Echoes of Everything: Sega Bodega's Past, Present and Future Selves Meet On 'Live & Altared'

Sega Bodega has never been particularly interested in staying in one place for too long. Moving between club music, the rock-inflected world of his project, Kiss Facility, and his increasingly ambient solo work, experimentation has become less of a detour and more of a way of working.

Driven by a constant desire to experiment across sounds, formats, and projects, Sega Bodega continues to find new ways to approach and perform his music. 

In a one-off performance as part of SXSW London this June, Sega Bodega took over Spitalfields Christ Church for a performance that brought together fragments of his past and future work, titled: 'I Brought You to the Church to Watch Me Play My Ambient Album by the Altar'. From this performance, fragments were later used to give birth to 'Live & Altared', an ambient live EP in which sound became part of the architecture itself. 

Talking to DMY, Sega Bodega reflects on space and sound, the instinctive process behind his music, and the role of collaboration in shaping his work.

You played at Spitalfields Christ Church for SXSW. Was there a reason you wanted to explore a space that seems outside of your comfort zone?

I always get bored of doing the same thing. If I was doing club stuff, it would be about a year or two before I’d be like, "Okay, I’ve really run out of ideas for what I can bring to this sound right now". So I’m like, "What else can I do?"

That’s always kind of why. Me and Mayah started the band Kiss Facility because we have this thing where it’s just fully rock music sometimes, or she’ll be like, “That feels like a band". And I’d never done that before. So it was just a period of time of trying all these new things. I was really enjoying it. Now, because I did that, I’m going back to making music that I think people would expect more from me. I think it naturally just kind of has a swing around.

There’s a lot of evolution, and you talk about wanting to try out new things regularly. But I do feel like your work has recurring themes such as spectres that accompany the aesthetics of your work; in your visual covers such as 'Romeo' or 'Need Nothing From You'. How do these presences feed into your work?

I don’t think any of the previous thinking applied to this one, because it was more like a film. We filmed the entire thing and wanted to make a short movie, so it was very much more about filming the show. I didn’t really think of anything beyond that because it was more about letting the church be the church, focusing on the fact that we were in this beautiful space.

I know that in a previous interview with Erika de Casier, you talked a lot about morality as a subject you like to explore. Obviously, this being in a church makes me think that maybe there was an interest in exploring that on another level. Would you say that the church space was an extension of that interest?

No, it was an offer that came through that was really special. I hadn’t planned to do an ambient show. I hadn’t planned to do any of that. But then when they brought up the actual thing, I was like, 'Oh, let’s just do it'.

I’d never really thought of churches as spaces for this kind of thing. Churches are actually very tricky spaces to do anything in because they have so much reverb. If you have drums or anything, it sounds a bit rough. I had to take that into account when doing the show because I knew that, although we had an amazing soundsystem, anything you are going to do might run the risk of sounding like everything had just had the reverb turned up.

So it’s actually quite tricky. Whenever I think of doing shows in churches, I ask myself, 'Do I really want to do that?' But this one was right because it was an ambient album.

Do you feel like you’re just in a space now in your life where you’re happy to explore spaces and things that kind of come to you, and then adjust in the moment?

A lot of times you have to go to a venue and build up your own show. It doesn’t have any kind of charm to it, and then you have to create the atmosphere, so it was nice to have that part removed when something naturally looks beautiful.

As there are two new tracks in this EP and then tracks from your past portfolio, what was the thought process behind the selection?

It was really all the stuff I’d been working on during that live. There were a lot of songs that didn’t make it. The release has five tracks, but there was like an hour’s worth of recorded music. I didn’t want to put all of that in it because I also kind of maybe want to do this again one day. But not right now, so I’d love to not give everything away.

It was also really tricky because I wanted to have guests too. I wanted to have Maya, and I wanted to have Cookie, and I wanted Ludo to play the flute. So it was more about: who can I bring into this? And also, what can I play on the guitar?

There were a bunch of different factors, but not one defining single thread.

And in terms of guests, you obviously talk about Maya. There’s this track that I think translates into the passage of time, or it’s Tabulae. How do you relate to this passage of time?

I didn’t think about that when I came to the show. But I have kind of come to the realization that there isn’t such a thing as time. Everything is always now. I’ve really started to understand that. Everything, even memories, sometimes are just wrong. Sometimes memories, especially childhood memories aren’t even real. They’re dreams that I had.

Sometimes I have dreams and then I see them a couple of weeks later. Or I have dreams about specific things and it happens exactly like in that dream. What is that then? Has everything already happened? They say that everything has already happened and everything repeats.

Once you start to get into that thinking, time feels almost irrelevant.

Going back to the realm of ambient, you said that you’ve been doing a bit more ambient over the last few years. I feel like time is also something that’s very important within that genre. Things are very contemplative, obviously, and there’s still a lot of texture and intensity, which you could also find in club music or things like that, but the intensity is a bit different. I feel like it’s the type of genre that would put me into these dream states. I’m curious whether that dream state is something that’s important for you to trigger in your audience.

