From Minimal Grooves to Grid Moves: Vlad Caia’s Sonic Journey

Sometimes you don't know where you're going till you get there. Vlad Caia's sonic journey has had many destinations over his long career. Perhaps best known as a key player in Romania's minimal movement, since his first release in 2007 his music has appeared on some of the scene's finest labels such as Cocoon, Darkroom Dubs, Dinky's Horizontal and his own Amphia Records. His work has included the collaborations SIT and Amorf alongside Cristi Cons and Mischa Blanos; acousmatic, A/V and experimental projects; and mastering, mixing, and audio restoration through his Composure Audio Works studio.

In this wide-ranging interview, Vlad traces his artistic evolution from a button-bashing youngster in the late '90s, through software explorations during the explosion of the internet and consumer electronics, to his recent work with Bitwig Studio, TouchDesigner, and modular synthesis. His story reflects a lifelong curiosity with technology and how it can be bent into expressive forms. Vlad also drops some Bitwig production knowledge, including how he uses custom FX Grid patches to gel his tracks together with hardware sampler-style grit.

You're a producer, performer, sound designer, mix and mastering engineer – but how did it all begin?

I've been interested in music since I was a kid. My father was a musician and was doing all kinds of MIDI sequencing from Cakewalk to his keyboards. I was blown away that you could control devices and make music in this way. He also had a band when I was growing up, and the keyboard player had a Roland – I don't remember the model, this was the early '90s – but I was mesmerized by it. I didn't know how to play; I was just pressing buttons, keys, triggering samples, drum hits. I was amazed that such a small machine could make so many sounds. That was the first phase of my musical discovery.

When the internet started becoming a thing in Romania in the late '90s and early 2000s, I suddenly had access to all this information about music technology. My father had an idea to build a studio computer, so I got a setup with a Creative Sound Blaster Live! soundcard and some pirated music software CDs, one of which was the eJay series, and in particular the Techno edition. I started arranging stuff using the built-in samples and loops. So that was the second phase I could say – getting used to the idea of linear editing in a DAW-like environment. Other software on those CDs included Fruity Loops v1.0, some early Native Instruments stuff, and MJ Studio, which was an early mixing/DJing application. Slowly but surely I was introduced to these concepts: DAW sequencing, MIDI clips, drum machines, synthesis techniques.

What music were you listening to back then that inspired you to make it yourself?

My good friend Dan had relatives that would bring compilation CDs from The Netherlands and Germany. We would listen to them, discuss them, mix up the running order, even sample some of them. Most of the music was quite commercial – early EDM, trance, some harder styles. But that didn't really matter because there were lessons to be learned, like DJ-friendly arrangements, the use of build up and tension, sound design, drum patterns and bass grooves.

Besides that you could find albums released on tape at the music store in my small town. I remember buying The Fat of the Land by The Prodigy. I was amazed by the dark, dirty, and explosive atmosphere. These were some of the ingredients that inspired me to make music.

I heard you worked with a hip-hop group at one point?

I had friends that were rappers and looking for someone to record them. They would come over with their instrumentals (which were clipping like crazy most of the time) and try to make something out of it. I would record the vocals and do some very basic mixing – the track was basically done in a couple of hours. Later when I was in high school and living with my grandparents, I turned my entire room into a studio. The guys would come over and spit rhymes full of cuss words – my grandmother was not impressed by their language.

You're probably best known as part of the Romanian minimal scene. How did you get into that sound, and what was it like to be involved as it developed through the late 00s?

I was living abroad when this sound was starting to get played in Romania. As in my early days, I had access to the internet but not much information was reaching me regarding this development, just some crappy recordings and a few tracks. But that was enough for me. I was attracted to it because it gave me the freedom to explore sonically, to create a basic drum patch and add different sounds on top. You didn't really have to bother with them being in tune or even in sync – it was just a clock keeping track and a texture. Even the arrangement could be random. A 20-minute-long track with no breaks, or shorter, tightly-sequenced ones. That fascinated me.

I started exploring how to create textures through sampling, synthesizing, singing into microphones, recording bashed-out bass guitars and adding effects. My involvement continued when I returned to Romania and moved to Bucharest. The sound was still in its early phase, but the scene was maturing and the foundation was quite solid. It was an interesting time – I didn't realize I was in a movement but I knew that it was something important.

How and why did you progress from making minimal, dancefloor-focused music to exploring more experimental sounds?

