Body Meat’s acclaimed new record Starchris is 13 tracks long and runs just a few minutes under an hour. In that time, it covers a lot of terrain. Though the artist—real name: Chris Taylor—told us that he doesn’t really think about genre when writing music, quite a few styles are referenced here: the sound design of IDM, the aggression of hardcore, the vocal gymnastics of R&B, and the rhythmic complexity of footwork and trap. 

These sounds are scattered, smothered, and covered over the record, which is in some ways the result of over a half decade of musical experimentation and deep software exploration. It’s not easy to balance high-definition headphone music concerns with a more grounded melodic sensibility, but Taylor does it. We sent over a few questions to the artist.

Your new record engages in some fairly detailed sonic world building. Where does that impulse come from?

Body Meat: The world building aspect comes from my interest in game design and specifically role playing games. To really bring the person interacting with it into the world of these characters I've created. Although I had to try and achieve this through sound only—which made it especially difficult, but ultimately a very fun challenge for me.

How do you think about genre as it pertains to your music-making process?

I don't really think about genre while writing.

Take us through how a typical Body Meat track comes together.

Honestly there is no formula, or typical route to making my songs. Sometimes I start with a drum, sometimes it's a voice memo, sometimes it's fragments of a sound. I don't know, I quite literally will some of this music to be, and at some point I've had enough toiling and I decide that it's finished or needs to be broken to pieces once again. (This is the process that takes the longest.)

Do you have a standard process for coming up with lyrics, or is it an ever-changing thing?

I'd say it's ever changing. It's mostly the last thing I do with the music. I really enjoy people that write lyrics that feel ambiguous or seem like riddles, so I like to take a similar route. 

How important is vocal processing to you?

Depends on the track, I think. I like vocals that are very clean and beautiful, but also I like voices that are crumbling. I think you can wield that in really cool ways by blending those two forms.

The sound design on “Crystalize” is wild. What were you trying to accomplish with that track?

I think I was trying to push myself in every possible creative sense on that one. It's mostly the culmination of every technique I've ever learned. I wanted it to feel like this incredible landscape folding in on itself, worlds within worlds being created and lost, and there's this person fighting their way through it.

Who are some of your favorite producers when it comes specifically to drum programming?

Oh this is hard, but I'd say for drums, top three would be Jlin, DJ N*gga Fox, DJ Travella. 

Is there any music, new or old, that you discovered this year that in any way changed how you think about making your own stuff?

DJ Ramon Sucesso. That Sexta dos Crias album might be the best album I've heard in the last five years. It's certainly up there for me.