, movements, cultures, producers, artists and sounds that make up the diverse world of electronic music.

It’s hard enough as it is for some artists to set themselves apart by settling into a signature sound; meanwhile, Xilent has managed to do so via a consistently sprawling output spread across a multitude of styles. In the span of five years, the Polish producer has done nothing but wow his way into our preferred players list after silencing critics of dubstep who took shots at the burgeoning genre, claiming it lacked depth and melody. All it took was a little inventiveness and some elbow grease to prove them wrong.

Xilent continues to turn heads and take over rooms with his genre-battering ram in hand. The proof is in his debut album, We Are Virtual, which was released to great acclaim on Audio Porn Records. It’s not a smash-and-grab approach he’s enacted to cover all the bases, but rather connecting the dots between various subgenres with a thread that’s always masterfully melodic. On the heels of his LP, we have a Metronome mix from the madman, who is here to help diversify your musical mind.

Your debut full-length We Are Virtual has been going vertical since its release in mid-May, having clinched top spots in dubstep, electro house, glitch-hop and drum & bass charts. Would you attribute this to having a lot of different fans within various scenes or a target group with a wide palate?
What I’m trying to do is keep the genre boundaries nonexistent, and so far it seems like it’s the latter. The majority of my fans enjoy whichever genre I produce and greatly support me. This is something I’ve been striving for over the past three years, and I’m incredibly happy about the results, which set me free from being known as “the dubstep guy.” We Are Virtual definitely played a major role in that, as will my future releases.

The album was written over the course of three years in four different countries as you moved between from Scotland, England, Spain and your native Poland. How did living in each of these countries influence your work?
It’s all very scattered; however, I have to say that each place had a specific vibe and mood based on my personal life situation at the time. I started with the core of the album in Scotland, where I’ve spent most of my grownup life. I had to juggle [university], a part-time job and Xilent. Despite me being pretty good at juggling three hacky sacks, I decided to stick to only one. The struggle of some of that is definitely reflected in tracks like “This Life,” which now stands as the oldest track of the album.

Then Brighton in England in 2012, where I started focusing entirely on music. I laid the grounds for tracks like “To the Future,” “Revolution” and the instrumental of “Chemical” (which I originally called “Different Worlds” until Five Knives came into the picture). It wasn’t until the opportunity came in 2013, when a small town in Spain named Benalmadena became a little Eden for me. I spent one of the happiest years of my life there with my fiancée at the time. That is where I finished most of the tracks I started, along with a really positive track called “Pixel Journey,” which didn’t make it to the album. When I moved back to my home country last year and got married, I produced “Shadow of You” as well as “Animation,” which to many is by far the happiest track of the LP.

Now that the LP is out, do you feel like the pressure is finally off, or are you already experiencing the urge to get a follow-up going? Do you think there is ever a right or wrong time to deliver a sophomore album?
Believe it or not, the LP was already finished soon after New Year’s Eve. While AudioPorn and I were already setting up the artwork, teasers, trailers and the entire campaign for its release, I had a lot of time to work on new material. I was dying to follow it up with another album soon after, but I knew it wouldn’t have been that easy. So I began work on a couple of collaborations, as well as remixes for artists like Dub FX and Au5. These in turn inspired me to write new, futuristic dubstep/electro hybrids, which I had a chance to tease to people on April Fools’. All this work still had to be laced with finalizing stuff for the album’s CD release, so believe me, by the time May came around, I couldn’t bear to hear any tracks from my album anymore. My cat, either.

Does your cat have a favorite genre? How do you know when he/she is feeling one of your productions?
Whenever some late-evening production business goes on, Pebbles is always behind me on the black sofa. Whenever she likes a certain sound, she gets really comfy and lies flat on one of the sofa’s armrests, like the clock on the tree branch in Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory. She’s become quite popular for that, and you can see her do it live on each one of my Twitch streams. That’s also where you can watch me produce live and play games like Tetris.

You’re relatively active in the gaming community. If you could score a video game, which titles would you go after?
It’s difficult to tell, because I wouldn’t want to touch the music that’s already in place in some of the games that I love, such as the Mass Effect franchise on the electronic side or Morrowind on the symphonic side. I’m also a huge fan of Akira Yamaoka’s Silent Hill music for its darkness. However, if I could redo a soundtrack of a particular game, I’d go with Portal. Despite it already being a very well-done electronic ambience extravaganza, I’d love to have been able to put my own mind into that.

What would be the name and concept behind a Xilent game?
If you asked me this question a year ago, I wouldn’t know what to say. Now, it turns out that a game that very much encompasses everything that I’ve always set my mind to, imagined and felt has just been developed last year, and it’s called The Talos Principle. You take control of an anthropomorphic machine that has been thrown into a series of worlds created by a higher entity, and you have to solve complex riddles and find out about humanity’s past by researching your environment, which you suspect of being just a simulation, yet your main goal is to prove that you are human. Incredible stuff, and I still haven’t finished it. The game contains great music, too, now that I think of it—as well as Tetris mini-games, hehe.

It’s been a while since you’ve uploaded your last live Launchpad performance. Do you plan on releasing a new one anytime soon?
Yes! The album’s release and the urge to produce new stuff got me too occupied to work on new performances, but I am finally preparing a live show of the first track of the album, “Connect.” It’s not as easy as I thought, though.

How long does it take for you to throw one of these routines together?
The preparation of each one of these means I have to switch from my DAW that I’m used to, to Ableton; that alone is a challenge. Cutting up samples and replacing melodies with live VST instruments in an already produced and mastered track is also difficult. Normally, it takes around three days of full 9am–5pm work. Then, all I need to do is learn to play it. Now, that’s when a lot of frustration comes in, especially when your camera stops recording in the middle of a successful performance for some reason. But it’s worth it, since I want to show We Are Virtual from all perspectives to people, and live shows are my new objective.

Track List:: Xilent “Disconnect”
Xilent “Shadow of You”
Xilent “Revolution”
Xilent “To the Future”
Xilent “Is There Time”
Barely Alive “Zombie Hunter”
Diskord “Release Me”
Xilent “Reality”
Memtrix “Ethereal”
Virtual Riot “Rampage”
Document One “Revolution”
Ed Rush “Scarabs”
Xilent “Vital”
Froxic “Satellite”
Astronaut & Eyes “Pinball” (Dubsidia Remix)
Astronaut & Eyes “Pinball” (The McMash Clan Remix)
Xilent “Hysteria”
Knife Party “404”
Xilent “Boss Wave”
Xilent “Boss Wave” (James Marvel Remix)
Xilent “Twisted”
Xilent “Beyond”
Xilent ft. Diamond Eyes “Animation”
Dub Fx “Prove Me Wrong” (Xilent Remix)
Rogue “Rattlesnake”
Marilyn Manson “Slow Motion” (Dirtyphonics Remix)
Xilent “Infinity”
Virtual Riot “You Know Me”
Au5 ft. Tasha Baxter “Snowblind” (Xilent Remix)
Xilent “Pixel Journey”
Axwell Λ Ingrosso “Can’t Hold Us Down”
Xilent ft. Sue Gerger “The Place”
Ellie Goulding “Figure 8” (Xilent Remix)
Xilent ft. Grimm “Falling Apart”