Konx-Om-Pax on music, art, and new EP Refresher

Konx-Om-Pax roughly translates to ‘light from a single beam’, a fitting moniker for multifaceted artist Tom Scholefield. Based in Germany but hailing from Glasgow, his output spans various media, unified by a singular vision and drive. The impressive number of forward slashes in his job title (musician/animator/director/illustrator/artist/DJ) speaks of a singular talent and an unbridled desire to create.

While he could easily have ended up tied in knots trying to reconcile all the different strands of his work, he's an artist with a finely tuned sensibility whose projects are increasingly interconnected, and one who is clearly entering a period of maturity. This is perhaps best showcased on his latest album, 2016’s Caramel, a golden slice of rave nostalgia which was shortlisted for the 2017 Scottish Album of the Year award.

The surging, multicoloured forms created by Scholefield for the album cover serve as a precursor to the burst of euphoric sound within. Following on from this album’s success, new EP Refresher is set for release on 11 August via Planet Mu. Within a limited space of just four tracks, Scholefield draws upon techno, Italo disco and ambient to create a stylised release working in the distinct sonic signature introduced in Caramel, even when switching tone and genre.

With so many ongoing projects, Scholefield still found the time to fit in a chat with us. Calling from Berlin, he talks about his influences, creative process and his forthcoming projects, shedding light on his vibrant, creative world. To begin, Scholefield explains his choice of recording name – clearing up any occultist associations deriving from the homonymous Aleister Crowley publication on the dark arts – and the thinking behind such a distinctive alias. "It’s a piece by an Italian composer called Scelsi and it roughly translates into 'light in extension'. I thought it was fitting for a visual album, I liked the way it looked and sounded and it’s quite cool to draw."

Elaborating, he adds: "I primarily picked it because it looked good written down, just from a graphic design point of view. The more I read into it, the more sense it made from a meditative point of view. And it’s  ! Someone wrote into Wire magazine years ago complaining that the journalist had got it wrong and thought I was an occultist."

On the subject of his beginnings as a musician, it’s easy to see why Caramel is so nostalgic for 90s rave culture: "I remember making quite weird trance music as a teenager on a Yamaha DJX keyboard. It’s like this toy almost, but you could record eight tracks onto it. And I remember listening to the radio a lot, trying to copy stuff like that. This was in the late 90s so I was buying lots of Ministry of Sound compilations and trance stuff. I know a lot of friends my age and that’s what everyone listened to really."

Talking more about how this fed into the making of Caramel, Scholefield explains: "I was listening to a lot of rave music and then listening to lots of William Basinski and Arthur Russell and Zoviet France, lots of ambient music. It was kind of about joining the dots between opposite ends of the spectrum, in a way – old school rave music that’s really fast and energetic for dancing but then trying to cross it over with really long loops, pieces that remind me of Steve Reich.

"I’m trying to make music which sounds like what my graphics look like; bright and detailed, and [that] has more energy. I started off releasing music that was really harsh and noisy and abstract and I’ve sort of manoeuvered it into slightly more melodic stuff as I’ve got older. The image-making has always been quite bright and psychedelic so I’m trying to make the music more like that, so they become one." Shrugging off the stress of combining so many projects, he says "It all kind of blends together, it’s like making a short film and I’m just art-directing everything and doing it at my own pace."

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Tom Scholefield's artwork for Refresher

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Continuing, Scholefield fills us in on the inspiration behind the vivid graphics that accompany Refresher: "The artwork for the new EP is kind of a remix for the [Caramel] album artwork. I’ve had time to think of it the last year and I developed the complexity and the way it looks. There’s remixes of [Caramel] tracks [on Refresher], so it’s nice to do the same for the art. We’re releasing a limited edition print that’s just like a super high-res detailed version that took fucking weeks to make – I assembled it as a jigsaw because it was too complicated for my computer to render at one time so I had to do it in bits."

Refresher is noticeably more danceable than its predecessor, Caramel – Scholefield tells us: "It’s the first dancefloor material I’ve made that I’ve really liked and I’m chuffed about it getting released. It’s getting some good feedback from DJs I really like. I just find making dance music really difficult, compared to weird ambient, there’s a lot more rules to follow."

As a DJ himself, it seems fitting that he release his own dancefloor-focussed material: "The more music you play, the more you listen to how it’s structured and you just try and copy it; it’s difficult yet really simple," he explains. "I love artists like Robert Hood and Jeff Mills where there’s not much going on in their music but everything’s really well-crafted and interesting and delicate. It’s like a minimalist sculpture; what’s there is really interesting and [so is] how they manoeuvre it."

It might sound a bit odd to liken dance music to minimalist sculpture, but it makes sense once you begin to understand things from Scholefield’s creative perspective. He makes music which is textured and tactile, as well as graphics-depicted, in such vivid detail that they seem to call out at you from the page. Unsurprisingly then, he carries this desire to create an all-around sensory experience into his DJ sets, where he often incorporates his own custom-designed visuals.

In line with his increasingly mature sound as a recording artist and his career as a DJ, the graphics he creates alongside his releases are progressing in new directions: "I’m developing the album artwork into live visuals, using the 3D models and trying to animate them. It looks something a bit Ghost in the Shell but more like sculptures. It just looks like a movie version of my last album sleeve and they had lots of different loops but intertwined, a bit like the music."

On that note, we can’t help but hope that we hear (and see) a lot more from Scholefield in the future.

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Refresher is released on 11 Aug via Planet Mu