Deeply rooted in a fascination with the interplay between microscopic and macroscopic, concepts reflected in both his music and his moniker, Los Angeles-based Tommy Simpson has crafted a sound that’s as precise as it is emotionally resonant.

With a career spanning modular synth explorations, audio engineering for Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, composing for media, and releasing his own music, Simpson constantly seeks to connect sound, ideas, and the vastness of the world around us. His work serves as both a reflection of curiosity and a comforting soundtrack to the routines of daily life.

In this interview, Simpson answers five questions, sharing insights on the gear that’s part of his creative process, lessons from working with scoring legends, and the personal inspirations that shape his artistry.

Your work bridges composing, producing and audio engineering. What's the one piece of studio gear you can't live without, and how does it contribute to your creative process?

The real answer is boring, but it's honestly a Mac running Ableton! And sure, that could mean I simply wouldn't have a multitracking tool I was comfortable with, but I mean it more in the sense that I feel that's truly the instrument I play and can best express myself with.

I love my modular systems, but one of the biggest takeaways from learning that world was taking the concepts of creatively routing LFOs, S&H and other sources of modulation into the DAW environment. But if that answer is too on the nose, I'll pick my Neve 33609 outboard compressor, which I use on the final mix bus on every track, often just for gentle shaping and adding some depth before sending it to mastering.

Having experience working alongside Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, what did you learn about scoring for film? Are there any moments from those collaborations that shaped how you approach composing?

The biggest takeaway was how to come up with a workman's attitude towards your commitment to a project. I used to think I was at my most creative at night, "...waiting for the muse" and all that. But assisting in their process showed me that you are at your most creative when you make your worktime a routine, a ritual. If you show up at the same time every day to work, you create a Zen-like flow state where the distractions of the mind can fade a bit and you enter a mental space to be open and more receptive to catching ideas.

It also greatly helped just seeing the entire arc of several scoring projects, particularly understanding good practices of file management (an extremely crucial factor in staying sane while scoring a film). That's not to say I didn't learn anything creative from my time working there, but I learned so much from them remotely by listening to NIN and their scores for tens of thousands of hours since I was 16 before meeting and working for them at 32.

“I love catching ideas more than sculpting them in a premeditated way.”

With a career that spans composing and producing, how do you balance the precision of engineering with the emotion of creating music? Do you find one influences the other?

I think the emotion is clearly the center of the bullseye, but I feel lucky that I can barely distinguish one from the other and I feel like they're two sides of the same coin. At least, I've grown to feel that way.

When I was younger and less experienced, I probably would have said that focusing on the technical side inhibited and distracted from my creativity, but I can look back and say that was only because I didn't have enough understanding of what various music tools were used for, and I was scared and intimidated to learn. But over time, slowly but exponentially understanding different functions of tools and engineering concepts and how they relate to each other in combination, that fear dissipated and vastly expanded what kinds of sounds I could create, which then allowed me to express more multivalent feelings musically. It's like vocabulary -- a kid with a limited vocabulary gets frustrated when people don't understand what they're trying to get across but studying feels like such a daunting task that they push back hard against learning.

Over time, their vernacular tool kit expands and they're much freer and happier once they can articulate more nuanced emotions that people can comprehend and empathize with. There are a lot of musical feelings that I only can unearth because of creatively thinking about how to process a sound even before I know what emotion is that I'm after. I love catching ideas more than sculpting them in a premeditated way.

Macro/micro is a unique moniker. How does it reflect your artistic identity and how has your sound evolved over the years through your diverse roles in music?

Thanks! It's really at the core of what I'm trying to express in my music, directly or indirectly. It's a totem that expresses a form of secular spiritualism that tries to take in the observable universe (and below/beyond) as a wholistic unity, from the microscopic to the macroscopic.

To recognise that reality (as we know it) is like a series of worlds-within-worlds like a matryoshka/nesting doll, every level being isolated from yet dependent on each other. We look out into space and assume vast emptiness, but if you shrunk your consciousness down so that you were standing on an electron at the same scale you'd be standing on the earth, it would probably look the same -- vast emptiness adorned with distant pinpoints of activity that you could never reach.

Yet you'd be nested in the atomic world, then the molecular world, then the cellular world, to animals, planets, solar systems, galaxies, superclusters, the observable universe... and then what? Seeing how the behaviour of the very small resembles the behaviour of the very large fills me with so much wonder, awe, fear, and ecstasy simultaneously that it overfills the god-shaped hole in my heart that Nietzsche described. I hope that it spills out and raises the hearts and minds of those who appreciate my music.

When you step away from the studio, where do you find your inspiration? Are there any personal rituals or hobbies that recharge you?

My family. That's not to say it's all lollipops and rainbows, but my life feels so much more significant and purposeful than it did before. Getting married felt like a metamorphosis of exiting an adolescence and young adulthood of deep insecurity and self-loathing, and having a child gave me this immediate feeling like I just took the training wheels off my life that I never even realised were on in the first place.

Parenting is the most wonderful, most difficult, and most rewarding aspect of my life and gives me stability in not feeling like I'm the broken centre of the universe, that there's a true gravitational centre of love which is our family. But for a less overly earnest answer, I love playing ice hockey, and have since I was 6 years old :).

5 Questions with Macro/micro