Artist talk with John T. Gast (UK)

Dealing with John T. Gast is a little frightening because it’s like dealing with nothing. Typing his name in the search engine is much the same as leaning over a cliff. We hardly know anything about the British producer, if in fact he is British at all. If we walked past him in the street, we wouldn’t recognize him because there are no images of him on Google and his Instagram profile is private. It feels like he doesn’t really want us to get to the material that he has been releasing whenever he feels like it since 2015.

In fact, we know him more through other artists with who he has worked with: the fact that he is a close friend of Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland, the two geeks who formed Hype Williams, says a lot about his take on music.

But what is most startling about John T. Gast is not that we know nothing about him, but when we listen to his glitched productions, full of unknown sounds coming from nowhere, we realise that we don’t know as much as we thought about ourselves either. Would we ever have known we liked them if he hadn’t created them? Now that is frightening.
[Description from Primavera Sound]

About John T. Gast
John T Gast’s appearances come in the form of album releases under various pseudonyms and labels. In the early 2010s, he is said to have collaborated with Hype Williams for their album ‘Black is Beautiful’, which is proof of his enduring commitment to London’s underground music scene.

John T. Gast has released a number of underground CDR releases in the past, but the 2015 album ‘Excerpts’ on Planet Mu was his first album released to a wider audience. He accompanied this album with these words: “The majority recorded early 2014 in SW England / A particularly fierce winter / Woman reasserting power / Man fighting in the dark / The Cold War continues.”

The artist draws on old melodies and classical compositions, introducing both industrial techno and Irish folk rhythms into his electronic tracks with psychedelic overtones. In 2017 he released the esoteric-sounding album wygdn on the Blackest Ever Black label. He now releases his music on his label 5 GATE TEMPLE.

Artist talk in collaboration with 20_14