“Out here in Hollywood, in ‘the game’ as I call it, creativity can be overthought and overwrought - a hamster wheel with too many people involved, that ends up with too much mediocre shit,” says producer Justin Raisen, speaking to MusicRadar from his LA studio.
“Of course, I love the hive mind but with me and Kim Gordon, when we come together, the common thread is that we’re not precious about anything - that’s when music happens fast.”
Justin’s energy is infectious, he’s clearly buzzing at the warm critical and fan acclaim that met the release of Gordon’s new record - Play Me. An album for which Justin was once again in the producer’s chair.
Article continues belowReleased on March 13th, Play Me capped a trio of records Justin has produced with the former Sonic Youth front-woman, First there was 2019's No Home Record and then 2024's Grammy-nominated The Collective.
All three of these albums exquisitely bristle with elements of noise, trap, and trip-hop embossed within a varied array of songs. Distorted rhythms and all-pervasive abrasion ensure that Kim sounds like no one else at this stage in her creative career
Raisen's enthusiasm even during our conversation makes us feel like anything is possible, so spending time creatively sparring with him in a studio context must be uber-motivational.
This is evidenced by the long list of artists that Raisen has been the production foil of - Santigold, Yves Tumour and Michael Stipe are among his past accomplices while Charli XCX, Sky Ferreira and, of course, Kim, have close and enduring creative relationships with Justin.
“If I’m looking to work with an artist or band, the first question I ask their management or team, which is a funny one considering I’m a difficult person, is - are they f*****g easy to deal with? Will they listen to me?” laughs Justin on how he brokers collaborations.
“I always ask my management, 'what’s the chain around an artist like?' Then the first thing I do is hop on the phone first so I can work out if I can deal with their personality - then they can come to the studio and work out if they want to deal with mine.”
Enthralled by more avant garde musical sounds and shapes, Justin's interest in pushing into new frontiers stemmed from a youth surrounded by music lovers.
“Learning to be a music producer isn’t really about gear man, it’s more about the people who make up your friends and family,” Justin says on his early interest in music. “Your taste is a reflection of the people in your life and I was lucky to have these great people surrounding me.”
Brought up in a musical family, Justin was a young fan of alternative bands and artists, weaned on Talking Heads, the Clash, Earth, Wind and Fire alongside the Police, before directing his tastes towards groups like Radiohead and the Verve.
“I remember my Uncle Chris made me this mixtape featuring this music from all these different emotional worlds - there was no logic or specific genre attached to any of it,” Justin says. “In some respects, the journey of discovery has been pretty wild, I can think of every single person who turned me on to certain things.”
Tape decks were the conduit from his progression from being a listener to a creator while also playing in various different bands and outfits. Initially, Justin took on the role of singer, but was keenly interested in how songs were shaped from ideas and into reality.
“If I was given an ability, it was athletics - and music is like a sport to me, it’s competitive,” he explains. “There was a punk band in my high school and once I started as a singer, I wanted to do things in a Phil Spector kind of way, directing the music and other band members.”
During the 2000s, he was a member of the band Tall Hands, before moving more into the recording-side of the industry. But with a demeanour the polar opposite of the stereotype of the introspective studio-hermit, why was he drawn to a mixing desk rather than the stage?
“I couldn’t stay in a band as I couldn’t stick to an album cycle,” Justin explains. “I’d get labels interested in deals, then by the time they would come to see the final show, I would have musically moved on from the demo they’d heard. But it was being in bands that started the process of getting to where we are now.”
A friendship with fellow producer Ariel Rechtshaid enabled Justin to expand into working with other artists. The pair met in the studio, got on very well, and Ariel then ensured Justin was involved with his projects including Charli XCX’s 2013 debut album True Romance and Sky Ferreira's Night Time, My Time. Justin also credits a link up with artist Lawrence Rothman as being a pivotal moment too.
“Lawrence and his brother Yves had this incredible studio in Laurel Canyon,” Justin states. “If there was going to be a school for audio engineering, how to use outboard gear, compressors, consoles and tape machines, this was it. We wrote 80 songs together there and it taught me how to build a studio.”
Although his knowledge extends to every aspect of the recording experience, Justin points that an ethos of un-learning has helped him act more anarchically in recording sessions.
