Artists
Downloads
Nov 09, 2026
Lusine: Melting Into The Moment
Jeff McIlwain has never been in a hurry. The Seattle producer behind the IDM/electronica project Lusine regularly spends a month or more on a single track, stepping away and returning until he’s certain it’s finished. In the meantime, his catalogue has moved between ambient, techno, IDM and glitch, with melodic arpeggiations and textural refinement at the core of his sound.
Always looking for a new language to escape self-identification, he turned inwards on Melting Days, his tenth full-length, to immerse himself in the fog of grief, surfacing with his first fully ambient record since 2007’s Language Barrier. As a result, the LP is more reflective and solitary, with his signature rhythms melting into layered loops and smooth, static textures.
Ableton Live, meanwhile, has been part of McIlwain’s journey since 2003, when he was handed a very early copy at a showcase at the Miami Winter Music Conference. Today it’s his go-to DAW for live performance, including the Melting Days live set. On the album itself, rather than use Ableton’s instruments, McIlwain was strongly focused on using effects to obscure sounds until masked beyond recognition.
Lusine - “Bird’s Eye”
Like many electronic artists, you started out listening to artists like Aphex Twin and Autechre. At what point did you find your own voice?
I started listening to dance music and the rave scene, before getting more into the listening side with Warp Records stuff like Speedy J, Aphex Twin and Plaid, but I also had a good friend introduce me to a lot of indie rock from the early ’90s. I was always interested in trying to figure out how to get some of the things that I liked about old shoegaze and indie rock records and make the chord progressions work for electronic music. Eventually, you start to figure out what works for you and that becomes your sound.
Was there a point where you felt like you’d created a signature sound?
To this day, there are times when I’m not at all confident about what I’m doing, but I eventually started to figure out what worked and what didn’t. For example, I used to have trouble with really basic things like how to make the bass sound good or trying to understand why my kick drums sounded so crappy, and then I slowly started to figure out tricks to get things to work.
It’s not like there was a specific moment when everything suddenly came together, but I will say that in my early days I wasn’t using proper monitor speakers. Once I got those, it was like, oh yeah, that’s what I should have been using the whole time! If people say I have a signature sound, then I’m always trying to escape it. Part of the reason for that is because you want to keep things interesting for yourself, although when it gets released people still say, “Oh yeah, it sounds like him!”
Finding genuinely new sounds isn’t easy with the abundance of tools at our disposal. Instead of chasing that, how do you find ways to keep yourself interested?
I find that working with samples, real instruments or field recordings is a good way to find something that sounds unique and interesting, so it’s often about tapping into stuff that’s living outside of the box. In that way, the basis for a track starts with sources that sound a little bit different, but I still go in for plugins and virtual instruments in order to find different ways to modulate sounds.
Lusine - “Apparition”
Where might you go to find usable or distinctive field recordings?
The last thing I did in relation to field recordings was to go to my stepdaughter’s high school concert to archive the performance and record stuff in between, for example, people talking in the auditorium or recording the actual instrument players tuning up. When they put down their instruments they often make some interesting, weird echoes, and I’ve found a lot of unique sounds from that.
Your tenth LP, Melting Days, reconnects with the more ambient-leaning work you’ve created in the past. Why take a step back in that direction?
For one, I was working on a score with my friend Michael Reisinger, who’s just finished a movie called Giant Void. Because I was already trying to get into that headspace, I thought it would be a good time to work on an ambient album as it frees you up to explore sounds that you typically won’t when you’re making music with beats and vocals.
What’s interesting to me about ambient music is that oftentimes when I’m working on a track that contains beats, I get really lost in all the other sounds knowing that they’re not going to be the main things you’ll ultimately hear on the record. But when you’re making ambient music, you can really hone in on a particular sound knowing that it is what you’re going to hear, which was kind of exciting to me.
How did grief play a cathartic role in how you approached Melting Days creatively?
