Interview: ab9st8

Meet ab9st8, a young ambient artist from Kraków whose work is shaped by curiosity, deep introspection, and a love for imperfection. With a background in guitar and a fascination for modular synths and tape hiss, his sound is both raw and emotionally resonant. In this interview, Antoni opens up about his creative process, sonic philosophy, and the challenges of mixing ambient music. A must-read for fans of Celer, R Beny, and everything lo-fi and heartfelt.

General info

Artist Name: ab9st8

Real Name: Antoni, 20

Location: Kraków, Poland

Social Media / Music Links

ab9st8.bandcamp.com

twitter.com/ab9st8

How long have you been making music?

I have been playing the guitar for ~11 years, taught myself basic piano something like 8-9 years ago and started recording my own music only 3 years ago

Do you release music under a label or independently?

Independent

Creative process and inspiration

What drew you to ambient music in the first place?

This is a tough question. Ever since I got my first guitar pedal (pretty sure it was a wah pedal) I've been interested in weird, evocative sounds, and finding out why they sound the way they do. The stutter of a printer or a diesel engine idling or a huge organ chord.

I was pretty closed off as a teenager and used to listen to music a ton and journal even more. Pretty sure I began listening to ambient by stumbling onto modular synth YouTube channels. I think "Arcology" by Lightbath was the first ambient piece I listened to out of my own volition. To be fair, at that point most of the appeal was still predominantly in the coolness of the bulky machines, riddled with knobs and flashing buttons, making bleeps and bloops, rather than in the music, but in that moment a long process of warming up to it began.

The mellow sound of "Eistla" by R Beny is meshed together with my memory of those years. Earbuds in, writing nonsense in my little notebook and trying to feel myself being somewhere else than where I am. It's a universal quality of all music but, at least to me, ambient has a unique way of transporting the listener to a different space entirely.

The next artist whose music really struck a chord with me was Will Long / Celer. Like in many other listeners' cases, my first album of his that I listened to was "Xiexie" and it still remains one of my favorites. I love his approach to music-making: not thinking of it so much as an "art", whatever that might mean, but as an elaborate form of journaling, in which an entry is a drone piece made from a loop that, in the mind of the artist, has an unbroken bond of memory to an impactful event from their life. Perhaps that's art in and of itself. Celer's work remains very deep in my heart.

Since then it has been all over the place. I started listening to anything and everything, not just ambient, started paying attention to more than just my feelings about the music but how I feel about the mixing, the mastering, the artist's approach and concept... The genre still remains my favorite for reasons I can't articulate. Maybe it's just nostalgia? Maybe it's something deeper.

Can you describe your creative process when starting a new track?

Before I enter the producing phase, if I'm inspired, I will have tons of ideas about what kind of tracks I want to make but barely any of them will end up being realized. That kind of pre-inspiration is good for getting into the zone but many of the ideas I will later realize sucked, didn't stick or I'm not ready to make yet.

As such, I don't have a clear-cut idea of a track before I make it. I record base tracks in VCV Rack and in real life - electric guitar or whatever I can get my hands on, including field recordings - and later post-process them almost criminally, to the point where the new stems barely resemble the original tracks they came from.

I will take as long as I need actually mixing a track in Logic (anywhere from a week to two years, it depends on how tough it is to mix; some of the VCV Rack recordings sound terrible as they are and it takes a lot of carving to make them listenable, let alone make them sit in the mix) in a somewhat tiresome process of exporting a mix and test-listening to it neutrally: at night, in silence and in the dark, not with the monitors. I want to find what should be improved: either corrected / adjusted / removed (happens pretty much every other export) or added / expanded upon (happens every couple of exports). Rinse and repeat, God knows how many times. In the case of most tracks, the first export, buried underneath hundreds of subsequent ones, will sound drastically different from what ends up being released, both in terms of mixing / balance as well as general arrangement. I am looking into alternate workflows and gear, specifically more hardware, but it takes time to get adjusted.

Where do you find inspiration? Emotion, nature, science fiction, or something else?

This is another tough question. Anything can be inspiring! Other music the most, but also literature, film, other visual arts. From a personal standpoint, I will often mull over what somebody tells me, or over an experience of mine, and I'll try to break it all down into some kind of atomic pieces, ripping apart the connections between them known only to me, and cross and combine and construct something new with them that still has that essence of what I can relate to but now can hopefully be related to by more people by having been stripped of my personal context.

How that relates to making music is, ironically, beyond me. I must say it's intangible and ephemeral and gets lost in translation from thought to action.

How would you describe your sonic identity or the mood you aim to create?

I don't think I ever have any specific mood or feeling I want my music to evoke. Arrangement-wise I just try not to make my albums monotonous: too depressing or too bright and hype or too calm. I think an engaging record strikes a balance and not enough people, both artists and listeners, realize that. I like to think of my music (and most ambient music in general) as terrible attempts at tacit storytelling. No words, no plot, no characters - but still a story in one way or another. It's hard to describe.

