Sega Bodega

Have you ever had a dream you thought might be real? Or a day that felt like a dream. Memories muddy the waters of perception. Each time we revisit them they morph into something new. However, Sega Bodega, the electronic music brainiac, is certain he has had those days where you wake up and, right in the moment, you’re not sure if you’re still dreaming. He just put that feeling in a blender with some deconstructed club riffs and created your next favourite album, Dennis.

Interview taken from METAL Magazine issue 50. Adapted for the online version. Order your copy here.

You may be familiar with the Irish-Chilean artist Sega Bodega, real name Salvador Navarrete, from his production on Björk and Rosalía’s incredible single Oral out the end of last year or work on Nymph Shygirl’s Mercury-prize nominated album. Whatever he touches turns to gold. His signature is creating a deeply cool, icy ambience with contemporary sparkling synths and driving base. There’s space in his music for reflection but also to completely lose yourself. Besides, the musician loves an echo. It evokes the mental unravelling of characters in Blade Runner that Sega Bodega describes as dizzying but seems to have a more empowering effect on his own tracks. Unafraid of looking different mental states in the face, his self*care EP has previously welcomed fourth conversations on how he’s worked towards feeling comfortable with himself. But this album is not about mental health, it’s about dream states – even if it is influenced by delirium.

What captured our imagination the most in this conversation over Zoom is when Salvador ruminates whether the collective consciousness might be a big computer pumping ideas into the global society. It’s apt to share about these ideas over the engine of the Internet, rather than in person with him in Paris. Silently the hum of the ever-present digital frames this conversation that moves from hitting the sweet spot for recording lyrics at 2am to organising holidays over Instagram stories – all possible thanks to the unsettlingly potent digital arms in our lives. We trace his origins and futuristic thought processes.

When you were aged 11, you were part of a black metal band and a grindcore band. It taught you to not people-please with your music. Do you still connect with that punk spirit?

I do. Yeah, I guess so because for a period of time when it was, maybe on my first album, I actually did try and become more people please-y. But actually, it failed for me, because I ended up not feeling like I stood too much by the music as much as I did before. I stopped doing that pretty quickly. I didn’t really get any fulfilment from that.

As you grew up, in 2012, age 20, you DJed at Field Day, why do you think electronic music drew you in?

I get very tired of a thing every so often. When I was younger, with my love for bands, there was only so much that the sound of a band would do. And electronic music just has so much more sound range. I think my love for stuff comes from not being able to understand why it sounds like that. It becomes quite fascinating. I didn’t understand how electronic music was made. So, it became such a kind of magic to me.

Sometimes we’re drawn to things we don’t easily understand or connect with. Dennis, your new album, it talks a lot about sleep, but also mania, which is associated with a lack of sleep. Was the album Dennis created at night-time?

Yes, actually. Because I do work a lot at night. 2am was the time where I would actually end up recording most of the vocals. Not because it made me sound tired, I just enjoyed that period of time in the night.

Would that be at home or in the studio?

That’d be at home.

Can you set the scene for when you’re producing at home?

I sit at my dining table with some candles and wish I had a proper studio elsewhere!

Did you experience burnout at all when working on this record?

SB: I did. And then I ended up going to a farm for two weeks to really focus and dedicate actual time (to the album). Maybe it wasn’t so much of burnout but working from home is so uninspiring for me and I had no routine at home because I’m always at home by myself and then I just I need to separate work from home life sometimes you know.

Can you tell me more about the farm?

It’s this farm like two hours south of Paris and it’s this huge place, I think it’s called La Briche. I would just sleep in the studio, there was a fireplace there and it was donkeys, turkeys and dogs running around the place. There would be a turkey that would just dance outside the studio while you worked because they love the sound or I guess the feeling of bass.

That’s great. That’s so much fun.

It was so fun. I got everything done like so quickly.

It seems you are you quite into exploring nature, because I saw you were in Iceland recently. Actually, a couple of mutual friends of mine are there too Millie Turner and Yuma Burgess – it’s a small world. You were also with some very notable artists who featured on previous covers of METAL. Caroline Polachek and Eartheater along with the ever-iconic Björk. Can you tell me more about that trip?

