Blending the world of classical music with a hard-hitting, electronic ethos, Apashe is operating within a uniquely epic sonic universe. With his latest album Antagonist solidifying this alchemic approach alongside the 69-piece Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, we caught up with him to learn more about the scope of his ambitions…

>“I’ve done just a tiny percentage of what he’s been through, but I’ve not got a Tim Burton friend who’s asked me to score 50 movies for him yet.” Apashe – real name John De Buck – is sharing with us his love of legendary cinematic maestro Danny Elfman; both an inspiration to the Belgium-born Canadian genre-blending musician, and his idea of a dream collaborator. “He’s kind of like me. I feel like he’s also done that switch from being in a band and making mostly pop-rock music and then Tim Burton hit him up to score music for movies. Now he’s writing pieces for classical music. That really sparked my interest. That’s both what I want to do and kind of what’s happened to me already. I wish to be like him, one day”

We’re speaking to Apashe during the mixing process of his new album Antagonist, the followup to 2020’s Renaissance – wherein the stylemashing polymath enlisted the Prague

Philharmonic Orchestra to take his emotive and intense electronic tracks and expand their sound into the realms of the hyper-cinematic. Antagonist continues the journey, adding the Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra and a children’s choir into the mix. “It’s definitely easier because I know what I’m doing a little better,” explains John. “For Renaissance it was almost like jumping into the unknown. I didn’t know what was possible and what was really complicated to write. What can you ask of an orchestra and where’s the room between the two spaces? All the small little details I didn’t quite know. So now it’s more complicated because I know there’s more room. Now the question is how do I make that work.”

Tuning up

John’s route into music came while studying electroacoustics at Concordia University. From there, his career developed into a stint at Apollo Studios in Montreal, where he worked as a co-producer on the sound design for numerous video games. In 2014 he embarked on his own artist career. With his recent settling into an electronic-meets-classical hybrid style, we wonder where his interest in this fusion began? “It was a journey because originally – as a teenager – Iwas just sampling classical music because I loved it. It all kind of started from that point in time. I just love taking really old recordings and trying to make something new out of them. I’ve always been a fan of sampling culture, and then after a while you kind of realise that everything has been sampled, everything has been eaten up and chewed a million times. It’s hard to make something original. Then it was around the same time that I went to university to study music and it was there that I learned about orchestration.”