Wallis on embracing sound-mangling plugins, thriving as a producer and how to survive the music industry

Inspired by a desire to take the techno she would DJ to new levels, Wallis moved seamlessly into producing her own music, finding a home on Kangding Ray’s ARA label. Based out of Lisbon, she performs around the world, incorporating a hugely diverse range of software and hardware into her live set as well as in her studio, with an esoteric approach to designing sounds. READ MORE: “Who cares if you layer two kicks if it sounds great?”: Collect 200 talk synths, samples and letting the strongest parts of your tracks speak for themselves With a healthy disregard for industry norms – she believes rules are there to be broken – our chat dives deep into the weird and wonderful plugins, synths and modules that form the backbone of her setup, as well as venturing into discussing how she builds sounds and tracks and how embracing hardware has transformed the way she approaches mixing. Plus she reveals her dream of owning one particular classic piece of gear… Hi Wallis – great to talk to you! Can you tell us a bit about your career to date as a producer and performer? How did you get started on this path? It started pretty organically, I was obsessed with techno records and parties and started to organise small events with some friends, which led to DJing at them, which led to producing. Back then, access to techno tracks was different from today and techno was more “rare”. You would dig for tracks in record stores instead of online. While DJing those tracks, you would always wish this track did “this” or “that”, so it made sense to eventually write your own tracks to perfectly fit your DJ sets. That’s my experience at least. Today, being a producer is a pretty necessary step to sustain a DJ career but back when I first started learning, it was more of a choice driven by passion. Many DJs were not producers at all and producing was not seen as a “tool” to have a career in techno. Only people with a passion for producing would get into it. Things changed a lot. Image: Rui Palma Your new LP Everything Is Not Yet Lost is your most expansive body of work to date. What was the thinking behind its creation? I have been a fan of Kangding Ray forever, and was very honoured when he asked me to submit music for his label. We worked on the tracklist together and it was a very smooth process. His ARA label is all about creating expansive LPs telling a story, and I was very happy he picked some of my most adventurous tracks. The way I view his label, it’s about everyone honing into music as an art form and pushing the limit to create something new, deeply creative and personal rather than choosing tracks that are more basic and catering to the masses. It’s a risky project in a world where everyone is trying to make music that the algorithms are going to like, and I respect him a lot for still fighting for true creativity in today’s streaming-platform-enslaved music industry. Image: Rui Palma Tell us a bit about your studio. My studio is located in central Lisbon, in an empty building that was turned into all kinds of art studios. It’s a very cool and communal place, with so many artists from different crafts. It’s very inspiring, I feel very at home there. I love Lisbon for this, this city feels filled with creative energy because there is this need to create the cultural space that people wish they had – as opposed to cities like Berlin where things are pretty established already, here everyone is always down to do things. I have my crew of creatives for every possible art form I could need around music and they are all extremely talented and have great taste. I love it here. What’s your latest gear or plugin purchase? I just ordered a guitar pedal called “Parting” by Old Blood Noise Endeavors. Effects are a huge part of my sound design and I am always searching for new weird effects, be it plugins or hardware. This pedal is supposed to be a little crazy, so perhaps it will be too wild to take to live sets, but maybe not! Either way, it will be great in the studio for sound design exploration. The description is: “Parting is a glitch pedal. It combines chance-based delay or reverb, modulations, degradation effects and randomized clock changes to give pleasant surprises at each turn of a knob”. When I read something like this it’s an instant buy (and the design also looks really cool and weird). MISHBY by Freakshow Industries. Image: Rui Palma What’s the best free plugin you own? Why? MISHBY by Freakshow Industries. You can technically pay for it or get it for free, and I love all of their plugins because they are absolutely bonkers. There is no other word to describe them. They do things to your sound that are impossible to explain, and it’s great to resample drums through them, or anything really, and cherry pick good moments that come out. They create a really fun and playful sound design exploration and they have the coolest UI of any VST I’ve ever seen. What’s been the biggest investment in your career/studio? Was it worth it?