Yeah, that was fun. I just put an Instagram story on my close friends saying I’m going to Iceland for New Years who wants to come? And then quickly, everyone’s like, you’re going, when? And I was like, I have booked my ticket from here to here. Just come. And then everyone ended up coming, which was kind of scary. I mean, I knew it was going to be amazing. But, I kind of felt this pressure for it to be really good. It obviously ended up being amazing anyway. And we just went driving around the island, seeing these kind of tourist spots, and it was so fun. We didn’t make any music there. Because I think we were all just kind of exhausted and wanted to unwind a bit. But I think if we had made some music there, it would have been magical.

Jacket IMMATERIAL COUTURE, t-shirt SANKUANZ, trousers 3.PARADIS.

What were the tourist spots that you visited?

We did the Golden Circle. They pick you up at half nine or maybe I think they pick you for like seven.

Oh my gosh, a bit early for me.

You drive to these four different spots, in the countryside, and then drive back. The sun is only up for like four hours. It was so beautiful.

How did the short daylight hours in Iceland effect you and the group? Are you more of a night person or a day person?

I thought I’d love it but it did really disorientate me, I do need some levels of daylight it seems.

As the founder of your collective NUXXE why is community so important?

I feel like it put context. I had been making music without too much of a solid crew and then surrounding myself with like, Shygirl and Oklou and Coucou Chloe was there too. We could put context into what the sound was so that other people could be like, oh, this is a world that I could get into. I’ve seen that work so many times with different artists, when they have a collective of people doing similar things, it becomes quite exciting to see. It’s hard to explain. But for some reason, it instantly just clicked. I was also just like being put on the wrong line-ups. A lot of the time, early on, I was just finding myself on a line-up with like, house music or something. And I was like, I don’t work well here. And it would show, the crowds were just not into it. And then we started that collective, to be able to play the same line-ups and stuff, and it worked – it just clicked.

You mentioned world building and it reminds me of your fascination with film and stories. That kind of comes out in your music. Does it ever feel like your life is a movie?

(Laughs) I hesitate to say it feels like a movie because it’ll be very, very calm for a long time and I find myself just cosy a lot of time and then it’ll have these bursts of intense couple of weeks where you get to like see everybody and your creative bursts happen and you end up writing a lot. And then it goes back to being like nothing again, it feels more like – what’s something that just goes up and down and up and down and up and down?

A rollercoaster?

I don’t know like a rollercoaster like an unpredictable, scary rollercoaster, but I do love it. But there’s no stability. There’s no emotional stability. I just don’t know what’s going to happen next, which is really nice. I kind of like the unpredictableness to my life.

I guess that’s being an artist, or full time one.

Yeah.

Are there any films that you wish you had scored or stories that need a Sega Bodega soundtrack?

I wish I had scored Mandy but I do love the soundtrack to Mandy I just love those kinds of visuals. And I mean Requiem for a Dream. I want to score a film like that. Where the music is such a part of it. Yeah, I saw Poor Things recently which I loved.

Likewise, I saw that last week.

The music was brilliant.

Yeah, it was beautiful. The audio-visual world you’ve created for Dennis that we’ve seen in Set Me Free, I’m an Animal is quite eerie and dark. What led to these stylistic choices?

They just make sense with the music, you know? I don’t know why. Maybe it makes me come across more moody and dark than I actually am because I think I’m a very upbeat as a person. I don’t relate too much to like sparkly, bright kind of bubble-gum aesthetics that a lot of music has. It doesn’t really click for me.

Do you think that the kind of disorientating nature of Dennis talks about mental health at all?

I don’t think so. It was more in a state of delirium, I don’t know if that’s mental health? I don’t think it comes from a place of emotional, dark deep, negative feelings. No, I wouldn’t say so, it’s more just like states of delirium.

I’ve had delirium before and it changed the way I perceived time passing. I wonder if that’s touched upon within the record – time going too fast or time going too slow. Just like watching a clock.

It touches upon not being sure what reality actually is. And I guess in that sense, time does too. The whole album is basically set out to be one day, waking up from a bad sleep, starting your day. Progressively getting more unsure if he woke up at all, and then trying to sleep again. This time, maybe it’s not such a bad sleep, and they get a good sleep. Starting with a bad sleep, living your day, ending on a good sleep.

That’s cool. You’ve also said that with AI and technology moving as fast as it is: “I can imagine the possibility of making words with people inside who don’t know, they’re not real. Who’s to say that I’m not already one of them?” When did that feeling start?

