Styrofoam - Pop and electronica in the bedroom

We caught up with Arne Van Petegem to hear all the stories from a career full of anecdotes. Between nostalgia for times gone by and plenty of hope for a future with a renewed drive to make music.

Everything's going really well. It's genuinely special to come back with a new record after so much time. Not that I've been doing nothing for these eight years — quite the opposite, I've spent all this time producing other artists' music as well as teaching electronic music at a local institute (Arne lives and teaches in Antwerp, ed.), which I still do now. I vaguely remember that show in Bologna, also because I think it was one of my very last shows before I stopped.

I think things, starting from my second-to-last album ("A Thousand Words"), had already begun slipping out of my control, both musically and in terms of label management. It took me a while to understand my own needs when it came to sharing my music. At a certain point everything became really hard to manage, with a kind of negativity attached to the whole situation. Producing other people's music let me keep drawing on my creativity without being forced to expose myself personally and deal with all the problems that come with that.

Even though I never actually stopped producing my own music, at some point I no longer felt that expressive urgency pushing me to share what I was making with anyone. The most logical explanation is that I probably didn't have anything to say musically.

The first seed that led me back to putting something out was planted when George (Mastrokostas, ed.), the man behind the Sound In Silence label — which put out a limited CD version of "We Can Never Go Home" — asked if I wanted to make an album with them. It turned out he'd been a long-time fan of mine going all the way back to my pre-Styrofoam stuff as Tin Foil Star, and had always kept up with the few tracks I'd posted on my Soundcloud profile.

At first I started digging through all the hours and hours of music I'd put together over the years and tried to piece together a tracklist, but gradually I preferred to wipe the slate clean and produce the material completely from scratch. For the first time in ages I had a really clear vision of what I wanted to do musically — that something I'd lost over the previous years. I wanted a fully instrumental, electronic and analogue album, without trying to be something I'm not: music made in my studio, sitting in front of my machines, trying to express my essence without any pressure.

It's only recently that I noticed how many similarities there are between the tracks on "We Can Never Go Home" and my very earliest work. I remember when the album was finished and mastered, I asked myself: "Which of my previous records does this new one resemble most?". It's very strange, because the production conditions now are completely different from almost twenty years ago. Back then I had very few options and my gear was basically a synthesizer, a drum machine and a four-track recorder. Now I have a really well-equipped studio, with modular synths, digital recording and loads of gear I could only have dreamed of back then. I think the similarity lies entirely in the absence of expectations toward the music — just me in my room with a few instruments, trying to find inspiration, the right atmosphere, the right feeling to produce something I truly felt.

I know it might sound like a typical thing an artist would say, but at some point I gave up asking myself what kind of music I should be making in 2018 and how that related both to what I'd done before and to what's being made now. I'm not a big believer in the idea of "art as an expression of personality", but right now I'm closer to that statement than I've ever been. At the same time, I don't feel like disowning what I did in the past — I'm a huge pop fan, and at one point I tried to reconcile that approach with my more bizarre sounds. I think the abrupt halt in my career came down mainly to budget issues, but also to my own nature: I don't feel like, and will never be, a frontman. I remember on the tour we did as a band shortly after "A Thousand Words" came out, people would start clapping and singing every song from memory with incredible enthusiasm — it partly terrified me and partly amused me.

I think the change in sound was something that developed more gradually, except maybe for "Disco Synthesizers & Daily Tranquilizers", where I took more of a bold leap. Then again, I do remember that was genuinely what I wanted to do at the time — make something more extroverted, maybe with a angrier approach. It's really hard to recall the reasons now, it's been such a long time!

My first real band was when I was 17. We were called "Kosjer D" and we played a kind of old-school emo-hardcore. We put out an album and two singles and played a lot of shows around Belgium, Holland, Germany, France and the UK. We even had a sizeable chunk of our fanbase coming from Italy, travelling to follow us to our shows! Our biggest show was when we opened for Fugazi at a completely sold-out gig in Belgium (on 19 May 1995 in Ghent, ed.). I think you can find recordings of that night on YouTube.

After that experience ended, I played guitar and sang in a couple of bands with a sound closer to indie-rock/noise/dream-pop. I was really taken with bands like My Bloody Valentine, The Wedding Present, Yo La Tengo. At some point I got tired of playing in a band and bought a four-track recorder, and that's how Tin Foil Star was born. Through my experiments in this new world I became increasingly interested in production and sound exploration, using electronic percussion, synths, primitive samplers and all sorts of different effects.

I remember that back then everything felt super exciting, there was so much incredible music coming out, a crossover between lo-fi home recording and electronic music (Isan, Broadcast, Boards Of Canada). Tin Foil Star gradually turned into Styrofoam right around the time I got in touch with Thomas Morr, who was launching his own label and put out the split between Tin Foil Star and Isan. Through Atomic Recordings — whose shop I worked at as a clerk — I helped put out that small release, and that's where everything started. Originally my two projects were meant to coexist, the initial idea being to keep them both going and release on two different labels. Shortly after I changed my mind and merged all the material into the first Styrofoam album, shutting down the Tin Foil Star project.

There are a lot of influences and styles in your music. You've experimented with electronic pop, hip-hop, some guitar-folk lines and instrumental electronica. Where do all these components come from?