One thing I can distinguish is I try to imbue my music with the gentlest tinge of humor. A funny sounding title, an off-beat sample or a ridiculous concept all in all. I will admit my music so far probably doesn't show it that well but I'm working on it. I feel like so much music carries itself so pretentiously. Maybe it's not about humility, however, laughter is generally such an easy reaction to elicit and it creates a very strong emotional reaction too. So I think it's underused.

Are there any artists that deeply influenced your style?

Tim Hecker's music has had such an impact on me that sometimes when I listen back to my material I worry I subconsciously copy him. R Beny was the first ambient musician I ever "really listened to" and so his subdued, modular, analog style has also remained inspiring to me over the years. There's much too many electronic artists who have been inspiring to me to recount. I do my best to post recommendations of what I'm enjoying at a given time in the r/ambientmusic subreddit.

I find all sorts of other genres of music very inspiring. I think there's always something to learn from others. In any case, inspiration is not something you choose to have, rather it's something that "has you". In high school I was radicalized by my metalhead friend and so I've listened to my fair share of heavy music. I find myself wanting to emulate the huge sound of double tracked distorted guitars much too often for it to be a coincidence. Frontierer is for sure an underrated band albeit making a very peculiar and somewhat fatiguing kind of music. I've been slowly but steadily growing more fond of American folk music for at least a couple of years at this point. Jackson C. Frank was incredible. All these newer musicians too, Chris Thile, Noam Pikelny, Rob Stenson. I never get tired of "Chinatown" by The Be Good Tanyas. Post-rock has such a huge overlap with ambient I have a hard time imagining somebody that likes one but dislikes the other. "The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place" is a classic. Love that roomy sound on the entire record. It's probably a little bit outside of post-rock but "Uneasy Flowers" by Dean Roberts' trio Autistic Daughters blew my mind when I first heard it. It's probably the album that got me into the whole "music as storytelling" concept. The characters of Rehana and The Rain King in my album "Hilcomparatee" are pretty much lifted from that album.

Gear and setup

Are you using hardware, software, or a hybrid setup?

I guess the answer would be hybrid. Most of the audio tracks and processing is done digitally but I also record field recordings, real-life instruments, bounce to cassette tape and back, through my pedalboard, an analog mixer etc.

What’s your favorite piece of gear or plugin, and why?

Honestly, no idea if I have a favorite. I don't really look at gear as something very dear to me and instead as just tools that I can use to achieve something. Most of them are fungible and I don't think it really matters what you use or how you use it as long as you're getting the sound you want. A lot of the music I've made is the sound of software or hardware breaking apart, or being fed a signal way too loud for it to handle properly, or being made to feedback into absurdity. In my opinion that's the true character of a piece of gear; not how it does stuff right but how it does stuff wrong.

That being said I guess I have to give some shoutouts. I love the Airwindows plugins. Chris is a beast. Love all the Kalman filter-related stuff (I abuse it a ton for my lack of EQ balancing skills) and all the reverbs that have a "derez" control. That's the good stuff. The undersampling creates sheen in the very high end and it gives unreal detail to a sound otherwise starved for detail (as a result of the undersampling). I have an Avalanche Run v2 and it's as good as they say. Very universal and musical. It has "a sound" but you can work around it if you want to get rid of it. I have an old mono Sony dictaphone to which I bounce either L then R or mid then side, a little hot so it saturates. I can adjust the speed however I want and then I bounce back to digital and mix the channels. It's time-consuming but sounds great and inimitable, at least in my experience. The tape noise can be a little invasive, especially if the cassette is not that good, but I can usually get around that to my satisfaction with some filtering.

The VCV Rack community has also come up with some wild modules. Valley Audio Amalgam can make all sorts of insane noise. "All Turns Brown", "Elixir", pretty sure "Quasimodo" too - that's all Amalgam being used in some silly way. From that same dev Plateau is a solid plate reverb and Feline is a solid filter. HetrickCV have some plugins that have very arcane-sounding names and descriptions but once you play around with them it turns out they're super musical and interesting. Pretty sure I abused their analog-to-digital module to make the huge wall of noise on "Elixir".

Challenges

What’s been the biggest challenge so far in creating ambient music?

There's many but I think for me the most significant and hard to overcome is audio engineering / mixing. When I listen to music I feel like a lack of balance or any kind of instance of sounding "unprofessional" can take me out of the immersion entirely. Which I have to admit is somewhat shallow but it's stronger than me. That's why I spend so much time both creatively post-processing and conventionally mixing my music. I want there to be no loose ends. Often I will get frustrated that nothing works to get something to sound the way I want it to and I'll look at the absurdly long stack of plugins working on it and I'll just clasp my head in despair. Throwing most of them out and starting from scratch sometimes works but not always. The hardest part is coming to terms with the fact sometimes I have to release something that I don't "like" or doesn't meet my satisfaction.

How do you stay motivated or inspired when you're in a creative rut?

I'll just let myself be uninspired for some time. Stop mixing for a week or two, turn my mind to other things, listen to some new music. After all, mixing is just listening critically to the same piece of music for hours a day, daily. It's natural to get sick of it after some time. Nothing wrong with taking a break and usually it works.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Become an artist! It will change your life for the better. Also, support independent artists! I don't think I have anything else to add.