“I learned everything, I was obsessed, I went through this period where I would be going to the houses of high-hat dealers in Laurel Canyon,” he says. “But then I just started to give less of a f**k and wanted to go back to where I started but with the knowledge from the Rothmans still in there.”
If you want to get along with Justin in the studio, then you need to be ready for brevity, energy and ideas. He holds all these attributes in high regard whereas his main gripe (among others) is for things to be taking ‘too long’.
“I love greatness but I have an athletic mind and I like to move at pace so when I do something, if I do take on something that is long, I’d better really like it,” he says.
His recent production projects have included artists who have reconstructed the very notions of what pop music can be, but has garnered mainstream appeal. Kim Gordon's The Collective in 2024 earned Grammy nods for Best Alternative Music Album and Best Alternative Music Performance for the track Bye Bye.
The secret to his success with Kim Gordon? Keeping things snappy…
“Me and Kim work so well because we don’t sit around, we both know what we like,” he says. “I try to push her to places of discomfort and sometimes she’ll push back. But our process is a back and forth, almost like a hip-hop way of working between a vocalist and producer.
“The biggest thing that holds artists back is overthinking and ignoring their instincts. If you overthink or take too long, it gets boring. We connect quickly and reinforce that when she comes to the studio.”
Of course, since first working together on music in the late 2010s, the pair have socialised and bonded over music outside of work - sharing memories of shows they’ve seen, and their respective families and life. As evidence of their bond, when they attended the Grammys together, Kim sported devil horns atop her head while Justin wore a Jesus t-shirt, without any prior discussion!
“We both love music and talking about it,” he says. “But we want to find the lightning in the bottle. This industry obsession with the elongation of the process is lame and cheesy, especially for the pop artists. Me and Kim both approach music in a similar way even though we as people and our tastes are different - that’s why we connect.”
From Play Me, Justin picks out Dirty Tech, Not Today and Girl with a Look as some of his favourite tracks. The album's songs are generally pretty short with the whole record coming in at just under 30 minutes long, but it leaves a lasting impression.
“I didn’t think she’d like Dirty Tech and I felt weird sending it to her, it’s almost something that Doja Cat could jump on but Kim loved it,” Justin says. “Then she came up with that line, ‘I like it when you talk dirty tech to me’, which is just genius.
“Those other two are more melodic but surprising as I don’t think we’ve heard her like this before. I remember Matador [Records, Kim's label] calling me up saying, 'Dude, Not Today is crazy!’ They weren’t expecting it.”
As with his approach to making music, Justin’s relationship with gear is fairly scattershot, picking up pieces of hardware and software, then moving on to the next.
“I’m not precious about it at all,” Justin says. “At the moment, software samplers are big for me - chopping things up and playing with sounds using the Ensoniq ASR-10 or the Teenage Engineering OP-1.”
There’s also a large number of pedals that he likes to constantly change with a guitar-playing approach influenced by Jonny Greenwood and Blur’s Graham Coxon. “I have an MXR Carbon Copy and a lot of my music goes through that,” he shares. “I really like trying to make guitars sound like synths and synths like guitars which I do through pedals.
“The moment that my productions got better was when I stopped caring as much about what I was using and more about what I was doing,” Justin says. “People forget that the most important thing is hearing what you’re doing, I learned that from Spider Entwistle from PMC, he set up this room with me in 2019.”
“I guess the biggest thing that I do - sounds so terrible - I’m a manipulator man - but that’s what I do - so many people have hit me up asking me how I’ve achieved a certain sound, it’s just taking anything and using it.”
The rest of the year is looking pretty busy for Justin with further work with Kim vying for diary space with the likes of Cruz Beckham and Violet Grohl.
Alongside lending a contemporary edge to musical talent, Justin is continually looking to put unexpected people in the studio together - then standing back to watch and record the resulting flying sparks.
“I’m trying to think about things in a futuristic way, in genres that don’t normally come together from different areas of the world,” he says. “I have this kind of global 'Gorillaz' idea and Virgin has given me my own imprint, I want to make and bring music that is interesting, I’ll be like Seymour Stein.
“The thing about me is that I like peak Madonna as much as I like peak Sonic Youth.”
So, Justin is, as the cliched phrase goes, a musical chameleon?
“That’s what I am dude, I can do impressions if you ask nicely.”
More information on Kim Gordon's trilogy of solo works, produced by Justin, can be found over at Matador Records
