One of my latest musical obsessions,  Silent Rider is the relatively new production duo of Reed Kackley and Michael Santiago. Based out of New York the pair has just started producing lisenable music (their words) and is just starting to make some ripples around their city. We recently had a chance to connect with the duo and chat about music, the irrelevance of genres and the inspiration for their new music video.

 

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Names: Reed Kackley, Michael Santiago

Age: 24, 24

Hometown: Fairfax/Leesburg Virginia

Current Location: New York, NY

What’s on your ipod right now? 

SBTRKT, Portugal. The Man, Talking Heads, Radiohead, Helios, Apparat

What’s better Red or Blue? 

Blue because it’s part of the word ‘Blues’…or maybe black because we’re Emo kids at heart.

 

Silent Rider -- DLZ (TV On The Radio Cover)

The team at dapperlifestyle are huge supporters of people who are chasing their passions. What is is that drew you to music? 

MS: When I was in high school, a lot of my close friends were played in bands… So I would hang out with them whenever they played and sat in on their practices. I started to realized that that was what I wanted to do, so I picked up the guitar (pretty late in my life, I know). It wasn’t until college though that I picked up electronic production. I became obsessed – it pretty much took over all of my free time. I’m still learning.

RK: I started playing piano when I was 5. I hated practicing and I insisted on playing everything by ear, rather than by reading sheet music, which infuriated my various teachers. I convinced my mom to let me quit when I started 8th grade. A couple years later I decided I loved making/playing music and am now grateful for the years I spent at piano lessons. Also, I think music is my/our release. It’s therapeutic to play and write.

 

 How long have you been producing for? 

RK: We’ve been producing together since around 2008, but only in the past year have we made anything listenable (laughs).

MS: Yeah, every time we sit down, we realized we’re still figuring out our craft – shaping our sound. We don’t want to always do the same thing, like you can hear some bands doing; being able to tell what band you’re listening to because of their production style or distinctive sounds.

 

Genres in music are becoming more and more irrelevant, but if you had to, how would you describe your style? 

I think dubstep-influenced ambient pop is the best classification we’ve come up with. You’ll see though that not all of songs have a dubstep feel. So, it really is hard to classify our style… we’re really just drawn to beats that groove (not always in a conventional way) and spaciousness in our soundscapes. That’s really what we’re trying to achieve.

 

The music video for “I Was A Bomb” is really excellent. It’s quite stylish and the cinematography is great. Where did the idea/inspiration come from for that video? 

The narrative for the video was put together by Reed and the director, Philippe Grenade. Jarret Egan, cinematographer, and the amazing Appalachia landscape provided the aesthetic beauty of it all. We knew that we wanted the video to have a strong narrative, with surreal elements, and feel like a short film set to music. We wanted something that was dark, thematically, and that dealt with morality and the most basic aspects of humanity. Initially, we envisioned the video somewhat mimicking the story of Abraham and Isaac, but it slowly evolved over time into something quite different. It should be noted that without our highly underpaid yet incredibly talented/professional actors and (very small) crew the video would’ve been complete, unwatchable  crap.

 

Silent Rider -- I Was A Bomb

 

 

What kind of equipment do you work on? 

MS: I have a 27” iMac that we work off of. I upgraded the RAM in it so it can handle a lot more as far as plugins and software instruments go. Our go to DAW is Logic with a bunch of effects and instrument plugins (i.e. Sound Toys, Waves, Komplete etc.) We’re not all ‘in-the-box’ though, I play the guitars parts with my telecaster through my various pedals (sometimes Died and sometimes mic’ed depending on what type of sound we want). I could go on and on about this for several pages, but I’ll leave some mystery to it!

RK: Up until about a week ago all I had was a laptop and a shitty midi controller (laughs).

 

Do you have any vices you care to share with us? 

MS: Reed is addicted to pornography…

RK: And a fair amount of reality TV shows.

 

What are some of your biggest frustrations in your day-to-day?

The biggest frustration by far is not being able to work on music full time. Other than that, life is pretty good right now.

 

Where would you like to be this time next year? What about in 5 years? 

Ideally, next year we hope to be steadily playing live shows and have an EP/LP released. In five years, it would be nice to be making music professionally.

 

Who would be the top 5 people (dead or alive) that you would like to invite to a dinner party? 

Thom Yorke, Dave Knudson, Johnny Greenwood, Michael Jackson, Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil (amazing con man)

 

Do have any advice for people that are just getting into DJing or Producing?

MS: It’s a lot of hard work and practice to produce well. You’re not going to learn everything just by reading books/articles about it (though it helps you get an initial grasp of things). It’s all about doing it, making mistakes, and making the necessary changes to get better. Also, listen to some of your favorite DJs and Producers and see how they’re stuff sounds (instruments, mixes, etc.). They’re successful for a reason.

RK: Get lucky.

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If you dig their stuff you can follow Silent Rider on Facebook, Twitter and Soundcloud.