Pegasus Warning Shares his Creative Process
Making the Stardust Vibrate
Name: Pegasus Warning aka Guillermo E. Brown
Occupation: Producer, composer, percussionist
Nationality: American
Current release: The new Pegasus Warning album Inspiration Equation is out via Melanin Harmonique.
Is there a preparation phase for your process? Do you require your tools to be laid out in a particular way, for example, do you need to do 'research' or create 'early versions'?
I definitely do research and I definitely do not have one particular way of working. I create MANY different versions before I can establish that a particular work is complete. I make work and record ideas, whenever, wherever I can. Then I bring them into my studio to further them or decide if they are crap or not.
My work is designed to be recombinant and modular so many ideas that are smaller nodes of something can often become part of a larger piece.”
Often, while writing, new ideas and alternative roads will open themselves up, pulling and pushing the creator in a different direction. Does this happen to you, too, and how do you deal with it? What do you do with these ideas?
This does happen. Sometimes it gives me a new direction or section of song or sometimes this births something new entirely. Sometimes my initial idea gets lost, in the case of demo-itis, I can sometimes get bogged down with the work of trying to strengthen the original moment of inspiration. And then I get lost.
And at that point, inevitably, something will go wrong technically with my gear and that’s no good. I get frustrated and want to quit. then I step away. Maybe for a month maybe for a day. And come back to it with fresh ears, eyes, perspective, and maybe an experience or two that could help with solving the problem of the song.
What’s your take on the role and importance of production, including mixing and mastering for you personally? How involved do you get in this?
I love this stuff and for me everything (except for mastering) is super intertwined.
I start to paint a picture with music and then when I get to a certain point, when the music starts to make me feel like I’m hovering, then I can begin to write. The music and sounds become the vehicle by which I can travel through boundaries real and imagined, through which I can shape shift, by which I can time travel: going back forth through past/present/future at will.