Autopilot’s melodic, intricate and thoughtful brand of dubstep has been catching my ear for quite some time. His music floats somewhere near the edges of IDM, soundtrack/atmospheric, electronica and dubstep; and is some of the most beautiful and unique I’ve come across. He’s also been quite prolific, releasing full cd’s worth of music every other month it seems. With regular airplay by the likes of Mary Ann Hobbs and BunZero, 2010 looks to be a great year for the Philly native.

How did you get started in music? how did you get into dubstep?
As for music, I’ve always been involved in it. My parents sent me out to take piano lessons before I could even tie my shoes so…I really can’t remember a time in my life that I wasn’t heavily involved in music somehow.

As far as dubstep = Through brostep. I thought that was basically what dubstep was. Kind of funny because once I discovered real dubstep after having that as my introduction, I grew to dislike the heavy aggressive stuff very quickly.

What are some of your creative influences, musical or otherwise?
I spent the majority of my adolescence listening to Orbital, Autechre’s pre-Confield output. Those are really the biggest influences for me.

Orbital really nailed the idea of having incredibly fun, lighthearted, crowd pleasing dance music while still having lush, cathartic melodies and songs that were evolving enough not to be repetitive. Pretty much every Orbital song, without fail, makes me want to get up and dance. Usually I do.

Autechre’s 90’s works are really something to behold. It’s sort of the opening of a new door in music, much like what The Beatles did to guitar & vocal driven music years prior. Autechre stepped up and introduced a totally new way of looking at how we use synthesizers and drum machines and what can be created with them. Tri Repetae still sounds like something that could have come out this year, and the album is something like 15 years old now. A lot of my favorite dubstep has similar textural and melodic ideas, as well.

I would hate to list 100 more bands but I like to keep my horizons broad listening to a lot of stuff. My good buddy Kochlear is always sending me new ambient piano/guitar music while I’m always sending him the newest in electronic music, so we keep our palettes fresh. A big problem that producers of any dance music genre fall into is not drawing influence from outside of the genre, which is how you run into things like a billion halfstep wobble songs that all sound identical.

What’s one of your favorite ‘musical moments’ (dj gig, concert, etc)?
Two of them really stick out in my memory.

Autechre’s 2005 tour for Untilted. They stopped by a very small venue in Philly called the Trocadero. There were no lights on stage, they played in complete darkness, and all you could see was the blinking of various LEDs on their gear, and the glow of a Macbook. All of the lights were focused out on the dancefloor. Everyone was going nuts. They did some kind of improvisation of a constantly evolving amalgamation of beats and melodies that would occasionally form into something resembling their commercially released songs, then delving back into pure sound experimentation. Amazingly, it was 100% danceable throughout.

The second was seeing Plastician at the 941 Theater in Philly. I almost didn’t make it, as I was so drunk by the time his set came on I thought I was going to pass out. The pure energy in his set and his stellar mixing abilities created an incredible musical journey. It was largely played in the dark as well, without him leaping around giving the gunfingers like a tool behind the decks. It was all about the music. Transcendental.

Plans for 2010? any collaborations/co-productions coming up?
RDubz and I have been talking about collaborating on tunes, but we haven’t actually done anything yet…just been remixing each other’s tunes a lot. For me, I really just intend to keep producing as many tunes as possible, releasing them, and keeping at the Sub FM show. Maybe getting some guest DJs on the show would be fun. I’m also going to be doing a bit of cross country traveling in 2010 playing shows.

Catch Autopilot every Sunday at 10pm EST on Sub.fm
More info at: http://www.facebook.com/dubsomnia
Purchase Autopilot’s music at here at his label Deepstep – http://deepstep.us