Alex Lustig transforms rap beats into ambient soundscapes and is making an Impact

At only 23-years old and with a SoundCloud page barely a year old, Alex Lustig has already received the honor of a Juno nomination - the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy.

The Antwerp, Belgium-based producer is a rising star on the hip-hop circuit, working with major modern day stalwarts of the genre like Machine Gun Kelly, Young Thug, Hoodie Allen, Skeme and more. After years of perfecting his sound in the rap realm and sitting on catalogue's worth of production material playing on an entirely different spectrum of electronic music, Alex Lustig decided to launch his own solo career, blasting off with a viral single called 'Light'.

Big things are on the horizon for the up-and-coming producer in his own right, but there's also plenty to get to know about his already prolific career navigating the hip-hop realm.

Get into an exclusive Q+A and diverse mix, below.

Was music a big part of your childhood?

When I was about 8, my mom bought a piano out of nowhere. She started saying, “Alex, you should start playing,” and she found a teacher for me and I started getting into it. Then, I started not doing so well in school but she said I could make up for doing poorly in school by playing three hours of piano, everyday. I couldn’t even skip one day.

Then when I was 15 or 16, I started going to school even less and my mom said that was only okay if I did five hours a day of piano and eventually, she brought me to the Conservatorium in Belgium to learn classical music. Then when I was 18, I ended up going to London where my sister was studying to study music production, but I never went to the classes because I hated being taught. I went to Montreal for a year when I was 19. I was going to study at university there, went for a day and then I said “fuck it,” it wasn’t for me and I decided that day to go 100 per cent into music.

Everyone I work with says I work very melodically, because that’s where my background comes from. My mom would always play opera at home, and she’d bring me too - drag me to these operas for four hours. Or, I’d come home from school and classical music would be blaring through the house super loud and she’d ask, “Alex, who is playing?” I’d say I don’t know but she’d keep pressuring me until I answered and knew!

Your mom seems to have played a huge part in instilling your interest in music.

She’s so funny, she knows every classical piece of music, every artist... then I’d play her some Skrillex and at first she’ll be unsure about it, but then one time I caught her blasting Skrillex on her own. She's great.

Tell me how you jumped from piano to producing music.

I had these big headphones when I was 13 and I’d play super loud music at school and my science teacher, Mr. Jordan, would come up to me and tell me I was playing music too loudly. He’d tell me that it was bad for my ears but I’d keep doing it, and one day he told me he was starting a class after school about music production. He saw I was obsessed with music and invited me, so I said, "why not."

I was hooked after that and I got my hands on a cracked version of Ableton. My mom would usually make me play piano first thing when I woke up, so I started sneakily waking up at like 5 AM to work on production so she wouldn't know.

I had to prove it to her, you know? She believed strongly in dedicating your all to become good at something and to her, it was piano. But eventually she saw how much I loved producing music though, and let me run with it.

You described your own music as melodic, and that has sort of become the way your sound is defined. Where do you think that inspiration comes from?

I have an anxiety disorder, and I was 17 I had a psychotic episode. I was taking medication and was in a spot where I wasn’t creating anything. I was taking these pills that made my mind stop thinking. I felt like a zombie.

I remember I’d go to my computer to produce, and get anxious because I couldn’t create. One day, I stopped taking the medication and I instead, ordered a book on anxiety because I realized that no one had actually ever told me what it was. I learned that the only thing you have to do when you’re having a panic attack is to accept it. The problem is is that you’re trying to help yourself the whole time when you’re having one, but you are tiring your mind even more when you do that. Then your mind gets so tired that it shuts down, and then you just become anxious about being anxious. Once you accept it, it just stops.

What calmed me down then was ambient music, in movies and stuff. Strictly then, I started doing more ambient stuff because it made me feel more comfortable. Big reverbs - they calm you down.

But also, the less and less I have anxiety, I start to experiment with trap beats like I made when I was younger, but blending in the ambient sounds and styles. Especially on my own sounds.

You’ve also worked with some pretty high-tier hip-hop artists though, which is quite different from your own sound. Which came first?

My first idol was Elvis, then Michael Jackson, then Eminem. When Eminem came, it was only Eminem on the iPod. It naturally came when I started producing, then I got into all these rappers. I tried copying Kanye’s ‘Stronger’ beat a million times.

When you don’t know how to do something, you’re so much more creative than when you do. You’re just trying everything. Some of the beats I made, I remember were so creative. That’s where I came from, listening to rap beats and trying to make them.

