In The Studio With

Ingenious producer TJ Hertz resumes his longstanding white label series with Objekt #5. Danny Turner charts his innovative approach to tech

© Kasia Zacharko

Berlin-based DJ/producer TJ Hertz began his musical life as a drummer prior to joining software manufacturer Native Instruments as a DSP en gineer.Although already recording as Objekt, the role had a circular effect on his music-making process, enabling him to showcase an audacious production style that has mesmerised both club-goers and audiophiles alike. ertz’s struggle to record Objekt material on a consistent basis has, ironically, added a sense of renewed anticipation with each release. Since his debut white label Objekt #1 in 2011, it’s taken over a decade to reach a fifth instalment. However, Objekt #5 merely solidifies Hertz’s reputation as one of the most vital and progressive electronic artists.

Did you always possess a technical approach to production?

“When I first started making electronic music I was mostly playing drums, bass and guitar in bands and recording amateur-hour stuff on the side. I had cracked copies of pretty much everything, but started with Sonar and Cool Edit Pro before moving on to Cubase and a bunch of other stuff. My mum was a professional composer in Manila for many years and did a couple of scores for Filipino films, some library music and a bunch of jingles, so before I started making electronic music I used to play around in her studio. I didn’t make anything particularly ground-breaking, but bearing in mind this was the ’90s and the studio was older than that, I was able to record stuff on the piano roll of her Atari ST and play back instruments on her sampler and a few sound modules. For a 16-year-old, I suppose I had a fairly advanced knowledge of how hardware and mixers worked.”

Your early releases seemed to gain quick recognition from your peers…

“The first few years of my artist career were quite bewildering in terms of how quickly the stuff I was making seemed to get an appreciative audience with some of the artists I admired the most. I remember my agent telling me that he’d passed my record on to Aphex Twin who liked it and began playing it out. Autechre were also one of my biggest inspirations. I met them a couple of years later and they were very supportive.”

Was there any value in trying to figure out their music-making methods?

“I picked up bits and pieces of information and was interested in trying to figure out how they made certain things, but I was never a super hardcore IDM production nerd. To be honest, I don’t listen to a huge amount of dance music. In fact, before lockdown I felt that my relationship with music was becoming increasingly functional and found it harder to listen to music for enjoyment’s sake, but by the end of 2020 I got better at switching off the part of the brain that wonders how something is made or how my own productions stack up to it.”

With so much technology available, do you think that it’s getting increasingly difficult to figure out how a piece of music was made?