What’s On Your Desk? With Todd Osborn
(Photo by Kaito Osborn)
Note: What’s On Your Desk? is a series of interviews with friends who are doing interesting things. The dialogue always starts off the same way, by asking the subject to describe their workspace. The fourth in our series is with Todd Osborn, the musician, artist and builder of whatever he puts his mind to. I met Todd about a decade ago in Ann Arbor and thought that he was one of the best DJs I’d ever seen / heard. While that would remain true, I learned through the years that it was a rather narrow view. The breadth of Todd’s output is simply staggering; not only does he record and play live some of my favorite music (for Ghostly and Rephlex), he builds his own instruments, puts together hovercrafts from scratch (we’re not kidding), assemblies Bultaco motorcycles in his kitchen, builds elaborate Lego sculptures and teaches himself how to fly planes (also not a joke). Every time I get the opportunity to sit on his couch in his Ypsilanti studio and take in the last few months of his projects, I leave uplifted in the belief that good work is the ultimate signature. Todd builds and builds and builds and when he can’t figure out how to do something, he teaches himself how to move around it or hover above it.
What’s on your desk?
It’s a mess (as always). I try to sort through things about once a week but more often than not I just throw everything in a box, hide it in a corner, and it starts all over again.
The main things that never change are two LG LCD monitors and a pair of Yamaha HS-50M’s.
As for the mess, it currently consists of:
- A TON of bills
- Nunchucks
- Passport
- Issue of Jail Birdz
- Six TMNT comics
- Two Dennis the Menace comics
- Cuban cigar
- Two books on breakdancing
- Garmin 12XL GPS
- EEE PC
- Walkman
- Map ruler
- Logic puzzles
- Two PS3 controllers
- Laser level
- Three bottles of medicine
- Nintendo DSi
- Four kinds of packing tape
- Arp 2500 module
- Pellet gun
- Three sound cards
- Giant torque wrench
- Issue of The Economist
- A stack of strange currency (silver certificates, etc)
- Various DVD’s, DAT’s, cassettes, and DV tapes
- Ceramic monster head
This is one of the best desk inventories I’ve ever read. When you hit your desk when you start your day in the morning, what are you typically doing first?
Well, usually my day doesn’t start in the morning. Since I work on music late at night I wake up sometime between 2pm-5pm.
In any case, the first thing I do is check my email (Hotmail & Gmail). After that I do a really basic scan of rss feeds from news channels. From there I can’t really think of any routines. Sometimes when I’ve worked on music the night before I’ll have forgotten what it sounded like and I will check that out, but since I wake up later I normally just check email and then do stuff with my family until they go to sleep.
What’s it like working all your hours in the night? It must be nice to have 6-8 uninterrupted hours to focus.
Yeah, it’s great for me. I work best alone, that way I can focus. Although, just the fact that a lot of music is based around computers now leads me to be very distracted - checking email, watching videos, listening to other music, and just surfing around. I see a lot of people get really caught up in a mentality of, “If I only had this one program/plug-in I could start making something” and they perpetually keep looking for things and no real work gets done. I enjoy trying to make something with the most minimal resources. But anyways, those 6-8 definitely doesn’t consist of all music making. You can probably deduce that just by seeing that list of crap on my desk!
I find similar problems voiced by other people who have been a part of our WOYD? feature…with everything centered around the computer and the ease of switching back and forth, it’s difficult to focus sometimes. Can you talk about some of the instruments and / or software you’ve made as workarounds for getting your music made?
Actually, I kind of consider the distractions positive. As a way of taking a break. In fact, you could look at music as a distraction to some other things I may be doing. I guess the difference is that I always come back around to what I was originally doing; some people just continually mess around and nothing ever gets done. I think making instruments or workarounds are also part of this distraction process (again, using distraction in a good way). Most modifications I do are done with efficiency in mind. I usually try to make something take up less space, do more, or integrate into something else. Ironically, I seem to always have more junk at my house than most of my friends, haha. Lately (with some prodding from Tadd and a few other friends) I’ve been thinking about trying to make modular synths. A lot of gear comes through my place, most of it old, and it’s easy to see how much of it could be made more compact nowadays and be designed to specific needs. Lots of companies do this today but for personal use I could do it cheaper (in most cases)… and of course it will be another one of those distractions.
I’ve been thinking about one thing over the weekend and wanted to ask you: I always think of one thing when I think about your creativity and that is, simply, the work. You seem to be able to produce more of it at a high quality, regardless of format, than anyone I know. This seems to apply to music, hovercrafts, cars, et cetera. How are you able to have such diverse interests yet always produce something meaningful?
Well, thanks but you probably just see the successful projects. I’m sure I have enough others in the vaults of dubious quality.
I guess the only reason they seem meaningful is because I do them for me. In music, for example, I’ve never sent out a demo or work specifically towards a release. I always just make what I make and then sort it all out after. Although, I’m not saying this is the best way to work, haha.
