Electronic musician Keith Rankin still celebrates the spark of creation

Keith Rankin made the decision years ago that he would continue to make music in Death’s Dynamic Shroud – a vaporwave crew launched in 2013 by electronic musicians James Webster and Tech Honors and which the Columbus-based Rankin joined a year later – but that he didn’t want to tour with the project. 

“Some people love that lifestyle, but it wasn’t for me,” said Rankin, who gravitates more toward the composing and recording aspects of music making that take place in-studio. “The moment of creation is still the most exciting thing, like having a vague idea and then seeing it become something tangible. And all the other aspects of the music industry have become less alluring with time.”

As a result, Rankin has only performed live with Death’s Dynamic Shroud once, at a concert in New York City, describing the deep sense of disconnect he felt in trying to find his footing alongside Webster and Honors, who have toured DDS as a duo for years. “I considered just pretending to hit buttons or playing my drum pad with no sound coming out,” Rankin said, and laughed, going on to relate that single onstage experience to visiting a club with two people who have long taken dance lessons as a pair. In the years since, on those rare times Rankin has joined DDS in concert, he has done so as the solo opener under his Giant Claw name – a pairing that will again be on display at Ace of Cups on Thursday, Feb. 27. (Cafe Bourbon Street will host a free concert afterparty the same evening with T Shirt, Deionyx, and Hedonotlaunshay.)

While Rankin’s motivations for making music have remained rooted in the same sense of discovery that fueled his earliest explorations, he allowed that he is less prone now to the intensive self-evaluation that used to accompany this process, in which he would attempt to “name the mechanisms connecting point A to point B and come up with a narrative about what inspired [the music].”

“I’ve always been of the belief that your music is just an expression of your identity and your whole life leading up to that point,” Rankin continued. “Whether you like it or not, your experiences and your thoughts are in your music. And I used to pick that apart more, but now I try not to think about it. I just make it and know that it’s an expression of who I am.”

Rankin acknowledged that his creative process can be impacted by factors both internal and external, including the state of “low-key stress” he said he has seen most people operate in since the Covid pandemic started. “I can’t remember where I read this idea, but it was talking about how if you’re afraid of making the wrong move, or if you’re afraid of failing or saying the wrong thing or doing something incorrectly, it’s usually a sign you’re in fight or flight mode,” he said. “And it feels like most of the people I know have been in a minor to major state of fight or flight for years.”

The Giant Claw album Mirror Guide, from 2021, sonically captures aspects of this tension, with moments of beauty centered on a programmed cello giving way to glitched static bursts that echo that feeling of modern overwhelm.

Similar bleeds are inevitable in the music Rankin composes for DDS, but he said the project is also imbued with an enviable sense of freedom that allows him to chase unexpected sounds from across the spectrum. This hasn’t always been the case, though, with the project beginning as something of a lark deeply rooted in vaporwave – a subgenre of trancelike electronic music built on the kinds of sounds one might encounter waiting on hold for an operator or in the background of the Dreamcast game “Shenmue.” (Tech Honors once told an interviewer that DDS got its start when Webster discovered that “Shenmue” essentially doubled as an interactive vaporwave album, with the crew’s earliest tracks serving as an attempt to recreate this vibe.)

“They (Honors and Webster) heard vaporwave and were like, ‘Hey, we can do this. We’re old enough to know the source material.’ And I think for them it was a little bit of a… I don’t want to say a joke, but it was a more frivolous experience,” said Rankin, who introduced a different dynamic when he joined the fold a decade back, owing in part to the work he had done for the online publication Tiny Mix Tapes, which required him to absorb mass amounts of music from across the spectrum. “And a lot of that music was using an extreme level of cultural slop. When you think about how much music has been recorded since the start of the 20th century, there are just these heaps and garbage piles of music, and a lot of it was being used as the raw materials for the creation of this new music. And that was the appeal, recognizing that this new way of using samples as a compositional tool was in the air at that time, almost jumping off from hip-hop sampling and people like DJ Screw and then expanding into different realms, different sample sources.”

The project has continued to evolve in the years since, becoming less “neurotic” and more musically expansive, Rankin said, fueled in part by a monthly subscription service that requires each crew member to deliver an original mixtape four times a year. This in addition to more traditional collaborative releases such as Darklife, from 2022, which struck a middle ground between the British rock Webster was listening to at the time and the score from “Final Fantasy VII,” colored by the varying personalities and interests of its three creators.

“When you sit down to write, there’s this initial burst of creative energy, and sometimes in 15 minutes that burst has kind of expired a little bit,” Rankin said. “And when I’m working by myself, I have to push past that initial burst and still get things done, even though that initial push is where all of the interesting things are happening. But with this collaboration, I can get that first shock out of the way and then step off the computer and let someone else take over who has been watching and is just itching to express their ideas. And that just continues to cycle, where you’re working together in these really distilled, rapid succession bursts of creativity, which is something I find very satisfying.”