Nick Millevoi - Digital Reaction (2023)

Digital Reaction is inspired by movement — dancing, running, biking, or driving. I like to listen to music with big beats when I’m on the move, and sounds like Herbie Hancock’s Future Shock, Sound-System, and Perfect Machine, Miles Davis’ Decoy, You’re Under Arrest, and Tutu, Kraftwerk, Mantronix, Neil Young’s Trans, King Sunny Adé, the Golden Palominos, and Bill Laswell’s production on his Celluloid Records releases were all floating around in my head when I started working on this record. All that music makes me want to move, and I wanted to create that same feeling.

As those sounds started to mingle with my own ideas, I wanted to explore how I could combine those kinds of beats and rhythms with my guitar playing as the lead voice — how would the kinds of melodies I play fit in, and what kind of guitar sounds would I use?

Once I got into the production of the album and my ideas started to evolve, I decided to base my tracks around the Alesis HR-16 drum machine, which served as the main drum track for almost every song. I let those drum sounds — which were often treated with pedals and plug-ins, sometimes heavily — inspire the tracks, and every part would grow from those beats. That informed the kinds of parts I would write, and the kinds of guitar sounds I would use on a track.

My collaborators are all musicians I knew would fit into this kind of sound — who would get it and have something to say. Sometimes I would start a track and think a particular friend would sound amazing on a track, and I’d build the idea around their sound. Jamaaladeen Tacuma — whose 1980s records are a huge influence — was the first collaborator I hit up about this record. He’s a direct connection to so many of the sounds I’m drawing on, so to have his voice involved early on helped me build the rest of my concept.