Andrea Bratta  How was yesterday’s big party? I honestly have a little bit of FOMO.

Sega Bodega  It was really fun! I usually don’t like to celebrate stuff, I’m quite bad at it, I don’t want to draw attention to myself as much as I can, which considering my line of work can be difficult sometimes. This time I had to force myself to do something special, but I’m glad I did.

AB Actually, it really came across more as a club night curated by you, rather than a launch party. It seemed like it just casually happened to also be Dennis’ launch party. How are you feeling now that Dennis is one week out?

SB I’m really happy with it. Everytime you release something new there’s always a small number of people who are like “Oh, I didn’t really like this part, or that part, you could have done this or that.” And usually, if I don’t feel confident about something, I can start acting very condescending towards critical comments. But, this time, I just didn’t agree with anyone, at all. I’m confident I made all the right calls with this record –I can really feel that I can stand behind it, and that’s how I know I’m really satisfied with what I’ve done. This makes me very proud. 

AB This record comes after a period where you really opened up to different sorts of endeavors: Different collaborations, launching ambient tweets, working a lot on the production and mixing for other artists. There’s a feeling of heightened confidence throughout the records, it feels cohesive, like it was a long process’ point of arrival. Perhaps that’s why you are so happy and confident about it.

SB At the point where my career is right now, having worked with so many different people, I’ve learned so many different things from so many different artists, in terms of vocals, songwriting, and all that. Of course I applied all this acquired knowledge to my own thing. It’s so hard when you’re working alone and begin second guessing yourself –I could spend something like six months spiraling down on an idea. You carefully, too carefully, consider everything, and then you show the result to someone: In that exact moment you start seeing stuff you weren’t able to before. Everyone needs that other ear. And that’s what I did with Dennis. I was definitely sending it to a lot of friends and asking for their input and advice.

AB Was your process always this open? I guess we could talk a bit about Twitch, speaking of openness. 

SB Yeah, I’d hope you asked about it! It is something that was very interesting to do, on so many different levels. Working on such a platform can forward the artist-audience relationship so much, to the point of almost being an embodiment of the whole dynamic itself. It’s you and them, no mediation –Or almost none.

AB What made you consider trying that out?

SB  It was a very simple prompt, initially. [laughs] A friend told me how much money she makes on Twitch and I was shocked! So I went and tried to build an audience for myself there, I wanted to see if I could do it too. It started as an experiment, so to speak, and all of a sudden, I’m not sure exactly when, I was just really focused on it. I had this span of six months where I think I really focused on this Twitch thing –I gotta say, they felt really like six longer than usual months, but they also allowed me to get a lot done. The very first song on Dennis, Coma Dennis, I made entirely on Twitch. It was a very short stream because I almost instantly did it and realized that it was going to be the first song on Dennis. So I logged off and canceled the stream, because I didn’t want to give that away, I wanted to keep that a surprise.

AB Do you think that platforms like Twitch might become an actual tool for musicians and artists to add new dimensions to their production? Usually the compositional moment can be a very insular one, and maybe sometimes you actually need that solitude.

SB I kinda have a twofold answer to this. From one standpoint, I think it has to be a private thing, because it’s just the nature of it. I personally couldn’t always do it in front of an audience. But I think the educational aspect of working and producing live on platforms like Twitch can be so helpful for people who are just starting off making music. I remember working with my favorite people when I was less experienced. The most reassuring thing was seeing them make stuff that was just not good. They were just trying and making mistakes, like everyone else. I sat there thinking “Oh, this is kind of terrible” And they would keep going, continue trying and then they would go on and make something incredible. It’s easy to think that these really talented, hard working artists only make good stuff all the time. But the truth is that the creative process is always full of bad ideas, and that’s a good thing. That’s the whole point of it being a process, you have to be trying all these different things and some of them will just stick. I remember feeling so liberated, I didn’t have to feel so bad when trying some ideas out and ending up with shitty outcomes anymore, because I knew that even my favorite artist in the world sometimes just ends up with really bad stuff. Sometimes you can try, and try, and try, and this idea will just never really function how you want it to function, so you’ll just have to try again tomorrow. Not a lot of people want to do that, they don’t want to try, try, and try, and try, and try. And that’s the whole point. I guess that really what I wanted to do with this Twitch experiment was telling people that sometimes you just aren’t having a good day, and that’s fine. But you still have to try the next day and enjoy the difficulties of a truly creative process.

AB More often than not you get to this level of awareness only later in your career, it’s an acquired taste, so to speak. And it’s the type of lesson that you can really apply to every creative path. Speaking of ideas, how did you come up with the concept behind Dennis? Was it a trial and error process too or you had the concept locked right away, and that informed everything else? 

SB It slowly formed. I tried to follow the rules that govern dreams to establish the album’s flow. You know, when you’re in a dream, one moment you’re in your childhood home, and then, all of a sudden, you open a door, and you’re in another scene, you’re in a movie. Something else switches and you’re in the middle of nowhere –You’re always jumping from thing to thing, and it makes complete sense when it’s happening in the dream itself. I aways was intrigued by the fact that all of that would be so fucking confusing would that happen in real life. So I tried to just follow that structure, and try to see what would happen if I tried to follow those dream logics in music. I’ve got the song, how do I derail it and go somewhere else completely? And how do I make it make sense at the same time?

AB Was making the album feel as cohesive as it sounds the biggest challenge to it? How did you solve that riddle?

SB I mean, this kind of approach is not something entirely new. Think of Kendrick Lamar’s Damn, that’s a great example of it. 

AB The beat-switches, yeah.

