Interview: Dapper Blob

Dapper Blob, the ambient project of Los Angeles-based musician Ben Schwarz-Hopkins, turns lived experience into spacious, emotionally charged sound. Shaped by early encounters with Enya, video game soundtracks, post-rock, museum silence, and the restless focus of ADHD, his music drifts between calm, memory, and quiet self-discovery. In this interview, he talks about finding inspiration in empty rooms and LA traffic, building tracks with Maschine and Komplete, learning when to subtract, and why ambient music can become part of someone else’s story rather than telling the whole story itself.

General info

Artist Name: Dapper Blob

Real name: Ben Schwarz-Hopkins

Age: 34

Location: Los Angeles

How long have you been making music? 16 years

 

Social Media / Music Links

instagram.com/cityofanimalsmusic
dapperblob.bandcamp.com

 

Do you release music under a label or independently?

Independent

 

Creative process and inspiration

What drew you to ambient music in the first place?

My first exposure to ambient/new age/drone, anything that fell into that category, was being given a copy of Enya's A Day Without Rain when I was 8 years old. I was already an atypical child, so showing up class and telling everyone how absolutely righteous this music is was a curve ball for everyone there. I also spent a ton of time (and still do) immersed in video games, so constantly interacting with evolving, environmental music was massively influential for me. I then got super into post-rock when I was in sixth grade through, God is an Astronaut, and once you put a foot into the relaxing instrumental hole you quickly fall down it!

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

I have pretty intense ADHD, and while there are some tracks that I've found myself working on for multiple sessions, those tend to just be commissioned pieces for other media such as video games. In the same way that ambient music, for me, is about living in it and experiencing it and allowing it to be a part of the moment, I usually just sit down to write something and let myself troll through all my patches and synths and see what calls out to me. And to be honest, there's so many times where I'll be halfway through a track and just not be in that zone anymore and abandon it.

What kinds of experiences or environments tend to inspire your work most?

So much of my music, both with my ambient works and other projects, are ways with which I deal with my ADHD, OCD, GAD, and tendencies towards depression. I've actively chosen to not go the route of doing medication for any of them since none of them really like to dance with each other and anything I've tried has just muted my creativity. So! For better or worse I'm just a big bundle of emotions, which lends itself to writing music.

That being said, my environments definitely play a massive role in what I create, my album Communions for Commuters was a way for me to just chill out on my hour plus commute in LA traffic. This newest album of mine, (Music For) Museums, came about from being at a natural history museum on a weekday and actually have moments where the room was empty except for my wife and I. (You don't really get that in LA, haha, people think full volume conversations are totally copacetic and it's rare you're alone in an exhibit for more than a second or two.) But, it was in that emptiness where I just felt so drawn in, thinking about how even the lack of noise when viewing art acts as a backdrop itself.

I reached out to a friend who works with museums and inquired about how one gets into doing music for exhibitions and it all ended up being convoluted and a massive process, so I figured I'd just my own accompanying music for any kind of museum. My very first ambient album, Specific Pacific, was actually written for my friends who were going to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, and I thought it'd be radical for them to have custom music for their adventures.

What atmosphere or emotional space are you trying to create with your music?

I think the answer to this one runs the gamut depending on the song. Although I have dipped my toes into more dark ambient (though that's more explored with my dungeon synth project, Spellplague), I find myself gravitating to the more relaxing, ethereal side of things. I certainly enjoy the more abrasive side of ambient music that's out there, but for me personally, I tend to write pieces that I can breathe a little bit more easily too. I love reverb, my wife makes fun of how much I love to use reverb and mallet instruments actually, and that huge encompassing sound is so lovely to me. It's only recently that I've been able to step more away from that and utilize negative space as an instrument itself.

What moment made you feel like you had truly found your sound?

Honestly, I kind of hope I'm always searching! The evolution of my music is so mirrored in the continuous self discovery of myself and how I interact with the world that, while I have certainly approaches I'll continue on subsequent albums, each collection feels so different to me that I'm always just searching for that new space. I'd like to think too that every artist always thinks "oh hell yeah, this is my best thing yet," over and over and over again, haha. Looking back it never was, but it was then! And that's super exciting!

How important is storytelling in your work?

I do have some more conceptual pieces that I've done for sure, but I think that for me storytelling in the way I try to use it is more of an implied space. I believe there's a beauty about having one's music be a part of someone else's story/day-to-day instead of being the narrative itself. I have my own stories woven through things and a lot of my tracks are deeply personal, but, I've also found that I'm not always eager to share exactly where they came from. Sometimes it's a blurred line between reflecting on a memory and scratching at a wound that's already closed.

What makes a track feel "finished" to you?

This one's hard to really say because I think my answer changes sometimes haha. I've had to really get on myself with editing down over the years. With my experimental electronic project, Damocles, I've have so many layers and three to four drum kits stacked and it's just a million things at once, which is fun, but very much not applicable to music that I'm wanting to be stripped down. I guess I'd say there's a sort of just innate knowing that it's done? It's that feeling of a good exhale after a stretch where your body says, "Okay, cool, we're in a good spot, let's do something else now."

Which artists (or even non-musical influences) have shaped your artistic vision?

Again, early exposure to Enya did wonders for my life, haha. But also growing up listening to classical music, metal, jazz, and the aforementioned post-rock all played big parts. Hearing compositions that are engrossing, thoughtful, and well laid out is so satisfying. I've also really enjoyed Japanese ambient and environmental music. I actually grew up listening to a lot of J-rock like Dir en Grey and Malice Mizer, so being exposed atypical compositions that aren't just ABAC structures always instilled this sense in me of you can really do whatever you want with music! That's what makes it so beautiful and personalized.

