NHAMInterview with controlfreak
“I see and hear the world through a filter of tape noise, glitch and warble.”
NHAM: Hey control! First of all, what’s the best way to address you? ctrl? C2? ctrlfrk? control.org? controlfreak? Or did we get it right first time?! And how did you come to adopt these monikers?
controlfreak: All valid.
As a teen it was hard finding other kids that would show up to band practice. So I decided to just do all the things as needed, jokingly as a control freak but mostly just for dependability. Shout out to 4-track cassette. I also have a hard time turning the other cheek to the litany of terrible things in the world that are realistically well out of our individual control. Plus it’s made for a rad domain for approaching 30 years.
Hack the planet.
NHAM: Well it’s lovely to have this opportunity to catch up with you thanks to a brand new release: an album of 10 unique covers, called REPLICATE1.0.
You’ve chosen to cover a range of artists including Editors, Hilary Duff, Soft Cell and Siouxsie and the Banshees. How did you go about choosing which 10 tracks you wanted to cover?
controlfreak: While there are historical and personal ancillary and tertiary reasons certain tracks resonate and made the cut, the primary and absolute definitive criteria was Rule no.1, do I yell it at the top of my lungs when doing loud farm work with closed ears on? That’s the secret sauce!
There were a few complicating factors. First, I don’t like covers and other than for some encore sets in tours over the decades, haven’t really published any. But as many of us do, I’ve had an obscenely long list of candidate tracks should and if I were to tackle some. The variety on the whiteboard is wild.
I’m an ex-drummer not a singer, which makes quite a few tracks I’d love to musically tackle, a bit more, daunting.
Individual track lore can be found on the album page.
NHAM: Would it be fair to say you like to add an extra ounce of oontz, a gritty edge if you will, to broadly electronic, synth pop?
controlfreak: Sure. I court the structures of dance music but exist in an industrial wasteland.
To my mind there can never be enough kick drum(s).
I feel after a certain point, hyper clarity and sterile overproduction has far overshot any utility, so I prefer a “flawed” human touch and organic grit.
I see and hear the world through a filter of tape noise, glitch and warble. My head is full of horror soundtracks to movies I’ll never afford to make. I do have the production background where I could possibly make more pop accessible sounds, but turns out it’s just not my nature. I’m in a good space personally when being less clinical and more organic, chunky, broken and abrasive. Sounding angry is my happy place. I appreciate it’s not for most but always excited when folks cut loose and dip a toe into my dark oontz waters.
On REPLICATE 1.0 I tried to not get too abstract and deconstructive. I hope I put my “sound” stamp there but with some reverence to the source material to be well recognisable. If it induces a wee head scratch or, even better, a nod I am amped to have anyone along for the ride.
NHAM: You only allowed yourself one or two vocal takes on any of the tracks on this album. What was the reasoning for this? Not wanting to put too much strain in yourself / Not wanting to fall in to the eternal pit of perfectionism / or something else?
controlfreak: All of the above. This was Rule no.2 for the project. I had to do all the vocals and force one-takes for all parts. Most days during this project’s creation, one take was more than I could physically muster.
Could I have done better on many vocals especially at later times, absolutely, but this was the rule. The decision to do a vocal session was sometimes because I felt like I could and sometimes because I felt there was no way I could, each surprising me at times in all directions. Also, nothing is ever “done”. As a healing project, it was important to document where I was and what I could or couldn’t do. There is pain, failure, determination and success all in here and I’m enjoying the reflection. Did I text a friend a couple nights in this process that I blacked out during vocal tracking, yes, yes I did. Lore.
NHAM: Do you have a favourite of the ten covers?
controlfreak: My favourites in terms of personal resonance with the source material but also reflecting on persevering and actually managing to do them at all are “I Felt the Pain” by Anything Box, and “Be Mine” from Robyn.
