Before we get to what Starsick, the ambitious second release from Minneapolis techno producer Malion, sounds like, let’s get something out of the way, and let’s be candid about it: How can you call this an EP when it’s an hour long?
You know: An “EP” is longer than a single, understood in the physical era to have two sides, A and B, and shorter than an album. At nine tracks over nearly 58 minutes, Starsick is clearly not an EP. What gives, Malion?
“It started out as an EP,” Clinton Kunhardt, a.k.a. Malion, pleads between laughs at my effrontery. But, he adds, it didn’t feel quite like an album. Tall, bespectacled, and shaven-headed—truly, techno is the baldest genre—Kunhardt talks in excited, contained bursts, his thinking both measured and cosmic, not unlike the music he makes.
Kunhardt explains that Starsick, issued in late February on Bandcamp as a pay-your-choice download, hadn’t actually started out as anything particular—the tracks were standalone pieces he’d gathered over time, not quite a deliberate, self-contained statement. But the longer he sat with the material, the more he wanted to add, including three superb remixes by other local producer-DJs.
The music that Kunhardt wanted to add more things to was already bursting with activity and intricately knit layers of synthesizer lines. And since this is techno, where machines sound like machines, these are synths, gleaming and silvery—and equal parts alluring and menacing.
I’m seated across from the effusive young man at Nina’s Coffee, near his place on St. Paul’s Summit Hill. Specifically, we’re in the balcony in the back corner of the main seating area. The deck contains two lounge chairs and a small table, with maybe five feet to spare, overlooking the whole place.
(Hot local journalism tip: There is no better place in the Twin Cities to conduct an interview. At one point while we talked, a jeep passed by with huge subs, and our entire tiny level shook along to the bass line. You won’t get that in the MPR conference room.)
This setting, I suggest, seems right as a place to plumb my subject’s lofty thoughts, and while Kunhardt laughs, he also delivers.
“Music is this direct language to the intuition,” he says at one point. “It cuts through all the stuff we’ve learned. Up in our head and our prefrontal cortex, we have a lot of systems and rules and social masks that we’ve accumulated throughout life, and music interacts with all that. But it also cuts right through it. It speaks directly to our souls. It’s a universal, eternal language.”
This is the sort of thing you might expect from a guy with Kunhardt’s CV: a sci-fi fan (Ursula K. Le Guin is his favorite), an academically trained musicologist (he moved to Minnesota to attend Macalester College), and a fixture (as crew member, DJ, and producer) in local techno circles since the late 2010s.
Kunhardt enrolled at Macalester in 2015, receiving a BA in music there in 2020. But within a short time of arriving, he began to feel constrained. “I wanted to break out of maybe some of the headiness of classical music, specifically where I think the rules come before the feeling, oftentimes,” he says
Kunhardt soon zeroed in on Detroit techno—the music’s birthplace is the home of a large number of its finest producers and DJs, where mixing highbrow concepts with dirty grooves was common coin—via the Gary Bredow documentary High Tech Soul. “I was like, this is getting at that thing that I’ve been hitting on my whole life—the soul’s desire to speak. It’s a visceral feeling. Your body is responding to it before your mind is,” he says.
The puzzle was completed after friends began taking him to parties promoted by local crews like Acme Collective and the now-defunct System. Kunhardt fell for the setting as well as the music, and he began to play records at parties himself.
“The DJ should be the centerpiece of an event,” he says, crediting local hero DVS1 for this insight. “It’s about the collective energy. It’s about reaching different levels of transcendence, internally and externally, through community and group activity.”
His alias has an aptly mixed set of resonances. “It’s short for Pygmalion: I dropped the pyg,” he explains. Kunhardt is such a classicist that he proceeds to detail “the Greek myth of the sculptor,” whom he describes as “the OG incel”—rather than a more modern variant on the myth, like the George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion or its canonical musical adaptation, My Fair Lady.
“I think there’s a parallel to machines,” Kunhardt says of the name Malion. “When you’re making electronic music, you’re entirely working with digital instruments, or sometimes analog, but there’s this coldness to electronic music, as opposed to working with a drum or playing a guitar or an instrument like a piano. You lack a little bit of that physical connection.”
But there are ways to mess with that kind of precision. Kunhardt plays more than he programs, per se; the densely intertwining synth lines on Starsick are mostly through-composed and played in real time.
“Only when the iron’s hot do I strike,” he explains. “Some people love to make music: ‘I wake up, I do my four hours, I edit this, I trip through new tracks.' It’s very systematic. And for me, it’s always been a little more casual. I only work when I’m inspired to. It drives me nuts.”
Kunhardt has always had music in his head, waiting to get out. He grew up in suburban New York, a self-confessed recluse. That began to change when he started going to New York City on the train as a teenager to look for CDs containing the music he’d been looking up on Ishkur’s Guide to Music.“This Flash guide, where it had all the different genres,” he recalls. “That was my one lifeline to all the different genres that are out there, because I had no connection to culture or scene or anything like that.”
Kunhardt had sung in church choirs from childhood, and his formal musical education was focused on voice. Singing, he notes, had been “a social activity. Classical music is beautiful. It’s just a transporting feeling of working with the group. No one person is the center of it. It’s this collective vibration of air”—not a bad description of Malion’s music, in fact.
Despite all that voice work, much of the music Kunhardt loved was purely instrumental, and not just classical. Clinton was a teenage prog-rock head, with a particular yen for the shifting, bombastic arrangements of Dream Theater and early King Crimson—music heavy on complexity and chops.
A similar taste for the brainy and rococo manifested in his early electronic music excursions, circa 2012. “I got turned on to Brainfeeder-y, Ninja Tune stuff,” he says. “Prefuse 73 was one of my first favorite artists—he blew my mind with the level of composition.”
By that point, Kunhardt had already begun making electronic music on his own since seventh grade, and soon it became an outlet. He initially worked with a hacked version of the electronic-music-making software Fruity Loops, which allowed Kunhardt to orchestrate the complex intertwining melody lines he was hearing in his head.
Software programs like Fruity Loops are long gone from his arsenal, replaced by real-life machines. He estimates that 80 percent of the EP is made with hardware synths.
“I have each of those routing in to a separate recording track,” he says. “I’ll program some sequences, I’ll have everything going, looping all at once, and then I’ll go through and perform one of the synth lines. That carves a little bit of the detail—sculpt one line, go back to the beginning, run it back, and then sculpt another line—a complete through-line.”
Sometimes that intensity can wear on him: “I cannot be working for 30 minutes and then walk away from and come back. I need to be sitting down for six to eight hours, so you’re hearing all of the parts harmonized, and they have to be talking to these other parts. It isn’t arbitrary. It’s all in reference to itself.”
Looking back, Kunhardt sees Malion’s previous EP, False Data (2021), recorded during a weeklong residency in Grand Falls and sponsored by the Southwest Minnesota Arts Council, as an attempt to fit into the techno mold.
“It was a narrowing, and narrowing can help channel energy,” he says. “I think Starsick, in comparison, represents dreaming of beyond. I don’t have to be constrained by the same rigid rules. It has this childlike excitement to it.”
Sequence
With: Malion, Jen-E, D. Untethered
Where: Uptown VFW, 2916 Lyndale Ave. S., Minneapolis
When: 10 p.m. Saturday, May 17
Tickets: $12.16; more info here
