Owen Sanders has always pushed the boundaries of music making. Before he got into modular synthesizers, he was the founder and conductor of the unprecedented Kyteman Orchestra, a 30-piece group that included 10 rappers among its orchestral ranks. But eventually, Benders wanted to break out on his own and double down on his passion for electronic music. When he took that leap back in 2013, he wasn’t sure where it would lead—but by following his instincts and eventually getting swept up by the possibilities of modular synths, he was able to establish himself as a touring musician with a huge community of enthusiasts fueling his work.

Once the pandemic hit, Benders’ touring was brought to a halt. This didn’t dampen his enthusiasm, though. Instead, he re-committed to streaming his craft in action, and created a digital safe haven for his community to virtually gather in as COVID-19 sent everyone into lockdown. 

Now, Benders is an all-in streamer, often going live for three- or four-hour sets. His on-stream exuberance and talent have helped him build a thousands-strong community who support his work wholeheartedly, and once he joined Rally, his fans were immediately there to scoop up his Coin, $VCA. Benders is just getting started with developing the perks of holding his Coin, but already, his community is pumped that they’ll be able to use $VCA to make donations on stream, buy music and tickets, and eventually get access to a massive music library—dubbed The Vault—full of recordings, stems, and other music that’s there just for them to enjoy.

Below, we caught up with the electronic musician to hear more about why he wants to ensure his streams and community channels are free and open to everyone, and how he balances his commitment to generosity with his need to make a living.

Can we start with an introduction to you as a creator? What kind of work do you make?

For my whole life, everything I’ve done has revolved around making and performing music. I used to work with orchestras, then I was a conductor for a big group, and I even wrote music for operas for a while. But for the last few years, I've fully focused on making electronic music—specifically with a modular machine.

What compelled you to make the switch to electronic music?

When I started out as a musician, I was solely focused on classical and jazz. But from there, I discovered hip hop, drum and bass, and other electronic genres. I've always been interested in the emotion and energy behind a piece of music more so than its style or genre, and I was immediately mesmerized by the energy that came with electronic music. So when I started trying to compose electronic stuff for myself, I was always searching for what kinds of sounds fit best to a certain energy or certain flow, and what I could do with that.

In the beginning, my first go-to point was starting with orchestral instruments, and adding in drums and other electronic sounds to expand what was possible. But at some point I hit this roadblock where I realized I was missing the electronic grit that bands like R. Falkenberg or Justice had. There was always a different drive and energy behind their music that I wasn’t able to achieve.

At that point, I was looking for a better sound than just what I could make with my computer, which sounded plastic and thin to me. Then a friend suggested, "Why don't you try using modular synthesizers?" Once I started researching them, I got really excited and bought way too many modules without a clue of how to use them. When everything arrived, all the gear just sat in the corner of my room for something like a year before I gave it a serious try. But once I focused on figuring it out, I got more and more interested in the results.

The deeper I went with it, the more intense it got. I am quite an obsessive person, so especially when it comes to something I really like, I can totally lose myself in it. That's what happened with modulars—to the point that I disbanded my orchestra and stopped doing everything else. I think that was something like eight years ago now, and I'm still doing it today.

Once you found electronic music and modular synths, how did you take it all online? You've got a big following built up—was building that community an intentional process?

I started streaming for the first time somewhere around 2015, when I had just disbanded the orchestra. It was the first time I was without an official project to work on, but every day, I kept going back to the modular wall and just jamming and trying to figure out where to take it. At some point I found out about this online radio thing called Mixlr, and started streaming audio. The first time I did it, there were maybe five people who tuned in. But even then, I noticed it changed how I worked. Having someone listening to what I was doing added this little edge of tension to everything, like, "Don't mess up." I got hooked.

A couple of weeks later I added some webcams and started streaming on YouTube and on Facebook. From there, things took off pretty fast, and I started getting bookings to do shows and big techno festivals all over. While I was on the road performing, the streaming stopped. 

Then last year, as different countries started going into early-pandemic lockdown, I decided, “We might be in lockdown for a while. Before that happens, I’m gonna grab my essentials from my studio.” So I brought my modular home, in addition to my camera gear. That was when I decided to start streaming again. 

In that first week of lockdown, a lot of people tuned into the stream, and it gave some structure to my days. I would wake up, fire up the camera and the synth, and just start playing. It was like, “Nobody knows what’s going to happen, but at least you can chill out here with me.” The community just kept coming back and having their morning coffee with me and with each other. Before I knew it, there were something like a thousand people in the Discord channel, all just meeting each other and talking about everything and nothing at the same time. It was like we had established this online community away from everything else.

It sounds like you created a safe space for people to come together when they really needed it. At the beginning of the pandemic especially, when it was so weird and scary, we all needed a way to feel connected to each other.

That was exactly what it was. It was this one place where no matter where on earth you were, you could drop in and feel a little bit better. In the thick of it, I had people contacting me from New York telling me things like, "Right now I'm on the front lines setting up hospital beds and your stream is on, and I'm just jamming to the music and at least feeling some semblance of normalcy." 

That human connection was so important, and even though it was happening online, it felt more real than anything I’d experienced before. At a normal concert, I don't really see or talk to people. There could be a thousand people in the crowd who I can wave and say hi to, but that's it. Online, it’s somehow more human feeling, since they're all talking and I can drop in and have actual conversations and connect with people.

How have you introduced Rally and your Coin, $VCA, to your community? What’s the plan with it?

