Mechatok. Photo by Anton Tammi.
The FADER’s longstanding series Beat Construction interviews today’s most crucial producers and their craft.
Mechatok isn’t inspired by videogame music, but he does find its context appealing. The German artist and producer born Timur Tokdemir is fond of their soundtracks’ “little worlds,” he tells me over a video call, “because I always imagine my [own] music as mainstream music in a parallel universe.” Based in Berlin, Mechatok credits both his classical guitar training and his teenage years spent devouring everything from Metallica to Justice’s Cross album as key to his development. But while he’s a true child of the digital era, his music is anything but archetypal.
This songwriting skill has been sharpened by Mechatok’s ongoing work as a rap producer. He is perhaps best known as a frequent collaborator with Bladee — over the past half-decade, he’s helped mold the sound of the Swedish rapper into the narcotized, luxuriously melodic music that currently draws legions of dedicated fans and countless imitators. Their work together has taken many forms, from the subtly glitzy 2020 album Good Luck (which attracted features and remixes from Oklou, Evian Christ, and Charli xcx) to the much campier future ballroom of “Amygdala” with Ecco2k. “I always think of a song as an abstract thing,” Mechatok tells me. “The production is its manifestation.”
For Wide Awake, Mechatok manifests a rich and detailed vision of another planet’s rave-pop, its songs ostensibly utopian if they weren’t so mottled with tears and sweat. The uninhibited moments are plentiful and their reimaginations of their influences are inspired: “Expression on Your Face” with Bladee and Ecco2k ruffles up rapturous bloghouse-era chiptune into an anti-nostalgic paean to youth with no sentiment, just style. Meanwhile, the Isabella Lovestory collaboration “She’s A Director” is just catchy enough to kick off a Perfecto Records renaissance on its own.
You’ll find the album’s heart in its quieter moments. The stuttering IDM synths on “Don’t Say No” interlacing with f5ve’s skipping verse, the gaps in between the wobbly ambient-dubstep melodies of “Everything,” and “When You Left”’s heartbroken two-step. “An album to me is more like a movie with different scenes and like different locations,” Mechatok says. “And in that sense, I’ve never made my little movie.”
After two EPs (Gulf Area and See Thru) and, believe it or not, a video game score (2020’s Defective Holiday), Mechatok is hungry for something grander. A few days ahead of Wide Awake’s release, The FADER spoke with Mechatok about musical narratives, ambition colliding with collaboration, and the upside of perfectionism.
The FADER: The album opens with “You Don’t Exist” and ends with “Sunkissed,” two songs that feel like they were designed as the beginning and end of a story.
Mechatok: The sequencing on this album [moves] the location. So for example, “Expression on your Face” is an upbeat electro song. Afterwards, it goes into this moody, almost dubstep piece [“Everything”]. In the lyrics of “Expression,” Ecco2k talks about stealing clothing from the cloakroom of a club and exiting through the back door. So [on “Everything”] I wanted to paint that picture of him walking through like a city in this serene state.
These things were how I made the decisions on the transitions between tracks. But also, honestly, there’s also a lot of intuition. I’m a DJ as well, and so often to me, it’s about either a super drastic contrast or we flow from one end to the other. I’m not a big fan of the middle ground.
The Isabella Lovestory collaboration is one of my favorites because it’s such a stark contrast with this full-tilt, Paul Oakenfold-y vibe. Can you talk to me a little bit about how that song came together?
I was riffing on my guitar [and] that ended up being more of a bridge in the song. But then when I’m trying to make a track that is based on that [kind of] thing, I get bored. So then I took that guitar and removed all the distortion and started chopping it up. Then I put all this reverb on it, resampled that, then rearranged those into the main progression of the song.
I really wanted an iconic indie drum. Bladee sent me “Soccer” by Kent, and it had this really cool drum intro. It was initially was supposed to be a placeholder but then I was like, “I don’t want to take it out.” So we hit Kent up and they were down to clear the sample. Then I sent that to Isabella and she wrote the whole song on top of it.
The FADER: You seem to have an old school approach to collaboration as well, with a smaller circle.
Definitely. I really didn’t want to make a producer album where it’s three features on every song. The way I think about this stuff is often like Daft Punk. It has vocals, and there’s technically features on it, like Todd Edwards on “One More Time.” But it’s a Daft Punk album, not Daft Punk featuring all these people. Obviously, like, all these people are my close friends. And there’s even a slight tragedy with Todd Edwards and Daft Punk. He’s the iconic voice in so many of the songs, but he never got the recognition he deserved. So I’m not as much of a brutal branding dictator that would hide all the features. These are my friends and it’s cool to do it together. But conceptually, that was what I was trying to go for.
“I always think of a song as an abstract thing. The production is its manifestation.”
“When You Left” has Bladee vocals but no credit. And it’s interesting because your brain approaches it differently than the one he’s credited on.
Exactly. You think of the voice as one of the instruments.
A project of yours that I think is really special is the one that you did with Toxe, the Emiranda EP. It’s like avant-garde chillout.
We both lived in Berlin at that time, DJing and traveling a lot on our own for shows. We [thought], “if we do like a band, we could just travel together and have a laugh at the airport.” So we just started making demos.
We’re both really control freaky people. So if something even slightly doesn’t fit my project, I don’t want it on it. So we made a new name for it — her middle name is Miranda, and my first name is Amir.
It was also because both of our names were starting to be boxed in. “He makes this sound, she makes this sound. You’re part of this scene.” With this one, we could just kind of do whatever we wanted.
Would you say that project marked the the beginning of you pushing against being boxed in?
Yeah. That project actually influenced my album a lot. There’s a lot of ideas I got from working with her that found a way into this album, you know? Even like the song, “Everything,” was a demo that we’ve made for that project. The original version is very, very different. I think the only thing that was left is that little vocal kind of slogan. And that’s Toxe. So yeah, That project definitely had a big impact on everything after.
Wide Awake handles homage very well. There are references, but they’re in service of an overarching soundscape. It’s more of a personal love letter to electronica than an indie sleaze record that might have similar inspiration.
No shade to that. I love a lot of the stuff that comes out right now. The super literal, revivalist ways of making stuff. But if I want to make “One More Time,” I’m not gonna go and listen to “One More Time.” Because I know if I do that, then I’m too informed. So I’m gonna just try and remember it and then make something based off of the memory.
The reference is distorted and blurred through my memory of it. And what happens usually is you don’t remember the exact sonic quality of what each of the components of the song were or whatever. But you remember the feeling of it.
