The Mix 115: Loukeman

In May 2021, Toronto-hailing artist Luke Frenton, AKA Loukeman, casually uploaded a playlist of beats he’d made in his bedroom during lockdown to the internet. Years prior his friend and roommate at the time Dylan Hancock, AKA Dyltwosix, had drawn a logo of an alien-like canine with a star at the end of its tail. They called it Stardog, and it became a collective symbol for their friendship group. Having slapped this image on all kinds of stuff over the years, from posters to possessions, Luke rolled with it as the artwork for his debut music release, and took on its name for the mixtape too, calling it Stardog One, shortened to ‘Sd-1’. Five years later, the Stardog symbol is recognised worldwide, synonymous with the style of sample-heavy, emotionally-rich electronic music he’s since honed across a trilogy of mixtapes, and Loukeman is an in-demand producer for global stars of rap and pop, including A$AP Rocky, PinkPantheress and Amine.

These low-key origins feel true to Fenton as an artist. When we connect over a video call, he’s freshly returned home to Toronto after a lengthy spell on the road, and sounds relieved to be freed from the anxiety of performing, more comfortable in a production lane than on the increasingly sized stages his DJ career is taking him to, including major festival shows and support slots for Overmono and Fred again... Put him in a studio with some of the biggest names in music, though, and he’ll have no problem giving them some of the Loukeman magic, a world of sound he’s built from an expansive array of influences, channelled into skewed, hazy and chopped-up beats. Loukeman’s approach is off-the-cuff and emotionally-led towards whatever feels good in the moment, and it’s stayed that way from bedroom producing to high-profile studio sessions.

His childhood was typically Canadian, born and raised in midtown Toronto, with summers spent skateboarding and winters on the ice hockey rink. Guitar music was his jam, raised on the likes of Neil Young and Wilco, before being put onto the electronic side of music upon discovering SoundCloud in high school. This interest bloomed when he moved to Montreal for college and began attending house music parties helmed by the likes of Patrick Holland, and soon he was making his own house music for the first time. Initially he’d mess about on FL Studio, before a laptop breakdown pushed him to upgrade, and next he was onto Ableton, pulled towards lo-fi production with Delroy Edwards as his gateway inspiration. 

That fuzzy, unrefined framework is well-suited to his style of painting musical collages from a palette of his many interests. He draws from a pool that spans ambient, folk, rap, R&B, and more, and makes it his own. Take ‘Baby You’re A Star’, which marries a country guitar line and an R&B hook to form a lilting house track. 

Having found an audience almost immediately with the surprise hit of ‘Sd-1’, ensuing clamour for a sequel was met when ‘Sd-2’ dropped in 2024. Now the trilogy is complete, with ‘Sd-3’ arriving in April, written across Canada, LA, Madrid and London, with contributions from Ralphie Choo, and Nate Sib. It marks the first instalment to not be self-released, landing through September Recordings to meet the demands of his growing profile. 

“I think the world is set for me — I just want to open it up,” says Loukeman, who’s also now scoring a film, amid setting his sights on more solo work, more collaborations, and more stepping out of his comfort zone to keep growing as a producer and DJ.

How has your production setup changed from when you started out? It was laptop-based at first, how much have you expanded the gear you’re using?

It's evolved quite a bit. By the end of my first year of producing, I had bought a MIDI keyboard and was really stoked on that. The next year I bought a little Boss drum machine and made a bunch of music with that. I love that thing, it was so sick. That gave me a lot of confidence, a lot of inspiration. Ever since then, I like to have one little piece of gear to not just stare at a laptop. Right now that's an [Elektron] Octatrack. It’s fun nerding out on drums, and then little bits of synths and stuff. I don't buy gear too crazy, so I'm due for a new piece, I believe.

You’re still working in the box a fair bit, but you said you like to not just stare at a laptop. Do you like the more tactile nature of certain gear? 

My favourite way of making music is to use one thing a lot to try to get to a new place with it. For weeks I’ll just use just the Octatrack and my laptop, or just the Octatrack and a synth, and try to see how many things I can make out of that combination, without using too many pieces of gear. Two weeks later you're deep into both pieces, and you're finding new things because you're so bored of it, and that's where your own interesting approach to gear that we all have comes from.

