When hyperpop pioneer, artist and producer A. G. Cook (born Alex- ander Guy Cook) logs onto the Zoom call scheduled for Tuesday 13th February, I feel instantly relieved. Although it is 8pm in London and the workday is meant to have come to a wrap a couple of hours earli- er, his bubbly talkativeness and genuine enthusiasm on the opposite end of the line compensate for my exhaustion, gradually bringing me back to life as we ease into the conversation.

“Sorry for the time ping-pong thing,” he says, referring to the back- and-forth emailing that preceded our virtual meeting. “I am in the mid- dle of moving places and very much living in boxes at the moment, but I am glad we made it happen.” Now based in Los Angeles, the British-born music disruptor joins me from a friend’s studio he is cur- rently working at – a couple of warmly lit spotlights, mic stands and speakers standing out against the linear and modern surfacing of the room’s background.

For someone who started out messing around with tracks in his Lon- don bedroom, the Californian scene must feel quite a radical change. Still, what else would you expect from the regular producer of hit art- ists Charli XCX and Caroline Polachek? The son of groundbreaking architects Peter Cook and Yael Reisner, A. G. Cook grew up at the turn of the millennium, his electrifying and wide-ranging experimenta- tion being a direct product of the Y2K tech-powered extravaganza, its rudimentary Internet culture and pixelated aesthetic.

Once half of Dux Content, the project he launched in 2011 alongside fellow musical prodigy Danny L Harle, he was soon spotted by the late artist, DJ and producer SOPHIE, who would then become an integral part of the avant-garde roster of PC Music – his label and collective, founded in 2013 and active through the end of 2023. Driven by a genre-defying appreciation of music and happily strad- dling its extremes, Cook has carved his way to the forefront of a new wave of sonic trailblazers, sharing inspirations and recording decks with names including 100 gecs, Christine and the Queens, Dorian Electra and Hannah Diamond. Attesting to the versatility of his mas- tering touch, his latest collaborations saw him come together with anyone from Sigur Rós’ Jónsi to electro-pop singer-songwriter Troye Sivan and Beyoncé. Here, fresh from the release of his latest single, he looks back at the past PC Music decade, reviving memories from the early days of his creative journey and hinting at the future of a chapter that has just begun.

Gilda Bruno: What do you think sparked your need for artistic expres- sion?

A. G. Cook: I didn’t grow up in a very musical world and my ap- proach to music is defined by that: I am an only child born to two architecture-obsessed architects. Our house has always been filled with an endless collection of architecture books – it is almost a religion being that into buildings. From very early on, I spent a lot of time at universities and architecture schools, surrounded by avant-garde students: I have memories of being four years old and seeing not just models of things, but people wearing the mod- els they had designed, like buildings or huge mechanical objects. At such a young age, those designs could have been anything. Looking at people making things without worrying about it set a really high bar for my understanding of creativity. There might be someone walking through a rubber wall or climbing up an insanely tall structure, and I would be exposed to that as much as I would watch dogs walking in a park – it had a huge influence on me.

GB: When did music come into play?

AGC: Being born in 1990 was an interesting curve, with the birth of Internet culture, the rise of the early websites and all of that, but it took me a while to properly get into music. As a kid, I was really into visuals, messing around on computers and using Photoshop. It is not a coincidence that the first music projects that clicked with me in the 2000s were those by bands like Gorillaz and Daft Punk: groups with visual worlds of their own which pushed the music even further. That’s how I discovered my obsession with music. It was the era of funny blog posts and online platforms where people uploaded whole albums from any era; anything from library music from the 1970s to an Animal Collective album. That’s how I started connecting the dots. Compared to friends of mine who were very encyclopaedic about mu- sic genres, or had siblings into punk who went to lots of club nights, for me the experience of music was flattened around what was avail- able online and was visually as well as creatively interesting.

I was using the computer to make drawings when I realised that music could be this layered composition that you could tweak, re- fine and edit as you do with an image. Through this interface with the computer, I learnt to write songs, make tracks and produce them. I occasionally played some instruments to socialise with people, but it was never my thing. I never felt like putting time into it until I found my way into music with my computer. I was like, “Oh, OK, the bits on the screen make sense”. That, of course, led to PC Music. I took quite a linear route to it: I studied music computing at Goldsmiths. And then, a week after graduating, I had already met enough people whom I thought could be framed in a loose collective and started uploading music. The name PC Music, or Personal Computer Music, was meant to stress how I saw the computer as a human tool that, since the very start, nurtured my interest in this art form. It was also a bit of a joke.

GB: I would have paid to see you nerding out on your laptop.

AGC: Right? But computers are folk instruments: as we stare into Zoom, hear ringtones or type stuff on our keyboard, we are all completely embedded in them. The fact that you can click on one icon to load an e-mail and click on another one to launch Garage- Band and then, suddenly, you are recording something ... or think of the early text-to-speech generators you could use on operating systems and how people use voice memos today: computers are so accessible, they have a very specific sound and feel. A lot of my confidence for some of the first PC Music releases came from this familiarity with them as creative devices that could be leveraged in so many ways – whether to edit a video, manipulate a specific sound or track. It was their lack of set boundaries that fascinated me. The idea that things can have a lot of potential regardless of whether they are successful or not is what convinced me to experiment with music. It was about bonding with people I met on SoundCloud or at uni, about knowing that you could make stuff with whatever people you wanted to and see where that led you rather than thinking, “one day, I am going to be on this stage”, or “I am going to work with X person”. I never really had this dream of holding a microphone and touring the world. Instead, I was much more excited about making a label, a music video or an album with some kind of imaginary pop star, you know?

