SPM Acoustics (Electric!): Okat from The State Press on Vimeo.
Phoenix-based sound artist Okat creates music that explores contrast while merging layers of digital and organic noise.
Tyler Griffin of Okat experiments with textures, warm musical tones and waves of heavy drones.
Influenced by similar musicians Tim Hecker and Ben Frost, Griffin began Okat in 2009.
When asked why calls himself Okat, he withholds the story.
“The music I make expresses its own emotion much more effectively than I could ever communicate through lyrics,” Griffin says. “Since there are no lyrics, I do still try to actively incorporate the human voice in my music by using recordings of friends or strangers talking or singing as the base for my samples.”
Music samples are short clips of recorded audio. All the instrumentation for the album was based on samples Griffin recorded in various locations.
Tyler Griffin sets up his equipment before filming.Photo by Kelly Kleber
Griffin produces Okat in his dorm on ASU's Downtown Phoenix campus. He first produced at the dorm in August 2012.
He is currently finishing production on his second full-length album “Western Hymn,” which features “The Price of Lemonade” and “Plain Milk Steel.” The album will be pressed on vinyl and cassette as soon as development is complete.
Prior to this, he released his debut full-length album Sable in July 2012.
Sable explores the realm of all possible variables as determined throughout production, says Griffin. To help express this idea as an image, he made a pinhole camera out of a Ouija board mint tin and used one of the pieces of film as the cover.
Griffin says the visual of album art is very helpful in assisting the listener visualize what the artist might have been thinking during the process of working on these recordings while also contributing its own part of the storytelling.
“The idea behind the cover for Western Hymn is to create something seemingly organic from images of unnatural, man-made objects,” Griffin says. “This is the opposite of the process in which I made the songs for this album.”
Okat's Sable and merchandise is available on Griffin’s Bandcamp. Find Okat on Facebook and on Soundcloud.
Reach the writer at kmkleber@asu.edu or via Twitter @KellyKleber.