 

Gear and setup

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

I do everything with my Maschine 2 and my Komplete S88 keyboard. The keyboard is somewhat recent for me too, within the last couple of years. Prior to that it was all done with the keyboard function on my drum pad. In my early days of electronic music I'd actually manually enter everything in GutarPro in then export the individual MIDI stems into another software and patch them up. Thankfully I don't do that anymore, haha, I'm thankful to utilize the seemingly endless amount of options that comes from the Komplete suite. One day I'd love to get more into analog equipment, but my apartment already has too much in it with several guitars and a couple of cats, so until I find more square footage I don't see that changing much.

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

Definitely my Maschine. It's compact(ish), easy to work with, and keeping everything self contained in its program is lovely for my ADHD brain. The more I have to switch back and forth between different things, the easier it is for me to lose interest.

What piece of gear completely changed your workflow?

I swear I'm not getting paid to say this, haha, but the Maschine. I didn't grow up playing the keyboard or piano, I actually started with bass guitar because my friend said, "We're starting a band and you're tall, so you get to play bass," which made sense to me. So to have acquired something that allowed me to better grasp a piano roll and the ways in which that is structured versus a guitar or a bass was just totally game changing. I got my first one 14 years ago and I've just been diehard ever since.

 

Challenges

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

For me it was learning to subtract things and let less become more. It's so easy for me to say "oh this rules, oh this rules, oh this rules," and keep adding and adding and adding, but, the focus just ends up being something else. Working with ambient music has been a practice in mindfulness for me since it truly allows one to get involved in the few instruments they're using.

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

I let myself experience creative ruts as they happen. To me, it's just as important to acknowledge the times where you aren't feeling creative as when you are. Periodically I'll still sit down and try to create something during those moments but I inevitably just don't enjoy the outcome. My creative bursts usually are like avalanches though. I'll go a few weeks without writing something I dig, then I find the next moment that calls out to me and I'll be glued to my computer for a few days and have written ten songs.

How do streaming platforms affect the way you release music, or what is your relationship with those platforms?

It's an annoying and necessary evil, but it can also be fantastic. I love physical media for sure, but touring for any kind of music isn't easy these days when you're independent, and when it's super niche it's even harder. As much as I'd prefer people to purchase music directly from me, I also know that the zeitgeist is streaming services. So, I do release everything on them so that anyone, anywhere (with signal I suppose) can have access to it. Making money from this would be sick, but I also don't see that as a final goal. I make music for myself and the love of creation and if someone else is able to enjoy it, that's incredible. I've found albums of mine on a pirating site and, yeah, that kind of stings, but then you see a couple hundred people have downloaded it and it's like, "Well, I hope they enjoy it!"

What are your thoughts on AI's impact on music and art? Have you, in any form, used it in your approach to creating and shaping ideas?

To me, AI has become a super slippery slope. It's evolving way too quickly. Obviously electronic based music has used generative aspects for a long time now, but when you're being pushed out of playlists by someone who crafted the entire other song with AI, it's a little lame. I don't really see it going anywhere though in the near future, but I think it'll ultimately change how it's impacting the world in the same way that cryptocurrency was a wild ride for everyone.

I did use MidJourney to create a full different album arts, but I have since stopped for my last few releases. With that too, I did my best to keep refining things to really try and give it its own sense of self, and if there was an artist I wanted to reference it was from someone who is no longer on this plane of existence. But, again, it's like the Will Smith spaghetti thing, the rate of evolution is just a little scary. I got the ick pretty quickly from it as it just kept going and going. There was a two year stint where I released ten albums from my different projects, and I just felt I couldn't capture the essence of the art I wanted from everything.

I'd prefer to just figure things out on my own and in time, if finances allow, hire real artists to create real art for it. Until then though, I'm gonna keep just making minimalist pieces and graciously thanking the artists of the past centuries whos work is now public domain haha I've never used an AI program though for the creation of my music and I don't ever see a reason to. Generative, sequencer stuff, sure that can be fun, but I like to play the ivories too much (or whatever synthetic material my keyboard is made out of).

How do you see AI evolving in music and art? Are you cautious about it, or do you think it will increasingly function as a tool within creative workflows?

I think things will get worse before they get better. You currently have people like Spotify allowing cheap imitations to just proliferate everywhere and it's pretty aggravating. At the end of the day, true art comes from true human emotions. Not to throw trash at the pop industry (there's so good pop out there), but it's like when you can tell that someone has written their own tracks and are singing with emotion as opposed to just singing about something because they paid another person to hand them the lyrics. With ambient, you're always going to have an audience of people who want genuine work, but you'll also have non-ambient listeners that just put on an AI generated playlist for when they study, and we can just hope they then venture out and try to get the real stuff in there as well.

What are you currently working on?

I've just finished up a new dungeon synth album as well as an alternative pop album produced for a friend, so, I'm in between sessions of things at the moment. I'm sure I'll be back in the ambient headspace soon and I'm stoked to see what happens when I am!

What advice would you give to new ambient artists?

Just explore! There's an endless amount of synths and patches and yadda yadda and you can just lose yourself in all of it. We're so fortunate to be in an age of easy discovery for this kind of thing. Really listen to what other people are doing so you can meditate on the process, but also listen to yourself in the moment and see what speaks to you.

 

The sound of Dapper Blob