I started to wonder why everything here is so bad all the time. Why bad always wins. It feels like bad always wins. We just can’t seem to get out of that cycle. So, I was looking up what other dimensions look like and the fact that they say there are dimensions where every possible outcome is happening. The idea that maybe, something somewhere is running research to see what happens in different outcomes. Even to the point where maybe, through running possibilities, what would happen if we evolve the primates into things with consciousness and self-awareness and the ability to create technology. And then maybe there’s different ones. Why would there be so many of these different dimensions? If that is true, wouldn’t you run tests? It’s the idea of researching different things. And I guess this collective consciousness thing that is so clearly real. People always have the same ideas at the same time. Like the television being made pretty much the exact same time in two different parts of the world. How does that happen? There’s also another story which kind of maybe inspired the album name –Dennis the Menace.

That’s fun.

Dennis the Menace was made at the exact same time in America and the UK, and they had no idea, it came out on the same day in 1951. A cartoon comic about a kid named Dennis the Menace with a dog. And these two people did not talk to each other. This thing of collective consciousness is so real. How can that be? And I was just thinking that our minds feel like they’re all coming from a source or something like a machine that’s pumping out information. Also, I’m convinced that with that Dennis the Menace story, I bet you, hundreds of people will have thought of Dennis the Menace at that time, only those two people just made it into a thing. I’ll be watching movies and stuff. And I had this idea. Or fashion trends and campaigns. This is always the same idea. I don’t believe that people are always copying each other. I do believe that there’s just this thing that we’re all experiencing at the same time. And ideas come to fruition for a lot of people at the same time. So, it just felt like there’s something connecting all of us. And based off like what technology looks like now it doesn’t seem to me too surprising that like, it would be some sort of computer. It sounds weird when I say out loud, but it just makes sense to me.

Do you think technology is helping us?

At all? Yeah. I think it’s also killing us, but I think it’s also helping us.

On Adulter8 the album begins with a “tinker of an eight-bit alarm clock”. It sounds like a pretty funky alarm to wake up to. Are there any other interesting samples on this album you’d like to highlight?

So there’s actually not that many samples – that was not even a sample either. It was just kind of designed to sound like an alarm. I try to stay away from samples honestly because clearing things is such a fucking nightmare.

What sound do you wake up to?

I’ll put on my new album first thing and pretend like I’m listening to it for the first time.

What’s your morning routine?

Turn my alarm off repeatedly until I wake up at like 2, I’ve become too much of a night owl.

Have you experimented with AI at all yet?

No, I haven’t got to that. I was trying to get someone to help me build an AI choir but I can’t seem to do it. For some reason it hasn’t drawn me in yet.

On the other end of the spectrum is the theme of Deer Teeth. It traces an ancient history of a woman who died in childbirth ceremoniously buried surrounded by deer teeth. How did you come into contact with her story?

TikTok (laughs).

So, I guess it’s still tied up in that technology kind of world.

I saw the story on TikTok and I was just like, wow. That is the kind of shit my algorithm is telling me (laughs).

It seems that deer teeth were used as amulets in the prehistoric period, as magical protection, do you believe in lucky charms?

I believe in things making us feel more confident and then our confidence giving us a better chance to succeed in the task at hand. Maybe you know, if you’ve got this thing on you that you think is helpful. You might be operating better, just naturally.

Are you the type of person who collects rocks from beaches you visit?

If I find a great one, maybe my mum is definitely that.

Did you grow up in a creative household?

My mum was very supportive of music and she herself is an architect so in many ways those two things stimulate the same part of the brain

That’s lovely. Do you feel like you’re a different person to when you created Romeo?

Yeah, I understand how to use my voice a lot better, each time I think. On my first album, I didn’t really know at all and then on Romeo, I did more and then on this I feel even more. I feel like I learned a lot about how to sing. I don’t think I’m a good singer. But I think I know how to process my voice in a way that I like.

It’s interesting that you’ve said in the past, I’m not a perfectionist, because it feels like you take really a lot of care in the details of your music. Is there a reason you felt like you don’t identify with that?

Because at some point, I know that there’s so much more work to be done, but I just can’t do any more. I learned to settle too easily. Not too easily but I could work so much more on songs than I do. I definitely listen back to all my albums and think I should just fix that bit. But also I don’t care because I like the charm in maybe some things that are a bit of a mistake.

I think letting go is really important in creating like artistic work.

Yeah, I have to let go.

How does it feel listening back to the current album?

I’m so happy with it.

That’s great. Are you ready to bask in the glory of it? Or are you working on the next thing already?

I have the next thing kind of ready. But I also want to bask in the glory of it.