It’s Going To Be A Good Summer: An Interview With Ryan Hemsworth

How much time do you spend working on music per day? What’s a typical recording session like?

Not as much as I’d like to, because of school. I’m finished university this year though, so I can’t wait to give music more of my attention now. I’ll spend a couple hours though at least every day working on something, a new beat or remix or whatever. Other days I’ll just sit and work on stuff all day long and put off homework as long as possible without failing classes.

Typical recording session is making tea, sitting on my bed bent over my laptop for a few hours, not blinking very much. Real trap shit. Nah but really I just sit there and drag drum samples, songs from iTunes, YouTube rips into my Logic project, move shit around, play my little synth parts on the macbook keyboard, etc. Then delete stuff after I make it a total mess, rearrange, end up hating what I made and delete the project. Then I start over on something new, do the same, and love it. It’s a pretty bipolar process.

Who are your biggest influences? What do they bring to your sound?

A little of everything. I think that’s pretty important for remaining diverse nowadays. You have to listen to everything, download every album and stay in touch with what’s going on, whether it’s on the East Coast or in the U.K., in Japan, whatever. You have to keep up so you can know how to make something different, I think. Nowadays I’m listening to RL Grime, Future, Chief Keef, LOL Boys, Brodinski, French Montana, Rustie, whatever sounds new and super exciting.

What’s it like playing out? What kind of reaction are you seeing?

It’s super fun to me and it seems pretty fun for people who show up for a good time and are willing to hear shit besides Pitbull and old Britney Spears. But people like that always show up and get mad at me – it’s part of the trade. My last show in TO a few buddies pretended they were my security and it actually worked, so I might look into commissioning friends to be my “song request security” or something. But yeah, if you heard my Live For The Funk mix, that’s kind of how it goes down. I play a ton of my own stuff, but also just the music I love listening to when I’m at home or or in my car. You’re going to hear everything that I think is great in music at the moment, pretty much. And some songs from video games, that’s an important part of the experience haha

How did you get linked with the Green Ova dudes? What’s it been like working with them?

I hit up Shady Blaze first after hearing his Shady Bambino project with Squadda B. I thought his rapping was amazing, and I was familiar with Squadda because at the time I was running a shitty little blog and he would email me his new projects whenever he made them. So I replied one day like.. “hey I make beats, interested?” haha they’re all super open-minded and easy dudes to work with. I’ve still never met any of them in person, so the project I did with Shady last summer (Distorted) was entirely just through emails and Mediafire links. Shady is one of the fastest working dudes in the game though, along with Squadda and Mondre. They’ll write, record, and email you back their parts in like 20 minutes sometimes. Which is easy to fall into that routine and get confused / impatient when other people take weeks to get back to you for a project. Not everybody functions like them, that’s for sure haha.