GB: And everyone’s approach to music is so subjective that playing with someone inevitably means discovering a different way of looking at it.

AGC: Exactly. That’s what is so appealing about it for someone like me who, before being a music artist, is more of a “visual person”. Music is so abstract on the ultra technical level – it is literally invisible. It is some kind of magic that, by vibrating slightly, can create anything imaginable. You can be with a trained musician and be like, “OK, there’s really strict limits here”. But I am also very thankful that they have set those limits so that anything as weird as an orchestra can exist. What I find really interesting is that all music is so catchy, even when not in a strictly pop way. It is begging to be affixed to things, to work in combination with things. You can take any movie, put it on silent, play any music under it and, for sure, there will be at least a single moment where the two work perfectly well together – it is so suggestive.

Soundtracks are probably one of the most literal ways in which that works, but there’s plenty of others. I have always been drawn to tracks that are just in the ether, songs which everyone knows in some unconscious way without being able to name the artist behind them. There’s certain hooks that are immortal: they may have been written a long time ago but somehow most people know them – be it because they played on the radio in the background when you were younger or from an advert you can’t quite put your finger on. Music has a very subjective value; even more than images, which have more of a literal quality. There’s ways to mess with it, but unless someone tells you what a piece of music is really about, there are so many ways for it to warp into your head.

GB: It always sounds and means something radically different, de- pending on the listener.

AGC: And that’s why I am so invested in DJ edits, remixes and live performances of the same song. I am part of an industry that requires music to be “definitive” as a master recording so it can be released on CD and vinyl stream. Although streaming is pretty flexible nowadays, most of the music world isn’t. But all songs exist in a bit of a flux as a curious moment in time. I always like to draw attention to how flexible tracks are: that’s why in my DJ sets and uploads, but even on com- plete albums like 7G, I often integrate the idea that you could just be hearing a version of something. The same reason led me to work on covers. I think a really nice quality of music is that it isn’t ever fixed in place; there can be a DJ doing a version of some live musician’s track, which suddenly becomes twice as long. And maybe they blend it with something that reveals what the actual song was influenced by the whole time in this crazy rabbit hole. Even if you try to freeze it for a second, music is constantly trying to connect to other things, to morph into something else.

GB: It is a bit like theatre: no performance of the same play will ever exactly replicate the one which came before. Although producers are gaining more prominence in recent years, their work has been neglected for a long time. Having been on both sides, what does “producing” mean to you?

AGC: I talk about it with producer friends of mine constantly. The word “producer” in itself is under a sort of crisis in a way. Some peo- ple find it frustrating, but that’s a good place for me to be in, as I thrive in contradictions. Generally, you have the old school producer, who assembles the instrumentalist musicians they need, books the right engineers and the right studio, and makes sure they manage to get the best version of any song out by liaising with the artists, their man- agers and so on. I am thinking of someone like Quincy Jones, people who, although responsible for the final sounds and feel of a project, don’t really touch the gear, but “conduct” the sound, in a sense. And then, in more recent times, you have the laptop nerd or beat maker – someone who is dragging drum sounds into Ableton and putting the whole thing together. Sometimes it is impossible to separate the two because today’s technology allows you to juggle multiple things at once: you are picking the musicians, doing material and arranging the tracks a lot. I enjoy being both.

When I worked with Charli XCX and Sigur Rós singer Jónsi, we had conversations about the entire thing before I worked on sounds that encapsulated our thoughts. Nowadays, most artists could literally re- cord their own music, which is something I encourage any creative I work with to do. It is important that they learn the tools and record themselves as well as with an engineer to give it a sense of intimacy. Charli’s How I’m Feeling Now album was done during the pandemic: I helped her set up the microphone on FaceTime so that she could re- cord stuff on her own, and those bits made the final cut. When I work with her as a producer, I do my best to make it sound as if she could have produced it herself: I want to capture as much of her personality and energy in it. When there’s a feature on a song, and with Charli [XCX] there’s never too many, we make it sound like that person did actually just turn up and jump into the track: it needs to feel like a reflection of who she is as a person.

GB: How do you manage to balance leaving your own “mark” on a song and letting the artist’s aura come through in it?

AGC: Although it is inevitable for me to have some signature on those things, I try to give as much space to the artist as possible. With Jón- si, I had to come up with a sound that was somewhere in between analog and digital. He is aware of embodying this Icelandic utopia, but also knows how to be silly about it, making things up on the fly and not being completely comfortable with just being someone who is considered like an epic songwriter. There was an interesting vul- nerability to all of that. Being a producer means that, at times, you even need to change your tools in order to let the artist’s voice speak through their music. I recently recorded a session with Caroline [Pol- achek] and her band which we wanted to feel related to the tour she has just done. She is producing a lot of her music now, which adds another layer to our collaboration.