I can’t really trigger that. One thing I’ve noticed with music is that you don’t actually have to try and do anything. You just have to make it. You have to feel how you feel when you make it, and then it usually actually translates without even realising it.

For example with Mayah, and Kiss Facility, I will figure out the lyrics without even being told the lyrics. I don’t speak any Arabic, but she’ll sing in a language that has some words that I understand, and I’m always like, “Oh, I think if we did a music video, maybe we could do it like this”. And she’ll respond, “Yeah, that’s what is implied in the lyrics”.

There have been so many occasions where people would say one of my tracks made them feel a certain way, and I’d say “I’ve never spoken about that, and that’s exactly how I was feeling”.

So this thing happens with music when you put something into it. If you’re being honest with yourself, it translates. So I don’t really try too much to have a theme that’s obvious and over-explained. I try not to be too obvious with it because it will kind of end up not being the thing.

I do think the music industry today can feel very far removed from instinctive production, and a lot of what’s resonating with audiences today is actually done through instinct, which is nice as a listener. I enjoy hearing these words from you, it's reassuring.

I wanted to go into the question of composition as well. I read somewhere that in one of your tracks, you altered the production so that the voice was removed, but it was still there in the track. It was as if there was a ghostly figure within that sound.

That’s to do with phasing. If you phase it in the right way, it won’t play on some sound systems, so you just get... nothing.

Do you want to tell me more about that and how that would relate to playing live, for example?

That’s probably how I discovered it. I would be playing this song that I made years before in the club, and there was this moment where I would wonder where the reverb went, or where the delay had gone. And then I realized it was phasing. So it just disappears.

It gave us this really anticlimactic moment when I was playing it, but it wouldn’t happen everywhere; it would only be certain clubs. I would always wonder why that was given I was not playing two separate versions of the track.

Then I made a song about my friend Cal. He killed himself a long time ago and I made a song about him. In one verse, I speak to him, and in the second verse, he speaks to me. In the second verse, I could put that element on the vocals so sometimes he doesn’t actually reply.

A lot of people were emailing me saying I needed to fix the song, saying how some voices disappeared when they would listen to it. I would need to reassure them that it was the whole point.

And then they’re like, “Oh, okay. Wow. That changes everything for the song".

I just thought that was magical when I read about it a few years back. I don’t think I’d heard about manipulation like that before, especially within a track. I think it’s a beautiful homage that you’re doing.

You were talking about how that moment in the club triggered more research into phasing. Is there anything that, when you’re playing live - for example, in the church - impacted you during that performance and made you think that would be something you’d like to explore in the future?

I liked performing in the round. There was no one in front of me; there were always people surrounding me. That was great. I loved that because I’d never done it before and I’d want to do more.

If I do the show again, I would put more actual performance into it. I really like playing the guitar, but when it comes to other stuff, I feel really pressed because I would use something and, the minute I need to use it, it’ll break. It just will not work. I have a history of things just not working right when I need them to.

I just don’t want to risk things for shows like this. So I focus more on singers, or the flute and the guitar that feel more safe.

Because it was also being filmed, there were lights tied to the whole thing. So I didn’t want to fuck up that part too. I wanted it all to be very condensed.

In terms of the guests that featured here, you said that there were many more than these five tracks. I just want to touch upon the collaboration with the flutist that appears in one of the tracks. Is there anything you want to talk about in terms of using organic instruments and how that collaboration worked out?

Ludo (Pear) was doing covers of my stuff on TikTok, and I was asking myself how I could use his work one day. Then when the show came around, I knew it had to be that. He was amazing; he’s great.

This EP was based off of a recording of a live performance. Did you manipulate any of the material afterwards, or did you want it to stay as raw as possible?

I mixed it. When we got the files back, it sounded kind of rough, so I had to mix everything again. Also, the songs were not in that order when I played them live. So it was more about making sure that when you listen to the EP in full, it flows perfectly, but it didn’t do that originally. There were other songs that came before.

That part was tricky, as well as deciding how often to put the applause in. At the end of some tracks, I muted the applause because I didn’t want it to be at the end of every song. I was just kind of deciding when that felt appropriate.

It feels like you have a very great team behind you, as well as collaborators. I couldn’t end this without mentioning Kiss Facility, which you have as a duo with Mayah Alkhateri. Is there anything that came from that project that inspired evolution within your personal project?

If anything that I do makes me think of Kiss Facility, but I’m making it for Sega stuff, I’ll just make it as a Kiss Facility song.

I wouldn’t want those two sounds to bleed into each other too much. I like having strict distinctions. Like, “Okay, this is that, and that’s this”. This might be a song for the singer, and this is a production song that I wouldn’t sing. Everything gets really organised in my head quite quickly.

'Live & Altared' is out now via ambient tweets & Supernature.

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