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G Jones has been releasing music since 2012, but the past year saw the Cali DJ/producer reach a lofty new level. His debut album, The Ineffable Truth, gained plenty of notice, and it wasn’t all from his steadily growing fanbase of bass fans. No, he and his album were lauded by such diverse talents as Porter Robinson and DJ Shadow. In fact, it was the latter DJ-legend who said that Jones was “the most gifted Ableton beatmaker I’ve ever seen.” Of course, a listen to The Ineffable Truth will reveal that this kind of mad respect was justly earned. The album’s a cornucopia of complex electronic sounds, rhythms and moods – a genuine journey, not just a collection of formulaic wobbles and drops, a genre classic. So, as his March 29 performance at Miami’s Ultra Music Festival approached, we caught up with the very talented Greg Jones. DJ Times: Why Ableton Live? Jones: I was introduced to it by a high-school teacher who saw me making beats on GarageBand, which was my the first DAW. He gave me a demo of Ableton 6, and I was blown away. Immediately what spoke to me was the Session View approach to making music – the ability to have a bunch of loops or clips that are triggerable in real time, as opposed to strictly working in a timeline format. Since then, I’ve just become super-comfortable with the Ableton interface and have never felt limited by what I can do with it, so I’ve never really had much of a desire to switch DAWs. DJ Times: How did working in Ableton, in particular, inform the process for your latest album? Jones: When I was writing The Ineffable Truth, I decided that I wanted to write in the most free, sometimes just stream-of-consciousness kind of way, and ignore any part of myself that
Photo: Lauren Marrone
DJ TIMES
MMW 2019
G JONES: THE INEFFABLE TRUTH
wanted to make utilitarian decisions to format the songs in a way that would work best in a DJ set. If I felt like writing a song with no drums or a bunch of tempo changes that made it difficult to mix, I’d just do it without a second thought, and in my opinion, a lot of my best music happened because of this. I realized that I should just write whatever I want to in-the-moment, and if I later decide that I like the song enough to want to play it in a set, there are all kinds of creative solutions to playing stuff that isn’t “easy” to DJ, especially since I’m performing with Ableton Live. DJ Times: In a world of single releases and EPs, why an album? Jones: Everyone’s experience is different and I certainly don’t think my way is necessarily the best way, but I waited many years before attempting to write an album. It’s hard to describe why it felt right when it did, but it did. It honestly just felt like I was ready to start writing an album one day, so I did, and learned and improved as I wrote it. DJ Times: Is there a favorite track? Jones: It’s really hard to choose a singular favorite because I like each song for different reasons, but “Time” is definitely a favorite. It’s hard to say why – something about that song just resonates with me in a deep way. DJ Times: Was it difficult curating the tracklist? Jones: I wouldn’t exactly say it was difficult, but it was a process that unfolded over a long period of time. I had the approach that I was going to make the album the best it could be no matter how long it took. A bit over a year into writing, I had what I thought was a strong working tracklist, and six months after that, I had the final tracklist which was only about 50-percent the same. I was playing a lot of one-off shows and festivals toward the end of the writing process, so I’d sequence the tracks in Ableton to sound how they’d sound on the album, playing into one another, and put that file on my phone and listen to it and take notes (continued on page 40)