What draws you to the samples you use in your music? Is sampling an active pursuit or more just stuff that catches your ear? 

Sometimes stuff catches my ear, but a lot of the time I go for a more general approach. Like, I love R&B vocals, so I'll download a bunch of R&B albums that I'm listening to and have folders on my laptop of full albums. Not even thinking, ‘that track's gonna be sick for a sample’, though sometimes that happens, but mostly it's just having a bunch of random source material. With how much I try to make music, you burn through them; I'll reuse the same samples a bunch of times, and you end up working things in so many different ways that eventually it's gonna be kind of cool or fit one of the tracks. It's a lot of building, having stuff on my laptop to pull from. 

Obviously I have influences that make me want to sample certain things, like R&B vocals work as that classic house vocal. I like acoustic stuff. The Avalanches inspire me, that sort of whimsical, acoustic, warm feeling. I'll download in these big categories and just pull from them pretty randomly and see what I can angle in.

I read a quote where you were talking about pitch-shifting plug-ins and said “the worse they are, the better”. What did you mean by that and why does that suit you the way you want your music to sound? 

Everyone loves their own special little trick with a piece of gear, or thing they've found out, and I think it's the same in plugins. Everyone's gonna know the correct way to use pitch-shifting plugins… They do something to the transience and the stereo image, so depending on which one you're using, you get the drums put in a different place, the whole thing gets adjusted. The really stock ones, like the Apple computer stock ones, have a tightness feature and a smoothness, so you can choose how mushy everything gets, you can really blur every transient into this washed-out, pitched-weird, phasey thing. It's fun to hear your track in a new way or put an element into a new space.

Have there been any sample clearing nightmares or do you change them so much they can’t be identified?

Early on, I didn't care about clearing. But now since the last two projects, I get so much anxiety. Even if it's changed so much, I can't sleep sometimes thinking, like, 'but what if some AI program comes and discovers it?'. Now I definitely try to clear everything. Even if it's mangled to the point where you can't recognise it, I still kind of fear out about it. 

As your profile grows and time goes on, you gotta be a little smarter about samples. But honestly, I find that people are down to clear samples, so I don't shy away from sampling anything. Either they clear it and they're cool, or they don't, and I just play it in a DJ set, and it's a song you can only hear in a DJ set, and that's also cool. So I still sample whatever I want. It's just whatever happens to that song is changed.

‘Sd-3’ is billed as the final instalment of your ‘Stardog’ series. Was it always conceived as a trilogy? What was the original concept and how has it evolved across the releases? 

The first one, there was really no thinking at all. I had made a playlist of songs, and my roommate Dylan [AKA Dyltwosix] had made the logo. I put it on as a placeholder, and he was like, ‘Just use that.’ Then I needed a name, so, Stardog One [‘Sd-1’], you know? Because it was so quick to put it together, it didn't need a special name. I didn't even think of a Two until some people hit me up asking, ‘Where's where's your next project?’. Then I locked in on that and called it ‘Sd-2’. Then I was like, I don't really want to just do this forever, so a trilogy's nice. Stardog Three. Maybe I'll break the trilogy rule one day, like 10 years, ‘Sd-4’. Who knows? But it's a trilogy for now.

How do you think they work together as a trilogy? Was there any evolution in concept and approach? 

In concept and approach, I would say they haven't evolved at all. The key to me with these projects is to maintain the same approach, which is jusst making beats, doing what I think sounds cool, and there's no real bigger idea of narrative or concept. As far as concept, it's just about mixing elements and samples and collaging, just my production approach more generally. 

But I think the sound has evolved without me doing it intentionally. You make music for five-plus years, you're gonna get better or worse, or different, you know? So I think it can naturally evolve. It's just meant to be the music that I enjoy making, and then sharing that.

So Stardog, I read that it's the “squad logo” for your friendship group, and a lot of them are artists too.

