Alex Epton
First gaining attention with his releases as XXXChange and production work on American rapper Spank Rock’s influential debut album YoYoYoYoYo, classically-trained jazz musician and producer Alex Epton then received praise for his remixes of tracks by Björk, Thom Yorke and Kylie Minogue before commencing work as an in-house audio engineer for XL Recordings, with his studio located in the basement of their New York office.
Epton also has a history working on TV commercials and short films, most recently for filmmaker Clayton Vomero’s docufilm 3OHA (pronounced ‘Zona’), which employs archival footage to explore Soviet culture and the flourishing youth scene there. Shot on location in Russia and Ukraine, Epton worked alongside cellist Lucinda Chua to create a raw yet elegiac soundtrack furnished with contemporary classical and explorative electronic themes.
What was your first journey into music gear?
“I was around 18-20 years old and didn’t have any sequencing software but slowly started to figure it out when I got Cubase and a sampler – the Akai S20, which looks like a lunchbox with all these little plastic buttons on it. I started sequencing that from a Mac and mixing down onto cassette, and the penultimate version of that rig was mixing down to DAT because you could then resample without it sounding terrible.”
Was that when you began working under the name XXXChange?
“XXXChange came a little later. My friend Tim Sweeney was interning at DFA Records – the label that LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy started with Tim Goldsworthy. Anyway, I also interned there, saw how they were doing things and joined a band they were producing called Zero Zero. One of the band members mentored me on the production stuff. He had a 16-track Pro Tools system, so I went on to do the XXXChange stuff on that rig and ended up buying it off him for $500 when the band broke up.”
You seemed to move into producing for other artists quite early. How did you
