interview with lio dubois

Let's start with the fundamentals of your practice. You've been making music for a decade now, moving from FL Studio to Ableton to Bitwig, and you work across multiple aliases with distinct sonic identities. What drives you to fragment your work across these different personas rather than consolidating everything under one name?

Your Dogma for oa,7—"Rubato Deconstructed Experimental Club 25"—is highly prescriptive: variable tempos, unusual time signatures, no real percussion instruments, asymmetric arrangements, unconventional mastering. Does following such rigid rules paradoxically liberate you creatively, or do you ever feel constrained by a system you've imposed on yourself?

Your manifesto takes direct aim at what you call "Commercial-Conformer Artistes"—artists who package formulaic music as experimental innovation—and "Pseudo-Experimental Enthusiasts" who consume it uncritically. You've had releases on Retract Recording alongside James Ferraro, placements in PC Music's Perfect Music Friday, and collaborations with Object Blue. How do you navigate a music ecosystem where the gatekeepers and tastemakers might themselves be part of the system you're critiquing?

You've been making web art since 2016 and describe your website as "a real maze" with Three.js elements. You use Blender for visual work, Plugdata for audio, GIMP for 2D—you're clearly building a complete artistic ecosystem beyond just music. Do you see yourself primarily as a musician who uses other media, or are you working toward something more integrated where the boundaries between sound, visual, and web-based work dissolve entirely?

A ten-year development plan for a video game that synthesizes all your practices—that's an ambitious endgame. Given that timeline and the sheer volume of music projects you're releasing (five albums by March, then continuous output across multiple aliases after), how do you structure your time? Are you working on the game daily alongside music production, or is this current flood of releases a way to clear the decks before shifting focus toward game development?

You've accumulated a substantial list of pending collaborations—some dating back two to three years, like the Lexoqvil remix. There's unfinished work with IRL, peowbeow waiting for material, stems from Object Blue for a remix, A/V projects with Arcana and Solo.show. How do you reconcile the collaborative debt you've built up with your manifesto's emphasis on personal pleasure and rejecting obligations that don't serve your creative interest?

You were part of PC Music's Perfect Music Friday in April 2020, featured in an Object Blue Boiler Room set in 2021, and released on Retract Recording. But your manifesto explicitly states "we don't care if others like it or not. The process is more important than the result." Now that you've had those validation moments from influential platforms and labels, has your relationship to external recognition changed, or do those milestones still matter to you in ways that complicate the manifesto's ideals?

Your Lio Dubois club bangers project is hyper-constrained—every track at 177 BPM, every track in A♯ Lydian with +3 detune and +59 fine tuning. That's the kind of limitation that could feel like a gimmick or a conceptual straitjacket. What does locking yourself into those exact parameters reveal about club music that wouldn't emerge if you allowed yourself more flexibility across the release?