My best friend Dyltwosix, Dylan Hancock, made the logo. We printed it on posters so long ago, probably like 2016/2017, and would just put it on random stuff, then I put it on my own music. I think people have recognised it as my logo, which it is in a way, but it's also a bigger thing of all our friends, and, for lack of better word, our kind of collective of music people, that are actually just all friends. There's probably about five or six of us that grew up together, and we a;; use that logo, or relate to it.

Alongside Dyltwosix, who are the other artists involved in that crew? And how have those relationships shaped your musical output, and life more broadly? 

There's my friend OLDRI. I started making music with him. He's moved to Germany and he works full-time now, but he still makes really cool music on SoundCloud. He's definitely the original guy that got us to keep going and keep making music. Then there's Brat Star and Ian Mills, who make really sick music. I'd say that's the core bunch. But we have a larger friend group of people we grew up with that don't take music serious at all, and we just jam and play guitar. It's pretty important to keep that ‘for fun’ lightness to everything.

The video for ‘To The Sky’ is very Canada-coded. It was shot with your friends at an ice hockey pick-up game, there’s some Canada Goose clothing on show. Some of your press shots around the release have a quite wintery Canadian aesthetic. How does that imagery match the music in your view?

Aesthetically I love winter. But also, when I'm feeling like I'm out of ideas, I end up just, like… Okay, what is most natural to me? What's the realest thing? And I just try to pull from my regular life. Whenever I do that, I end up feeling pretty good about the thing I've made, and it stands the test of time to me. If the press shot was me looking all crazy, some contrived thing, you know… two months goes by, I'm like, oh man. 

It's my friend who's a Toronto-based journalist, photographer, Tommy [Keith], he shot that. I liked his photos. It’s just setting up all the parameters to be something that's [reflective of] where I'm from, who I am, and winter. I love winter, it’s a huge inspiration for making music. If you're from Toronto, you know that you know you get most of your work done in the winter. 

‘Sd-1’ was a lockdown era mixtape from an unknown producer, and ‘Sd-3’ arrives while your star has risen considerably, working with massive rap and popstars. Did the changed context around the creation of this instalment affect your process much? Have you felt more pressure?

Yeah, I think I felt more pressure, but I felt more pressure at ‘Sd-2’ as well. I'm someone who can quite easily get in my head about everything. I've already tripped out on most things, so tripping out on pressure isn't new. You just sort of gotta let it run its course, and not spiral out of control.

But I try to keep everything pretty level-headed, and just remember that, for me, these projects are my own thing, and everything else can be its own thing too. They're meant to be uncompromising and what I like. It can be bad to people, and that's okay. You know, lowering the stakes, it's your own music, do whatever you want. An uncompromising approach to my own music is what keeps me going.

How about in the circumstances of working with big artists. You’ve been collaborating and remixing some massive artists now, from A$AP Rocky to PinkPantheress. How have those experiences been for you, have they changed the way you make music?

Yeah, I think I've learned a lot from working with people like that. Being a producer in a room with other producers and working on somebody else's song is a different set of tools. But at the end of the day, you're trying to get to the same place as making any song, which is that this should feel good, and you don't want to overthink it. Obviously you're humbled, you're like, wow, these people are so talented. But also what I’ve learned is that we're all kind of doing the same thing. There's no cheat code in a bigger room with bigger artists. We're all on Ableton or flipping something, you know, and they're just good at it. They just write really good songs. That's humbling, but you're also like, wow, I can sit down today and do the thing that they're doing too. You learn a lot, but it's also, like, we're all just doing the same thing at the end of the day.

You made your name as a producer, but then as you've got more known, the DJing side of it has expanded a lot as well. How are you finding DJing, and how do you view DJing in comparison to producing? 

It's hard for me to take my producer brain away from DJing. I am very much a preparation person, and don't love performing or crowds. I'd definitely rather be at home making beats. But over time, I'm really trying to enjoy it, and I've been learning the real benefit and fun and feedback you get from DJing is pretty incredible. I've even been finding myself a little excited to DJ, rather than just nervous or anxious. So it's been a really difficult, but also really insightful path, just performing in general. 

