Saint Thomas LeDoux is a house & techno producer from Knoxville, Tennessee. He is a member of the Knoxville-based producer collective, TEKNOX.
We had a chat with Saint Thomas LeDoux to talk about his new Dance Artifakts release,’ Fragments’.
Electronic Groove: Hi there Thomas! How are you? We’re excited to have you here with us. A challenging year we’ve left behind, right? Reflecting back, what balance can you make out of it?
Saint Thomas LeDoux: Ha! Broad question! To be honest, most of this year I’ve been concerned with simply trying to stay alive and stay on track without wallowing in existential despair! Mass isolation has made me realize just how small my social circle really is, for better or worse. I miss my broader scene here in Tennessee but have also enjoyed the freedom of being able to reorganize my creative life around things that matter to me more intrinsically.
EG: Can you share with us a bit about your origins and your first contacts with music production and DJing?
Saint Thomas LeDoux: My introduction to electronic music goes back to the golden age of illegal file sharing and learning to type “trance” into Napster. I was a sponge. I also had no idea what I was doing and I downloaded so much random electronic music from places I had never heard of before, good and bad.
For most of my teens, I would just smoke weed and drive around listening to tunes with my goofy buds. Being from Tennessee, though, my first attempts to branch out and actually pursue some sort of community around electronic music were in the Midwestern psytrance scene. In hindsight, the music wasn’t so much my style, but I was exposed to a wildly flamboyant and indulgent culture as an impressionable kid that kinda stuck with me. I became an adrenaline junkie. Also something of an actual junkie.
I moved from Memphis to Knoxville for school and met a small gang of heads there that slowly exposed to techno and the broader history of electronic music. At the same time, my best bud, Ben Allen (a.k.a. Dialectic Sines), got a gig DJing on our college radio station. We started hanging out there a lot, listening to all kinds of music. We got big into promoting more commercial shows and even festivals for a second through the radio station. I also followed in Ben’s footsteps and eventually learned to DJ.
We stumbled from gig to gig until Ben and another bud, Alex Falk, started a more underground party, TEKNOX, with a stricter focus on aesthetics and a deliberate rebuke of any sort of commercial culture. The party was free. It happened out of a community center. It was BYOB. But it was really cool and down-to-earth. People were into it and the vibe was right, and also they were more focused on showcasing regional talent that was actually relevant to the rest of us. I begged to be a part of the party for months, helped load out gear every night, and finally, they let me in. Alex is also a really prolific producer and taught Ben and I how to make tracks. We would share demos with each other all the time. We later brought on Nikki Nair, taught him all the same tricks, and the rest is history!
Electronic Groove: ‘Fragments’ is your label debut on Dance Artifakts. You must be stoked. How did that come to happen? Did you have the label in mind when composing these?
Saint Thomas LeDoux: Actually, this latest release was set into motion well before the pandemic! Back when we could still party, we were playing out and yet another bud, Stephen Wilson, liked my set. When he found out that I was playing mostly my own tracks he asked me to shoot him a demo for this new label he and some other friends were putting together. I dumped a lot of tracks on him, and the two they picked were actually from pretty deep in my catalog. My first label boss, Michael Zucker (RIP) told me once that old tracks like that can age like a fine wine, not finding an audience until they’ve had time to mature. And I think this release is definitely a great example of that process in action.
Electronic Groove: We know you’ve been active during the past year, a complicated one, and now pushing your latest EP. Where did you find the inspiration for these during such a turbulent year? Do you feel like the outside world seeps into your studio?
Saint Thomas LeDoux: The idea of ‘Fragments’ represents both the fragmented nature of the release and also the time in which we’re putting it out. The tracks, given their age, are snapshots of my past as a producer. They represent these breakthrough moments in my struggle to find some sort of sonic identity. Some of the first examples of me really “getting it.”
The ‘fragments’ concept definitely took on a dual meaning when we finally got around to releasing the tracks, because in many ways all of our lives have been severely fragmented by the pandemic, and the vibe of this release sort of accidentally represents that, at least to me. It’s a bunch of ideas isolated in time trying to find common meaning, the same way we’re all separated from each other by the pandemic while still trying to hold on to and create some kind of mutual, shared experience. In that regard, I’m really thankful for my far away friends, Stephen, Terron, Quarion, Akari, and Jack for helping to give these moments greater meaning. Jack’s cover artwork in particular really helped to convey this idea, and I think his contribution to the release was even cooler than the music!
“These tracks are little windows into my emotional past, but they’re entirely open to interpretation”
Electronic Groove: Diving deeper into the music…do you feel like you tell ‘concept’ stories through your tracks? What are some of the feelings that you sought to convey through ‘You Are’ and ‘Laughing In The’?
Saint Thomas LeDoux: I don’t deliberately attempt to write “concept” music anymore because my first attempts at doing so as a young producer were pretty heavy-handed and sort of cringe. That said, I do definitely convey whatever I’m feeling into my writing. I try to capture moments in time, rather than constructing some kind of deliberate narrative. These tracks are little windows into my emotional past, but they’re entirely open to interpretation.