At a certain point I started moving away from the usual indie stuff and got interested in a huge variety of music, which I still do now. I'm a massive fan of a lot of old-school hip-hop, and I think it's also some of the most exciting and interesting music you can listen to. Besides that, I listen to a lot of 70s afrobeat, soul, funk, rocksteady and dub, along with plenty of other stuff. I also try to keep up with new things, but it's more sheer curiosity, checking whether there's still anything interesting out there, rather than genuine interest. It's inevitable as you start getting older — the prevailing feeling is wanting to go back to the roots of certain sounds, rediscovering more things from a few decades back rather than slavishly following every new release. Even though I have a sizeable CD and vinyl collection, I'm a big fan of digital listening — a lot of the music I listen to is on my phone, and I listen to it while travelling by train or plane.

Another thing that shapes how I listen, besides forcing me to keep up with what's going on musically, is my job as a teacher. I hold a position teaching electronic music at a college in Belgium, and through that path we've covered a huge range of genres and a good chunk of mainstream pop history, which also pushes me to listen very closely to a lot of music. That's partly why I started digging into soul and afrobeat music, for instance. That way I've managed to create a link between the present and the past, letting me build a connection between me and my students, who are much younger than I am.

Which album or artist has influenced you the most? As for more recent stuff, is there anything you'd recommend?

I think that more than any single record, what's influenced me most has been an attitude toward the expression of music (John Coltrane comes to mind). One record that showed me a new path, or helped me discover something about myself - maybe because it resonated with me on an emotional level - was "Zen Arcade" by Hüsker Dü, along with all of Bob Mould's parallel projects. My favorite singer is, and always will be, Otis Redding. I'm not sure in what way his music might have influenced me, since you'll agree with me that my sound doesn't resemble his in the slightest.

My listening habits range wildly across time, so I can listen to a new record for a whole week and then switch to something really old for an entire month. There was a time I listened to nothing but Herbie Hancock for two months straight, while last week I spent a whole day listening only to "Daydream Nation" by Sonic Youth, as well as revisiting the latest Jungle Brothers record, "Raw Deluxe", which I thought I'd overlooked by giving too much weight to their earliest work.

I'd recommend the new tracks released on XL by the duo Overmono, and there's also a ton of great indie-rock coming out of the Netherlands right now - check out Pip Blom or Amber Arcades, for instance. The new Low album is truly exceptional - I'd lost track of them a bit, but this one is a real surprise. I'm also a big admirer of Frank Ocean, I can't stop listening to him.

Those were truly special times. That period allowed me, with music produced in my bedroom with limited gear, to gain attention and the chance to play shows across Europe, America and Japan. I have so many memories from that time, and it's really hard to pick just one. In the very first days after signing to the label, I flew to Berlin to finish mastering my first vinyl record (my first time on a plane!), and during those days I was thrown into an incredibly stimulating world - I went out with the members of Múm and other Morr artists, we saw shows together, I stayed at Thomas Morr's apartment, and I got to discover the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood where the place was located.

My first American show was at the Knitting Factory in New York (back then a legendary venue), a gig organized by Todd Hyman, the same person who later put out Animal Collective's debut "Here Comes The Indian" on Paw Tracks, a sublabel of the much better-known Carpark Records. Macbooks hadn't arrived yet, so I traveled alone with 50 kilos of gear from one airport to another, with luggage that didn't even have wheels. I remember one day I had to make an insane dash to catch the train to Philadelphia, all while lugging that weight along with me!

Another great moment was when I was asked to play in Notwist's live lineup after the release of their album "Neon Golden". Thomas Morr called me to see if I'd be up for it, and just under a week later I was on a flight to Munich. We rehearsed for two days and then kicked off a tour across France, followed by a run of American shows in an absolutely surreal context - Bush had just invaded Iraq, and we arrived in a strange, almost "wartime" atmosphere. The following summer we opened for two nights straight for Sonic Youth, which were two incredible days. The last show I played with Notwist was at some Italian summer festival, with Broadcast on the same bill. In 2004 I did a long North American tour as Styrofoam, with plenty of ups and downs. Thinking back on those days brings to mind one of the members of that touring band who came along on that adventure: the late Alias (the legendary Anticon rapper who passed away in March 2018, ed.).

Alias contributed to some of the beats on "Couches In Alleys" and "Make It Mine", among other things. He and Ben Gibbard flew to Brussels for a whole week, during which we immersed ourselves in working on "Nothing's Lost" at the mecca of Belgian music, the Ancienne Belgique. It was 2004, and it was a really fun week. I'd met Ben two years earlier, when I went to Los Angeles on vacation. When Death Cab For Cutie played in Brussels shortly after the release of "Transatlanticism", we ran into each other again and I asked him if he wanted to contribute to the record, which clearly turned out great. I have such vivid, emotional memories of the work we did on that album, and I'm still incredibly grateful to everyone who agreed to take part in it. While we were working on "Make It Mine", we noticed there was a piano available on the stage of the main hall (we were in another room across the street), so we set up microphones on the piano and worked with Ben via a video connection: it was a truly bizarre way of working! The only thing I regret about how those days turned out is the excessive use of autotune on "Make It Mine" and "Couches In Alleys".

I hope all these memories will inspire you to get back to making music and playing shows with that same old spirit. Either way, do you plan to do that? Or is this latest album a one-off?

No, I don't want it to be a one-off. I have plans to make new albums and I'm working hard on it. One of them is a covers record, a project I've always dreamed of but never had the chance to make. I also intend to start playing live again - I'm making arrangements with a few venues in my city. These will be entirely instrumental shows, where I'll play the whole of "We Can Never Go Home". Beyond that, I have no plans for a bigger tour, but I'll consider any offer that comes my way.

Thank you for your time, and I hope you can come back to Italy: even though so much time has passed, there are still plenty of fans waiting for you.

Thank you! I hope I can come back one day.

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