I was just messaging people on Facebook telling them I wanted to make a song. One of the first artists I worked with was SRH, a rapper singer, and we made this project called ‘No Big Deal’. After that, some rappers start hitting me up and I did more and more.

When I started making the ambient, weird beats, people didn’t want to take them. I kept wishing for someone to take them because I just wanted to put them out. I’d play them for people and they’d tell me it was crazy but they didn’t know how to rap on it. It never hit me just to put it out as it was, until later.

You've worked with Young Thug, Hoodie Allen, Machine Gun Kelly and more. How did you connect with them?

When I was young, I really would not think things through, but I think it ended up being a blessing in disguise. I would hit up everyone on Facebook, asking to make a song. I would get messages back, asking if I produced and I’d be like, “Yeah!”, even though I was only like, 15.

I had Hoodie Allen’s email from someone I had worked with before, but had never sent him anything until one day when I said fuck it and just did it. He responded to my surprise and actually liked and took a lot of my beats, and I ended up producing half of his project ‘Happy Camper’. Hopefully we're going to work on more together in the future too.

That's why when people complain nowadays, I just say there's really no excuse. All it takes is an email. I used to spend my time hunting down emails, even guessing them sometimes just looking for a shot.

What’s something you’ve learned about working with rappers that people might be surprised to know?

Rap right now is so new, and it's everywhere in pop music. Look at Lil Yachty who made this “happy rap” genre, Lil Uzi does this mumble rap. It’s so fresh. You make a rap beat, give it to a pop singer, it becomes pop, but it’s still a rap beat.

It's also cool to learn from these rappers. They've taught me a lot in ways that I wouldn't have expected. I was in the studio with Skeme, and he would hear things that I wouldn’t, and I like to think that I know my productions the best. He was recording a verse and asked me to move the beat a little bit over, even though it sounded fine. I was sitting there like, “uhh…” thinking that it would be off, but then we played it and it sounded incredible. Such a small detail, but he knew the flow and the timing so well and it made all the difference.

So then you decided to focus on your solo career with the release of your first single ‘Light’. Why that track?

I have probably a million notes on my phone of album titles and concepts. And I always tried to share my ambient beats with rappers I was working with, but no one took them. They always told me, "Man, these are so sick but I have no idea how I'd rap over them." I never had thought about releasing them on my own until it got to the point where I realized I just had to put something out.

I had a track called ‘Voices’ which at that point was a year old which was going to be the one, but I hesitated for some reason. Then, ‘Light’ came and it made more senses. People started picking up on it. It was really the first thing I put out, my SoundCloud was brand new at that point. But it took off and it all started to make sense to me.

Then the EP came out, and it started getting a lot of good reactions. Actually house labels started reaching out to me, which was funny because I’m a rap producer at heart, but there's also not really a genre for me yet. I'd tell them, "I'm happy you're interested, but you have to know that just because this song is 100 BPM, doesn't mean they'll all be like this. The next one might 140 BPM with some rap in there!" I don't want to be limited in any way.

Tell me about the mix you made us.

DJing is still really new to me, but it forces me to be creative. I wanted to show Alex in this mix, but show both what I'm listening to but also how different I want things to sound too. I put rap songs in there that made sense like the Travis Scott interlude, because it represents elements that I put in my music. Bon Iver is in there too though, because he's one of my favorites in the world. It's about the selection in this mix, for sure.

Hear Alex's latest track 'No More' here

Valerie Lee is Mixmag's US Digital Editor. Follow her on Twitter here

Track List:

Alex Lustig 'Light'

Mura Masa 'Know Me Better'

Majid Jordan 'Tea & Coffee'

Odesza 'How Did I Get Here'

Jadu Heart 'Jewl'

Flume 'Trust'

Clams Casino 'All Nite'

A$AP Rocky 'Lvl'

Nosaj Thing 'Safe'

Burial 'Archangel'

Alex Lustig 'Do Wrong'

Travis Scott 'SDP interlude'

Bon Iver '21 Moon Water'

Clams Casino 'I'm God'

Alex Lustig 'Rise'

Tourist 'To Have You Back'

Jack Ü 'Where Are Ü Now'

Cashmere Cat 'Aurora'

Skrillex 'Fire Away'

Burial 'Raver'

Flume 'Innocence'

Four Tet, Jamie xx, Romy 'Seesaw' (Club Version)

Clams Casino '32 Levels'

Jadu Heart 'Meeting Faro'

The Glitch Mob 'Between Two Points'

Slow Magic 'Waited 4 You'

Jacques Greene 'The Look' (Koreless Remix)

Tourist 'U'

Tourist 'For Sarah'

Jamie xx 'The Rest Is Noise'