‘You Are’ I remember writing while I was having a lot of relationship problems, being a bad partner, and feeling really guilty about it. The completed phrase in the lyrics is “You are…bad” referring to myself. ‘Laughing in the’ refers specifically to track sampled in the background of the tune (hint, hint), and is similarly a breakup tune, if I recall correctly. It’s an expression of regret for past mistakes while attempting to channel the sort of power and vulnerability of the original track to which it pays homage.
Electronic Groove: Can you tell us what your studio is like? Do you have any favorite piece of gear or vst?
Saint Thomas LeDoux: Lately my studio has been sort of a work in progress. During the summer, the university I’m attending demolished a building that had a lot of the music department’s old equipment in storage. A sort of graveyard for decommissioned gear that they couldn’t legally sell or throw away. Before the bulldozers came, some friends and I ransacked the place and made off with all kinds of loot, including a few racks of old synths, samplers, and effects. Most of them were broken, though, and so I’ve spent the last few months restoring all this gear. It’s been a lot of fun, but it’s also hard to choose a favorite. They’re all my precious babies!
That said, I think my favorite case from that excursion was a Yamaha YS200 keyboard that I rescued. It’s probably the trashiest synth in my studio, but it has a very distinct, edgy character that the nicer FM synths from that era of Yamaha can’t exactly recreate. It’s like a dumbed-down version of a DX-100, with even nastier D/A converters, really simplified controls, and a sort of cartoonish looking enclosure. It looks like a toy, but it’s stupid easy to program and can still make some wild sounds. When I found it, the keyboard was broken and the synth case was all cracked up like it had been dropped. I glued it all back together, and now it works like a charm. I love it! Stay tuned for plenty of cheesy FM goodies in the new year!
Electronic Groove: Do have plans for live shows in the near future or have you had any recent ones? What’s the situation like with COVID-19 and the restrictions taken in Tennessee? How do you feel about them?
Saint Thomas LeDoux: Ha! No way in hell, not here in the states. There are some people throwing plague raves, but with our governments’ total lack of adequate management around the pandemic, they are a huge liability. I can’t afford the risk. I know some people here have gotten big into live streaming, but I never really gelled with that concept. I have been keeping up with mixes, though, and have luckily had a few opportunities to record some myself (including last spring for Electronic Groove!). I’ve been meaning to record some live sets here at home, not to live stream, but maybe to share in some other format, if only to work on my very out of shape live-set skills!
Outside of live music, though, I’ve pivoted somewhat to doing sound for picture, and what few gigs I’ve managed to garner in that world have been pretty involved. It’s not dance music by any stretch of the imagination, but it feels more appropriate to be working on those kinds of things to me right now rather than trying to sustain live music culture during a time when it’s really impractical. I’ve enjoyed the break, and I think this time apart from gigging will only make me more appreciative of shows when they are feasible again.
That said, my livelihood wasn’t hinging on gigs before the pandemic, so I understand other people’s frustration with the situation. That said, here in Nashville honky-tonk bars have been open the whole time like nothing ever happened, blaring bad covers of pop-country tunes to hoards of mouth-breathing tourists, but those places seem very icky to me right now.
Electronic Groove: How do you envision the return ‘to normal’ for the music industry in particular? Do you think some things will change forever?
Saint Thomas LeDoux: God, I hope things don’t change too much! If dance music sticks to live streaming as heavily as it is right now I think it will be the death of the industry! Parties are the whole point! Sweat! Smoke! Filth! This online culture is only an accessory, for me anyway. I think streaming might supplant traditional radio as the go-to online platform, but honestly, I don’t get the point of watching people DJ in their bedrooms. I never looked at the DJ at parties, so why start now? I was always more interested in the freaks on the dance floor. That’s where the real show is. I want the freaks back. Not enough freaks on these streams.
Besides that though, in places like the U.S. where there isn’t a lot of public support for the entertainment industry there will be a lot of doors closed for good, and something of a vacuum left to be filled once we can all leave the house again. It will be interesting to see what new promoters come up with, and how sounds shift with the new generation. Here in Nashville, the younger kids in the scene have really done a lot to keep things fresh (shout out to Limited Network!), and I expect they’ll have no trouble getting back in gear. I’m just hoping my favorite local spots can continue to weather the storm in the meantime!
Electronic Groove: What can we expect from Saint Thomas LeDoux for 2021? What are your next goals?
Saint Thomas LeDoux: My most immediate goals right now are to finish post-production for two movies I’m working on, which is eating up all of my free time right now. Once that dust settles, I’m looking forward to wrapping up a couple of demos that I think have some real promise and will be a significant leveling-up from my previous output. I also started punk-ish side-project over the summer that I’m hoping to put more effort into, but it’s a bit more labor-intensive. The tracks are a lot more acoustic and incorporate a lot of collaboration with other musicians. It’s a new way of working for me and takes more time to polish. Once that one gets off the ground, I think it would be a lot of fun to tour with a proper band, but who knows!
Electronic Groove: Thank you so much for sitting down today. We wish you the best going forward and hope you have a great year!
Saint Thomas LeDoux: Back at y’all! Stoked to be featured again on Electronic Groove! Y’all have a killer taste and have been supporting a lot of my friends in the scene for a long time. Always an honor to be among those ranks!
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