SB The beat just flicks, and that’s a rap thing, and I’ve always been fascinated by it – Sometimes there are three different songs happening in just one track. Kanye does that a lot –Here’s an idea, and now there’s another idea for you, and then we’re back and now we’re gone again– It keeps the listener engaged and on their toes. You can just change the whole song as it goes, and if the result is still cool and strong, if it simply is just more good music, people will be like “Yeeeeeey!!” Bohemian Rhapsody is a perfect example of this too.

AB Chaining one vibe to the other and back –It makes me think a lot about DJing, especially since we mentioned the hip-hop/rap beat-switch. The whole genre’s genesis is deeply linked with DJing –DJ Cool Herc, NYC’s block parties. Are you thinking of transitioning this side of your production in Dennis’ tour live settings? Are you going for more of a proper live set-scenarios, or a DJ/Clubbing vibe? 

SB Yeah, well, I probably will have a strict set-up, that won’t change. But doing the live versions of the songs has been real fun, they’re a bit different. 

AB I’m very curious now, any spoilers? 

SB No spoilers! [Laughs] You gotta come to a show. 

AB Fair enough, and I most certainly will. Perhaps Paris or C2C. Let’s detour a bit from sonic elements for a moment. I wanted to ask you about the extra-musical inspirations behind Dennis. You have been described as a big cinema buff, for example. Any notable leads here? The record feels very cinematic.

SB There are a lot of movies that I would need to quote. One of the things in my bucket list is scoring a movie one day. I really really want to! You know, like a big, colossal score. We’ll see if i can make it i guess. [laughs]

AB What other mediums or ventures have you set your sights upon right now?  

SB Capital P pop music. I want to do a lot of it –I think pop music is dying, it desperately needs some new ideas as it’s really getting kind of stuck. I don’t think I’m gonna be able to listen to phoned-in records much longer, and neither should anyone.  Pop artists need to be trying new ideas. 

AB I strongly agree. Even if they might not know it, even the most distracted listeners are dying for better Pop music, or music in general. I also think that audiences have never been so much more open to “experimental” stuff than they are right now. Maybe it’s because, you know, there’s never been so much music and it also circulates differently –Think of the possibilities you just mentioned earlier for Twitch. How would you rejuvenate the Pop music landscape? 

SB It would depend on the artists I’d be working with, really. You have to see how willing they are to allow you, and themselves, to do what you want, and just ignore the label heads because they’re going to tell you to do something completely different. Maybe I’d Just try not to make pop music, basically just make music for fun without an agenda, and see where it gets us.

AB Do you think that maybe the distinction between mainstream and underground, genres and audience, make still sense today? Everyone basically listens to all sorts of stuff, and everything bleeds in everything all the time. For example, your label technically would qualify as a niche one, but still, you just said that you would happily push some more pop-ish stuff there.

SB You know, I don’t care, I think I’d release anything on my label, I don’t want it to have a sound or an aesthetic. It’s not about that, it’s about each individual artist on it and what they want to do. And if it sounds good, it sounds good –Having A sound, it can be very limiting. 

AB I guess you being an artist that also happens to have become a label head is showing here, it makes me think about a lot of artist-run galleries, how sometimes only an artist can properly represent another artist. And how sometimes artists that end up being represented in more commercial, or rather classically institutionally settings are forced to repeat what starts as their forte, and ends up becoming their prison. 

SB I think that’s the scariest thing that can happen to anybody. Personally, I need to be able to feel that I can derail my sound at any point, because otherwise, I’m just gonna get bored. It becomes boring, no one wants to make the same thing for 10, 20 years. You have to move on from yourself, and that can be kind of hard. 

AB You can really see this wanderer-like attitude in your trajectory, you have a 12 years career behind you where you really did a lot of different things, worked with different artists, you just launched your second label, closed one. Even the Twitch thing, it really feels about pushing yourself even just in your process, not only in the end-result, you know? Experimenting can be a difficult thing. Earlier we spoke about second guessing yourself and coming to terms with making mistakes. Was it difficult back when you just started pushing yourself towards finding your sound through constant experimentation, have you ever felt without points of reference?

SB I think losing the points of references that you get accustomed to is the whole point, it has to be hard, you have to confront the resistance to change in order to grow. That’s what being a human being is all about, really. But, then again some songs just happen, and they feel easy. 

AB You’ve developed the right confidence and trust in your abilities to back up the ambition of constantly challenging yourself. But maybe you had moments throughout your career where you were this same quest for artistic freedom could have been difficult to sustain.

SB I couldn’t have developed those skills and confidence without the moments of struggle. I guess its kind of a clichè but really..I am convinced that this is just a fundamental part of existence..it’s almost scientific. [laughs]

AB Were there some moments in your career that really solidified your conviction? The kind of “I can make this” moments.

SB I guess listening to the music that I’ve been listening to all my life. That’s been the main driver for me, always. I love music and I’ve always been drawn to it. 

AB What are the records that are timeless for you?

SB I’ve always been taking a lot of references from my teens and my childhood. I really still love IDM, Aphex Squarepusher, Crystal Castles, I grew up on them. Sometimes you love something from the past, and then you listen back to it and realize it didn’t age well whatsoever. What else..Placebo. I love Placebo, I still listen to Placebo. A lot of rock music like Interpol, The Strokes. I still pull from them without even realizing it.

AB They are ingrained in your sonic unconscious. Maybe this goes back to why you’ve been so interested in the role of dreams, what they are, and how they function. You’ve been taking a Jungian approach to music, investigating the way our musical collective unconscious operates. I guess visuals played a role in this process too, right? 

SB Sometimes, yes. And sometimes, they did not. It was definitely not consistent. There was no consistency in anything making Dennis. You know, I was in so many different moods when I was working on it, sometimes I’d be more fascinated by a sound, sometimes by an image, others by a lyric.