By Deuce

It’s astounding what sort of influence can shape and curate the aspirations—and productions—of sound recording artists. Sometimes, it’s a specific musician and his oeuvre. Other times it may be a particular tune.

And in some cases, it may take the form of gardening.

Really.

“For me, musical influence in any particular genre or any particular song is more like a seed,” reflected music producer, composer, and mixer Jeff Novotny. “I’ll take that and I’ll put it into my piece and I’ll use it and something will actually grow from it. I won’t use it as is, generally. It’s not like transplanting a plant from one pot to another. It’s more like planting a seed and seeing what comes out of it.”

One listen to almost any of Novotny’s sonic creations reveals those seeds and their impact on his songs are as multifaceted as music itself is. A good deal of his recordings function as elaborate pastiches, in which there’s no telling what one might find. Jazz and rock, as antipodal as that might seem to the uninitiated, are perhaps the only constant motifs in his body of work. But one’s liable to find almost anything in there, from vocal samples to totally different styles of music.

“I listen to all kinds of music,” Novotny acknowledged. “On any given day I might be literally listening to anything from Britney Spears to…opera, to a death metal band.”

Not surprisingly, Novtony’s own tracks are motivated by definitive fusion approaches to blending and meshing genres, which is clearly depicted in his nearly 20-minute tune “Cygnus X-1”. His accomplishments for doing so are steadily mounting. Not long ago a German jazz and rock band, Panzerballett, recorded a song he’d written and placed it on its album Planet Z. Another piece he’d written was published in a British piano magazine, International Piano, which is a testament to his prowess as a composer well versed in the finer points of tonality, micro-tonality, timbre, and other elements of music theory.

According to the producer, the drafting of his compositions is not too dissimilar from a visual artist initiating a drawing—which perhaps is understandable with all the types of music constantly swimming through and around him.

“When I start, I just have a general idea of the kind of sound that I’m going for, and I kind of refine it from there,” Novotny disclosed. “So like, I have this kind of rock sound or an EDM sound or something, and I’ll just kind of start fiddling around with ideas, putting them down on paper and playing them to see what they sound like and saying, ‘that’s good; I’ll keep that’ or ‘that’s not good; I’ll have to change that’. It’s kind of like sketching out a piece or artwork: you start out with very simple lines at first. Then, you fill in the shapes and colors and things like that.”

His immediate future involves composing new tunes, collaborating with more musicians, and broadening his brand as he sees fit.

“I’m working on some new pieces now; one’s a big band,” he said. “I generally kind of go between large group and small group pieces. It’s probably going to continue like that. I do like the electronic sound and may incorporate more of that. I’ve been getting into microtonal music a bit; I’ll probably explore micro-tonality a bit more.”