My overall favourite in a sincerely comical way is of course the Hilary Duff track “With Love”. A few metropolitan terrestrial radio shows have played that one and I have quite a chuckle thinking of someone nipping out to grab a cheeky Nando’s and bumping scan on the radio and getting hit with EBM Hilary Duff.
NHAM: There are guest appearances on a few of the tracks from Adam Colegrove, Jamie Hill and Shannon Curtis. Tell us more about how and why these came about
controlfreak: Part of the rules of the project was I had to do everything myself, especially the vocals, which is my least favourite and capable part.
However, another part of my challenge for 2025 was if I wake up in the morning, I want to make music with friends. Since I have been working in parallel on original music, remixes for others and some collabs, I felt it was still in the spirit of the game to bring in some tiniest bits of morale boosting cameos for REPLICATE.
I had been touring with Adam’s projects for years where we’d show up in each others’ live sets, and he has featured on multiple control.org and C2 releases (see PENTALOGY and the fourth estate medicate video).
I could write an entire coffee table book on how awesome Shannon (@shannoncurtis) and Jamie (@hilljam) are. The precursor to attempting this covers project was doing some remixes to get back in the studio via I Am and One Thread. They had zero hesitation in allowing me to endirtify their gorgeous work. Their energy is infectious. Their encouragement is unwavering. Their 80s Kids covers project was a huge boost for me to really have a go at compiling and finishing REPLICATE. I can’t send enough black heart emojis their way.
It’s also been very positive getting many old and dear art and life friends embedded into the upcoming original albums.
That others are willing to abet and contribute to my a/v hijinks is just wild.
NHAM: You’ve said this project was a ‘vehicle to try and get back into producing music’. It certainly seems to have been successful as the past few months have seen you make remixes for other people, play live shows, release a music video AND you’re currently deep in to work on a new album. Can you elaborate on why your creative output had previously stalled?
controlfreak: I have been generically open that serious scary and debilitating health declines stole much more than just my creative time/space/energy.
During recent years one of my means of trying to put two fingers in the air to my situation was mostly anonymous extreme volunteerism on music community building projects. I have two settings, go too hard, and go way too hard. I’m told it helped many but it was neither safe nor good for me.
Having to be an infinite fountain of positivity and a community pillar is one of the hardest things I’ve done. Having to be chronically online to infinitely seed positivity and hope against the monolithic doom of ALL social web/media including if not especially the Fedi is hard.
Unending requests, misconceptions and assumptions, hate et al at the project are one thing, but THE WORST was being stuck in a front seat bearing witness and proxy to so much struggle, and how hard it is out there for all the cousins, especially the bard class. That takes a massive toll. Already in physical health debt this all added an emotional and mental debt that came due.
The wild irony is doing all the things to foster positive organic community building, activism against tools that make life harder for artists, and exploring how to normalise direct support for independent and marginalised artists relegated my personal artistic output at zero.
Selfish as it may be, for self preservation I needed to make space to try to fight to make the space to even be able to sit at a studio desk for 15 minutes. Then see about getting back into making noise as a release valve and fuel for my health battle. Remixes were the dipping of the toe, the covers album project was the cannonball into the deep end. The live shows were wildly ambitious but fully supported by my awesome clinical team. As some confidence and energy built, more work on originals started to take place concurrently.
I hope to continue growing creative activities with recordings, live sets, remixes and sound commissions in 2026.
NHAM: Although it may have come at the expense of your own work, what you managed to do with RFF was huge. You built and galvanised a whole community – a scene around Fedi music – one with kindness, compassion and community at its core. You must be proud of what you achieved there?
controlfreak: It’s nice to see resonance and ripples in community and ethos of things I did differently to prove there was a place for organising and rallying organic community, attribution, consent, empathy, normalising as direct as possible support for indie artists.