Right now I'm trying to find the balance between producer brain to a DJ set. Producer brain being: just doing what you want, and making some weird thing that goes fast and slow, wherever I want to go. I just want to play everything and be all over the place, like an album or something. But I think there's also part of me now that's [recognising] there's a real art to being able to choose a song on the fly and keep energy going, the more traditional DJ skills. So I'm trying to find the balance between both.

You’re travelling and touring a lot more. There’s a quote in the mixtape press release saying it was a “little too much”. How are you finding that whole DJ tour lifestyle, is it draining? What's the balance that you're hoping to find there?

It’s draining in some ways and energising in others. I really enjoy traveling, and it's really healthy for me, mentally, to just be spawning into a new city and doing scary things for myself. As much as I want to be at home just making beats for months in the winter and not going outside, it's just not that healthy. It's good to have a thing that's  scary, and you go do it. You get to earn your chill time, and it's a healthy balance of fear and comfort.

I read that you’re scoring an upcoming film. How’s that going?

That film I'm really excited about. Luckily, they came to me knowing my own music, and I made it clear that I would only want to do this if it felt like something I could really do well and in my own  wheelhouse. I was able to work from that perspective and make a lot of ambient music, and the film is set in a place that fits a. sort of, cold, wintery, dark, melancholy… not fully just dark, but it seemed like it fit my vibe of production and music and feeling. It's been a really fun exercise to sit down and try to make a lot of ambient music, and a lot of chords, different moments that could be used in the film. It's just getting started, but it's already a thing that feels pretty good. 

What other ambitions and goals do you have artistically in the future?

I really enjoy producing for other people. I think it's a really satisfying thing. You know, I'll always just be making beats in the house for myself; I'll never really stop that or stop releasing that stuff. But I enjoy collaborating and trying to open up the world of Loukeman music. and just work with other people and not be too careful or scared or anything. I think the world is set for me, the Loukeman music world. ‘Sd-1’, two and three sort of set it up, and I just want to open it up.

Who would be some dream collaborations if you were to set your sights on anyone?

Justin Bieber, Jeremih. PartyNextDoor, I think, would maybe actually be the top pick. I love R&B. It would be fun to make some R&B stuff with one of my favourites.

What are you aiming to bring to those scenarios? What do you think the Loukeman world can offer to PartyNextDoor, or A$AP Rocky, all these people that you've worked with or want to work with?

I think I get excited by certain people. PartyNextDoor has such a sick voice, such a good beat selection and melody sensibility. It would be so satisfying to be able to flip some Party vocals, as I have done, but to do that for him, or to hear him on something I've made. Get him on that certain feeling that I would love to hear him on. It's just about hearing one of your favourite voices and artists and writers in the context you want to hear it.

How did you approach your mix for this feature?

It features some songs I’ve been rinsing, a couple edits I’ve made, and a few new tracks I’ve been working on from the last couple months. Recorded at my home in Toronto.

'Sd-3' is out now via September Recordings, check it here

Patrick Hinton is Mixmag's Editor & Digital Director, follow him on Instagram

Tracklist:
Manifester – Instead i’ll make it worse
Loukeman – Pink Bape Lighter
Irini – dreamuniverse, pt.ii
Loukeman – Yesterday is gone 128 bpm (Unreleased)
Lemon Jelly – Stay With You (Radio Version)
Loukeman – love 3 (Unreleased)
Loukeman – All I Could Think Of
Loukeman - Manifester
Loukeman – To The Sky
SALEM – Dance4Me
Loukeman – Clairo Blouse Luke edit
Loukeman – Take Your Headphones Off (Unreleased)
Loukeman – Brain 3 (Unreleased)
Loukeman – Digitaldash edit
Loukeman, Legion, Nyan – Be-LgNyLm-133 (Unreleased)
DJ Technics – Girlfriend
Lemon Jelly – Nice Weather for Ducks
Loukeman – Find Your,,,,, (Unreleased)
The Magnetic Fields – Strange Powers
I:Cube – La vie en communauté?
Loukeman – Numberzzz
Loukeman – We Belong (Unreleased)
Manifester - The Peace