Courtesy of Hot Sugar

Plenty of great music has come out of the East Village, but on an album due out May 14, the East Village is going into the music. On “Moon Money,” Nick Koenig, who records under the name Hot Sugar, changes the way we hear the neighborhood by manipulating sounds from its streets – an experimental process known as associative music.

“Familiar sounds represent a location or experience, triggering a mood you’ve grown to feel towards that place or experience,” Mr. Koenig explained. “I try to incorporate sounds familiar to New York City inhabitants in my music, hoping to subtly provoke those moods in my audience.” The musician recently broke down one of his tracks for The Local, to show how he puts his listeners in an East Village state of mind.

How were you first attracted to associative music?

I got tired and embarrassed of using the same stock sounds that everyone has. I wanted to make my own sounds and realized I could.

What intrigued you about sounds from the East Village?

I like how counter-intuitive it is to record out here. Producers and recording engineers are taught to record in the most silent and sterile conditions, making most studios a prison for sounds. I’m against that idea, and Manhattan is one of the loudest places in America, so I try to record amid the chaos and play with the results. It’s easy to surrender to the cacophony of the city but if you focus on the landscape and learn to decipher it, it turns into a gift basket of cool sounds and I just pluck the ones I want from it.

What have been some of your favorite sounds to manipulate in the East Village?

Hurricane Irene gave me some intense sweeping transitional sounds. Once, a girl crying in front of the YMCA had perfect pitch, which I turned into a violin. Lately, I’ve been more interested in non-sounds or at least sounds that aren’t in our audible range. I’ve been working with what we perceive as silence, recording the room tone in building lobbies or other quiet spots around the East Village and cranking the volume afterwards to hear how that silence sounds. You’d be surprised by how different the silence in a funeral home on Second Avenue sounds compared to silence at the Tompkins Square library.

Do you want people to recognize the sounds you use?

I disguise familiar sounds by isolating the elements I want the audience to focus on, so when I reveal its origin, it contextualizes the piece in a way that’s relevant to hip-hop’s sampling. In my songs, I want people to focus on the melodies, rhythms and composition, but all that adds to its texture.

Below, listen to “Theres A Man Waiting At the Bottom of the Stairs,” off of “Moon Money,” and read Hot Sugar’s breakdown of the East Village sounds he used in the song.

Sweeping sound – Hurricane Irene
Noisy kick – Kicking a street cone at the entrance of the East Side highway
Lead synth – A metal pipe outside of the Con-Edison plant dropped onto concrete
Percussion – Blowing the top of a 40 oz. glass bottle on a rooftop
Shakers, additional texture – Pigeons scattering

A launch party for “Moon Money” will take place May 24 at Littlefield, 622 Degraw Street, Brooklyn.