One of my core principles is that I don't make music to make money—I make money to make music. As long as I can eat, sleep, and expand into new projects, I’m good. So, that's always been my quest: Figuring out how to balance my desire to do as much as I can, and be able to take risks with my projects, while at the same time making sure that at the end of the month, the electricity is still running and there's not going to be someone knocking on the door to take all my stuff away.

I want to be as generous as I can with my content and with the music I make. When I'm streaming, I don't want to put it behind a paywall. With Patreon, one of the things that always felt very awkward was promising things to one part of the community that I wouldn't give to the rest. From a web 2.0 perspective, the whole point of building a community online is to give and show as much as you can, while also trying to find ways to sustain yourself. It’s not an easy balance to strike.

When I found out about Rally, I started reading up on what it was all about. I'd seen the whole social currency movement happening around me, so I felt like, "This could actually be an interesting way to bring balance to how I do things, where the community can support me in my work, and I can still give everyone access to my music." 

In practice, I haven't fully introduced the coin to my community yet—it’s just getting going. But already I see how well Rally’s model is working. I’m realizing that I no longer have to worry about how I'm going to make money off of the projects that I'm doing. Instead, I can focus purely on making my projects as great as possible, and on sharing them with the community that I have. I've only been on Rally for a month or so, and already it’s blown way past my expectations of what having my own Coin could do for me.

So right now all of the action on your Coin, $VCA, is pre-launch? You haven’t even told your community what it’s for yet?

Exactly, yeah. I hadn't even told the community about it yet, and already they were like, "Hey, we see you've launched this, we're getting in!" It's so much fun to see, and so heartwarming. I haven't even put up a notification about it yet, and somehow it’s already going strong.

What will your community be able to do with $VCA once it’s all set up?

The Discord is open and free, and so is the stream, because like I said, I want to be able to share those things with everyone. But soon there are going to be some very cool things launching where $VCA is going to play a big part.

A couple of the things that we're thinking about are pretty obvious, like using $VCA as a new currency for donations on stream. That's a big thing for me actually, as YouTube and Twitch both have massive limitations on what I can do with them. YouTube takes a big cut, and Twitch demands exclusivity when I partner up with them—which is something I never wanted to do. Now with Rally, a hundred percent of my community’s support will come directly to me, which is something that matters to them, too.

The next thing we’re planning with $VCA is music sales, both to the community but also in a professional sense. I'm already talking to my booking agents to figure out how they can start accepting $VCA at my shows. I think it’s going to be interesting to see how the professional domain reacts to it.

Beyond what I’ve already mentioned, we're also working on some tools that we're actually developing with the community. I’ve always recorded all my material, and most streams last something like three or four hours. From that, I have all these recorded stems, which together form a massive library. It's something like 200 or 300 hours of music. So right now, I’m working with some community members to get all of this material up on a special website that I call The Vault. Once it’s launched, the multi-track recordings and the stems for all this music is going to be available to everyone who holds the required amount of $VCA.

Through the Rally rewards that I'm getting, I’m able to hire professional engineers and artists to mix and master everything, make the artwork for it, and to do the official release with the content that we decide on together—which from there can be shared back with the same community of $VCA holders. So it’s pretty amazing.

At some point, once $VCA grows more, I can even start asking other artists to get in the mix, like, "Hey, how about you spend a couple of weeks in the studio, I'll bring a recording engineer, we'll mix everything, and we'll release it for the community." So over time, I expect the vault to grow—not just with my own music, but with others’ as well.

The last thing I want to mention is an NFT project that we're working on. Basically, for the next stream season, we're going to be doing everything in a form of augmented reality. To make that possible, I invested in some proper cameras that can track in 360 degrees and everything. They also communicate with Unreal Engine at the same time, which means that during the stream, there can be all kinds of 3D objects, layers, and characters walking through the studio. It's going to feel like we’re really bringing the virtual world into the real one, as if the community could be here in the studio with me.

In terms of how the NFTs come into the picture, we're releasing a series of “Jacks.” Jacks are basically characters made up of three cables stuck together, which are going to be released as NFTs that people can collect. And whenever they talk, they will have their personalized Jack avatar that’s able to sit on my modular, or walk around in my studio. 

How’d you come up with $VCA as the name for your coin?

It's an inside joke in a way. A VCA is a very essential module, as it’s basically the amplifier that decides whether or not audio should pass through. And in the modular world, everyone always says, “You can never have enough VCAs.” Then later on, someone dropped the catchphrase, “Vote, create, aggregate,” and I felt like, "Oh, we've got to do something with that." 

Can you say a little more about how the Rally Rewards have worked for you?

In the beginning, I was hesitant about introducing a Coin to my community because I didn’t want it to become about money. We didn’t want people to get speculative with it, and buy more than they could afford. But overall, we felt that the community benefits outweighed that concern. We were also like, "We’re going to pay close attention to how things evolve, and make sure nothing goes awry."

At this point though, every time when I look at my Rally page, I'm just staring at it in disbelief. Like, “Is this really happening?” I didn’t know what to expect, but it turned out to be such a win-win. It’s enabled me to focus on my music and the community, explicitly. Of course, only time will tell how this will evolve, but if it does continue the way it's working out right now, it means that I can get more and more ambitious with my projects. So yeah, I'm continuously wondering, "What's the catch in all of this?” Because for now, it really is blowing away all my expectations and exceeding everything that I thought it would do.