What I’ve found is that working on music brings you into the present in a way that’s almost meditative. As you’re working, you’re pushing out the past and the future and solely focusing on what you’re doing in the now, which is something I wanted to briefly touch on process-wise. From that perspective, the music was probably influenced by what I was going through at the time, and if you track the progression of the album, it definitely feels like it’s moving through something that’s thematically emotional.
Whether using samples, drums or vocals, the process of disguising sound seems quite prevalent across the album. Why did you decide to approach effects in that way?
Another artist I should probably point out is Christian Fennesz, because he’s so good at disguising instrumentation. Throughout that process, the sound eventually becomes its own unique and beautiful thing, despite you no longer being able to pinpoint what the instrumentation is. I like to form something new out of specific instruments until they have their own sound, but don’t want it to be a wash of sound or a drone – I like for it to have some sort of progression or anchor that you can hold on to.
Lusine - “Pendulum”
One of the strongest characteristics of your sound is your approach to using arpeggiated patterns. On Melting Days, they’re audible but not at the forefront of the sound. Why did you decide to texturise them?
I use arpeggios quite a bit because they make for really nice layers, but on Melting Days I wanted to start with an arpeggiation and make it sound weird by throwing it through reverb or doing something totally different that still carries its progressive properties. As it pertains to Ableton Live, when it comes to creating those arpeggiated patterns, I’ll often use it as a hardware instrument by connecting my laptop to the Push 2. I also used a Roland FANTOM 6 workstation because it has a nice arpeggiator on it.
The track Pendulum actually begins with a weird little sequence or arpeggiation from my Dave Smith Tetra, which has got a really crunchy, soft sound. I basically had this superfast arpeggiation going, threw it through the Tetra to create a wash of reverb and started bringing it back to the original sequence.
“What I’ve found is that working on music brings you into the present in a way that’s almost meditative. As you’re working, you’re pushing out the past and the future and solely focusing on what you’re doing in the now, which is something I wanted to briefly touch on process-wise.”
You mentioned Push 2. When did you come across that device and decide it could be useful to your production method?
I used to have an Akai MPC 1000 and did some programming for a composer back in the early 2000s on an MPC 2000 and wanted to get back into that because I love pattern-based nonlinear workflows. Unfortunately, I found that trying to bring parts in from the MPC to the computer was taking too much time, so I thought it would be good to get a Push 2 - especially because I already knew that, together with Ableton, I could use them to create new, pattern-based material that didn’t feel like it was made in the box.
Do you find that you get very different results when using physical hardware to create arpeggiations compared to software?
Regardless of whether the result is different, it can be more inspiring to work on a piece of hardware. The Push 2 has certain methods for building layers of loops, so I’ll primarily mess with those in Ableton’s Session View. I find that comes really naturally to me, because it’s how I’ve been working in my live sets for many years. When I’m using the Push, it’s all about making scratchpad sequences and exporting them directly into the DAW.
Lusine - “Just A Cloud” live on KEXP
You kindly made an instrument rack for us called Acoustic Waves. What can you tell us about it?
I put an acoustic guitar recording in there, albeit I’m a terrible guitar player, but I like to mess around, get core tones and do something interesting with them. It’s similar to the process that I used on Melting Days, where I’d take a recording and do some random granular modulation where it jumps around the waveform in a certain way.
I used the Chord MIDI effect in Live to help shape the sound, and by setting the device to generate fifths it added a lot of depth and warmth to the track. These are the kinds of rich, deep textures I typically go for in my music, so I wanted to demonstrate how I achieve that using this specific instrument rack.
Download Lusine’s Acoustic Waves Instrument Rack preset
*Requires Live 12 Suite
How might you expect a producer to use it within their productions?
The patch should serve as an excellent foundation or “blanket” of sound to kickstart a hybrid musical texture, but it’s up to the musician to figure out what they’d use it for. You can pick it apart, throw in different samples and explore its combination of granular synthesis and modulation to jump between different parts of the sample. As we discussed earlier, this effectively disguises the original sound and turns it into something completely new, which is exactly what I was aiming for with this patch.