Hailing from Los Angeles, Isla Hinck is known by many as one of the members behind video game website Easy Allies. When they’re not busy producing shows, Hinck is busy playing with synths. We talked to them about their background in music, working on music for Easy Allies, and if a studio album is in the works.

How did you get involved with music?

I grew up in a very musical house. We would always have a CD playing. Anything from Chanticleer to Gregorian chant to Ray Lynch to Sounds of Blackness. It was a really wide range of stuff. My parents would take us to concerts at the orchestra hall in Minneapolis/St. Paul a couple times a year for various things. I took piano lessons for 7 years as a kid, but they basically fired me because, turns out, I've got problems with authority and I don't like being told to practice. Haha. I started playing trumpet in band in 5th grade and continued through high school. I started singing in earnest in 9th or 10th grade and fell in love with it. I would be in the plays and do the singing competitions and everything.

About midway through high school, my friends and I started a terrible goth rock band called Spolia Opima. A few years later, we stopped taking ourselves seriously, changed the name to Dr. Survivor and the At Seas, and the music got a lot better. In college, I was in DePaul Acappella, and we sang a wide range of musical styles. I loved it. The director of that group had a deep love for Georgian folk music (Georgia the country, not the state) and introduced us to it as well. He started a Georgian folk choir called Alioni in Chicago, which I was a member of until I moved from Chicago to LA in 2010. I miss singing in a choir setting, especially Acappella. In Chicago, I was also in two bands: one called the Closers and another called The Evening Redness named after the subtitle to Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Pretty dumb band name maybe. Haha. The Closers was kind of 90s-ish funky rock, and The Evening Redness was more hard rock. I joined TER after they had much of the music written, they were looking for a singer, so that was an interesting experience to join something that was kind of already in motion.

What attracted you to synths?

I grew up listening to, like I mentioned above, Ray Lynch and things like that. And my dad would sometimes put on prog rock stuff that had some synths in there. But when I was a super depressed teen, I got REALLY into Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead, and that kind of set me on a course from there. I also have always had a deep love for John Carpenter, and so I'm sure the soundtracks from those films got into my head somehow. And growing up playing a lot of video games got the 8, 16, or 32-bit palate of music-making sort of in my head, too. But what's maintained my love for synths is just I love the sound. It's comforting to me. It can be really exciting, or really mellow, it just has so many sonic possibilities.

What acts have influenced you as a musician?

Well, NIN and Radiohead in my formative years. I just can't escape even when I try it seems. I'll make a thing and someone will say "oh very Radiohead," and I'll be like, "Damn, it is isn't it?" Which is very far from a bad thing, of course. But I think I find influences all over the place. From the psychotic energy and lyricism of Tom Waits or Nick Cave to the gorgeous harmonies of a motet from the renaissance era, there's something to appreciate in just about every kind of music except country and bubblegum punk. When I was a kid, we saw this hammered dulcimer player, and that really stuck with me. Hearing that you could make such full tones with just one instrument like that was really something to a young me.

And I've always loved Acappella music, too. I mentioned them above, but Chanticleer is really something else. More recently, I find Lorn really influential, as well as Agnes Obel, and serpentwithfeet. The mixing and mastering on the latter two is really good. That's an area I hope to get better in.

You've played in a handful of bands. Do you remember your first live show?

I remember a few early shows, I don't remember which was first. But Spolia Opima played in a battle of the bands between a few local schools in rural Wisconsin. We won, but I think it was rigged. I was in a bubblegum punk cover band (that's what I grew up calling stuff like Blink 182, and ironically it's my least favorite kind of music, it just makes me really really depressed. Probably because I was really depressed when that stuff was super popular), and I didn't know any of the lyrics, so I had them all written down the side of my arm in black ballpoint pen. Haha.

One of the best early show memories with Spolia Opima was we did one of those scam shows where you have to, like, try to sell a bunch of tickets yourself and you had to buy them first or whatever. I know now that is like totally a scam, but anyways, we got to play at Quest, which was the club Prince started in Minneapolis, and as a weird little sad high school kid, that felt really cool.

What's the process like for creating music for Easy Allies?

For a long time, I would do a song a week for my show with Easy Allies called Easy Update. I mainly decided to do that as a form of practice to try to learn better techniques and stuff. To hold myself accountable. Eventually, negative internet comments kinda killed my enthusiasm for doing that, which is sad, but I do feel like I did learn a lot and improve a lot, and I kind of want to get back into that habit. Just making a song in two hours and calling it good. The pressure was off because I didn't feel like those songs had to be overly serious or really even all that perfect. There's something very freeing to making just silly funny goof-around music. But that was something I just did on my own and stopped doing on my own.

For the live shows and stuff, the first two times we did it, I got a little band together of people I know in LA, and we paid them and we adapted songs I'd already made into a rock band format and that was great. It felt really good to get back in that saddle again. Then for year three, we hired my friend Daniel James, who's a composer, to do like a medley of popular video game tunes and myself and Noah did a kind of karaoke thing with the audience which was a blast. I did one musical episode for Easy Update, but I'd like to do another, I've got some ideas. It's just a lot of work, so I need to find the time. And with Covid it's not possible to get people together to record or shoot anything.

What advice would you give people looking to get into synths?

DON'T! It's expensive! But actually do! Spend all your money on it because they're great!! I was very afraid to get into modular because I knew I wouldn't be able to control myself, and lo the prophecy did come to pass, and I've got a whole boatload of modules now, and I love them like they were my children. They cost about as much as a kid, probably, so I might as well treat them that way. In all seriousness, I think starting with a good mid-range synth that can make the kind of sound you like is really important.

Besides goofing around in Fruity Loops and then Ableton and not counting the Yamaha S80 we had when I was a kid (which I just googled, and WHOA, I didn't realize how expensive that thing was!), my first real hardware synth was the Korg Minilogue which I still really love! The Minilogue, I think, is a good place to start because it's polyphonic (multiple notes at once) and has loads of presets and it sounds really, really good. It's got a little sequencer and arpeggiator and everything, too. You can do lots with it for $500. Otherwise, there are lots of good software synths that are even cheaper. Pigments by Arturia is really good and is visual, so it could be a good learning tool. And you can learn modular for free with VCV Rack!

What current acts are you listening to right now?

Ochre, Lorn, Rival Consoles, Kelpe, The Comet Is Coming. The Sea Shanties album by Robert Shaw Chorale recently re-entered the rotation because I was playing Sea of Thieves. And Nils Frahm is always close by for the last few years too.

What was the last concert you've seen before everything was shut down?

I went to see John Carpenter a while back. That was awesome. Saw Nils Frahm (and Brad Pitt was sitting right behind me, I'll never get over it!!) in an old church, and it was incredible. Just watched the Nick Cave alone concert which was quite sad but really good. That was online just a couple weeks ago.

Will people ever see a full-length album outside of the material done for Easy Allies?

Here's hoping! I have every intention of making that a reality. I currently have a handful of songs I tolerate that might make the cut. Haha. I hope before too long, yes.

Follow Isla Hinck on Twitter and check out their music on Soundcloud.