Problem being, on the “social” interwebs there is no cruise control. That galvanisation requires someone to be always on, always connected to the many, and always fighting. Fighting: atrophy; platform splintering/visibility/reach/scale/enshitification; bad dev actors (indie and corpo bros alike); funding going to projects that will not help artists and/or in fact harm marginalised folks; the VIP talking head class that hate artists taking a gram of attention from them; IRL doom; and the general walls of noise. That’s a lot of fronts to fight in order to be positive and uplifting. The Fedi has been very good at burning out anyone with a sense of duty to community.
RFF got proper out of control in the best sense for artists and friends for a few years. It was a powerful moment in time where together we proved a project and “popular” account could be totally about lifting up others which was like magnetic repulsion for the egotistical number go up movers and shakers. That level of “isolation” in plain sight and the always on and fighting sucked exponentially for the hamster sprinting in the wheel.
So yeah, love/hate. Loved the results for others, hated being stuck there. I hope the gauntlet thrown down helped adjust some durable baselines for how we treat artists, one another, and how we might assemble and celebrate in spaces outside of as many corporate and influencer stresses and pitfalls as possible.
NHAM: Tell us a little more about yourself. Where are you based, where have you come from, where have you been and how important has music been throughout your life?
controlfreak: I live at the foot of a mountain in the middle of nowhere on an island in the middle of nowhere.
Toured in the 2010s (fun!), but mostly the 90s (less fun!) as an artist, DJ, engineer, hired gun, all the things. Hilarious and traumatising road stories for days.
I was apparently attending some rather rocking concerts in the womb and then up on shoulders. I grew up on the road with a rock band. I was treated as an adult with agency, respect and as one of the crew. There were always pillows or milk crates around so I could sit or stand wherever I wanted to learn how to do all the technical stage and performance things. I was legit working tech crew as an ankle biter. There is old film of me at barely six years old sitting in on drums utterly dwarfed by the kit.
My musical upbringing was light on formality and theory, but very practical and from the literal school of rock. I was always supported and encouraged to perform, experiment and discover. As much as my mum had a fit over me rewiring everything and had to endure daily drumming, decades later she was still front and centre at my recent online concerts taking screenshots and being amped up for hours afterward. She said, “you can never be dark enough to scare me off”. Nice one mum.
NHAM: Currently in progress, what might we expect from your upcoming original album?
controlfreak: I’ve just released some more videos, the latest volume in my mangled sound asset series Broke and Dirt 004, and on 19th March I’ll be performing the control.org album manipulate, celebrating its 25th release anniversary for the *ahem* NHAM in concert series!
Coming up next for original releases is a control.org album called ERADICATE. It is primarily stripped down EBM and industrial club bangers with a few usual introspective and goth adjacent excursions.
Hoping to drum up (lol) remix, sound asset, soundtrack etc. donate-what-you-can commissions and, for continued support in this years studio campaign so I can also develop more custom live shows, do more collabs; an EP of reworking old material called REGENERATE; and the next covers album REPLICATE 2.0. All outlined here. There are even more album plans on the whiteboard of doom.
NHAM: And outside of the music what keeps you ticking? We’ve seen some lovely posts of your garden, your cat and even your own carefully manicured cricket strip!
controlfreak: Thanks to friends and lovely strangers’ support last year, I’ve been able to again explore music as a therapeutic tool to be as vertical as I can for as long as I can. But, yes, other things I do in my bloody minded manner that both on paper and in practice I should not be doing are subsistence farming and fast bowling. Shout out again to my clinical team for encouraging my resistance.
NHAM: Lovely to chat with you. We love the new covers album, Replicate 1.0, and are very much looking forward to the new album when it comes. Stay vertical!
controlfreak: And Stomp in Solidarity!
Replicate 1.0 is out now!
Interview with controlfreak
Interview with controlfreak “I see and hear the world through a filter of tape noise, glitch and warble.” NHAM: Hey control! First of all, what’s the best way to address you? ctrl? C2? ctrlfrk? control.org? controlfreak? Or did we get it right first time?! And how did you come to adopt these monikers? controlfreak: All valid. [...]
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