I see it as a stepping stone to another area of music and sound. I realized that my music-making process over the years resembles a personal journal. You can see the journey from my early deep house releases, to more minimal and dark tracks, to my present-day sonic explorations. It's a process that came naturally to me as time passed. Like you might read the dictionary every day to learn a new language, here I'm expanding the vocabulary of sounds.

What drew you to Bitwig Studio?

During the pandemic I saw some clips of the Bitwig modulation system on YouTube, and thought it was next level. That's still the thing I use most in my process. I like to do all kinds of automation and modulation on pans and mix effects to try and add movement. When you build up layers of a track, a bit of movement here and there really makes things sound organic.

You're starting to use TouchDesigner to create visual accompaniments to your music. How do you combine TouchDesigner with Bitwig?

I'm learning TouchDesigner as an introduction to visual stuff. The first time I tried, I exported a song from Bitwig into TouchDesigner, extracted the transient information and tried to match the visuals to the beat. But I moved away from that. Now I take footage recorded on my phone while traveling, import it into TouchDesigner, and try to make something that doesn't feel recognizable. Eventually I want to sync it to the things I'm creating in Bitwig, so that everything feels more interactive.

Are there visual components or techniques that you tend to come back to?

Feedback! I discovered feedback in TouchDesigner, and I love it. I love audio feedback as well. I use delay pedal feedback to create rhythmic patterns from delays. Then I tried feedback with visuals and I was like, "Holy shit. I love it." It reminds me of old analog stuff – pointing a camera at a screen. Trippy vibes. I like using feedback plus some sort of blur filter. I want to wash out the look to make it feel dreamy or moody.

Tell us about your most recent solo release, waves of white. What prompted this foray into ambient?

During the pandemic, all the clubs and gigs disappeared and I had a lot of time on my hands. So I talked to my friend who's a film director and he said, "I have a 15-minute film that I'm finishing up soon. If you want to try something, do it." I put it on loop and watched it for an hour. Then I powered up the modular system and started jamming while watching the film. I recorded hours – like tens of gigabytes – then we chopped everything up and figured out what worked best.

The album contains a lot of things we didn't use in the film, and some parts are not exactly the same as the score. I didn't want to repeat the music exactly – I wanted to create something new from the unused sessions. I think everything you create should be released in some way, not left on a hard drive. So we decided to create a mixtape.

Let's talk about The Grid. You've posted some quite extensive patches on your social media. How do you start creating a patch?

I just start playing around. Sometimes I get some ideas from Polarity or The Bitwig Mycelium, guys on YouTube that really are power users. They're wizards. I try to follow the concepts of what they're doing and add or remove a couple of things to add my own flavor.

What are the flavors you add to make it sound like you?

Dark and trippy, floaty. Drone-like. But it also depends what mood I'm in. If I want a '90s vibe I add a little sample rate reduction and bit depth reduction everywhere. I have a patch that I used ChatGPT to make that's like the Bit-8 device, but made in the Grid. It just uses two components, a sample-rate reducer and a bit-depth reducer. You have to do it mathematically and use the math modules: divide it by x, then multiply it, etc.

Bit reduction and sample-rate reduction is an older trick that I saw was used a couple of years ago by some EDM artists, using it to add additional high frequencies to sounds. If your clap or your snare is sounding dull, you just add some reduction and play with the parameters, and it's really crunchy, it pokes through. Sometimes it works on kicks as well, but it depends on the music.

I saw you also put sample-rate reduction on the master channel of your project. What's the reason for that?

It levels out the frequency spectrum overall – especially in the mid-high frequencies – because the downsampling kind of boosts everything up and makes it a bit crunchier. Maybe you're using some really low quality samples downloaded from archive.org and a couple of high-quality loops from the latest sample pack – you'll notice that they don't quite fit together in the mix. By using sample-rate reduction at the end of the master chain, it kind of glues everything together and fools the ear that it's from the same source. The same way you might record something onto DAT or an old sampler – those old converters level things out and make it into one cohesive package.

Do you have a tip for someone who wants to start using the Grid but is a little daunted?

You could find a couple of Eurorack modular patches and try to rebuild them in the Grid. Start really basic: a trigger, a small sequence, or an oscillator and a filter – that kind of topology, like a classic subtractive synthesizer. Then just build on top and keep going. That's how I would approach it.

And how do you know when a patch is finished? Is a patch ever finished?

They're like open canvases – I don't think they're ever finished. They're like templates to work from. When I feel like I arrive at a place and it sounds good the way it is and I can modify it for future needs, in my book it's done.

Interview by Graeme Bateman.