Erik Wiegand

We are all social human beings, so making music is a way to contribute to society, to feel needed, to feel necessary. We need this. My driving force is the fun of doing something creative, being a valuable member of society, and getting feedback.

driving creative fun

The first time you have a little success, some good feedback, you start imagining having a career, or being a professional musician. But while being creative, or doing creative work, is very natural for humans, to think of that as your main occupation, that's a really important transition.

important creative thinking

But for me it's very difficult to finish music on my own. It's the fear of losing the fun. It's very easy to get a sketch of something or an idea together in a very short time, to try out something new, but to get a five minute track to play out is much harder, at least for me. When I start to construct something, it often ends in frustration.

track frustration fun

When you can inspire other people to do something they couldn't do before, that's a very satisfying feeling. Sometimes I meet people and they're over the top excited to tell me how much they love Razor. There is no shortage of synthesizers out there, every week there's a new synthesizer, especially plugins - there is a lot of competition - so if you make somebody really excited about synthesizer it really feels good, so it's a source of a lot of pride and satisfaction.

feel-good pride people

When I play live, it doesn't look like I'm interacting with the crowd that much because I'm looking at the controllers and I'm concentrating, but I really like it, for me it's easier to play live than to work in the studio, it's more natural to be on stage improvising.

I do music mainly just for myself in the beginning, and of course it's great when I get a reaction, but I'm more interested in hearing something unusual to my ears, and that's what I'm also looking for in other people's music. It's not interesting to look for a sound that is made to make everyone on the planet move - I wanna have both, I want something danceable but very creative and unusual.

creative interesting moving

The positive thing about collaborating is that I cannot get distracted by coding work, because I cannot waste the other collaborator's time in the same way as I can my own. And it's always good to learn how the other person works, learn about techniques, learn social things like: how do you communicate with another person? The music I make with other people I'm much more confident about, I'm a little bit less judgemental of the outcome than with my own stuff because I know it's not only me, it's a more outside of me. Sometimes I even like them better than my own tracks.

judgemental track people