Jameson Orvis enters into dialogue with the Berlin-based beatmaker Skoolio for a voluminous conversation about the art of the unfinished, Gigi D’Agostino, and Mind Maps.
Skoolio’s beats have permeated the SoundCloud underground since 2019, but it was only within the last year or two that his beatpacks began to take over my music listening. For ages, producers on SoundCloud have been hawking their beats in beatpacks, short minute-long previews of their work spliced together into single, long, continuous tracks. Yet only recently has it felt like these beatpacks have evolved into a musical form of their own, strange compositions that are thematically cohesive but too diffuse and scattered to feel like a full album. I’ve been listening to these beatpacks so much and been so confused about how to classify them that I reached out to Skoolio to ask if he had any thoughts on the matter. Almost simultaneously, Skoolio reached out to me in the form of a Github issue on a personal project that had profoundly influenced the course of my life. We agreed to do an interview in late September 2025, but in the same way I am confused about the composition of Skoolio’s beatpacks, I am also confused about the structure of the conversation that follows.
The conversation has been edited for length and coherence.
Skoolio: It’s really cool talking to you cause I was wondering if there was anything written about me on the internet and I randomly found your blog.
Jameson Orvis: Oh yeah, I put that on the No Bells year end list.
Skoolio: Yeah, you understood about how beatpacks are their own thing, and I realized you were the same guy who made the SoundCloud map and I was like okay I need to talk to you about this.
When you made a Github issue I was like what the fuck! I DMed your SoundCloud but I didn’t know if you knew that was me.
Skoolio: No I didn’t know it was you… You messaged me a few days ago and I was like, ‘Who the fuck asked me if I consider this a beatpack, of course it’s a beatpack?’ Funny how we both tried to contact each other at the same time.
How would you define the beatpack community?
Skoolio: Basically, the beat community includes beatmakers who produce for other people or people who produce beats in general, which include people who make beats for the sake of making beats, creating a track without thinking about if anyone will want to use this beat. It’s interesting how it evolved over time, how there is a community that doesn’t really care about creating instrumentals for other people, it’s just about creating the beatpacks.
Who is part of the beat scene to you?
Skoolio: It’s a continuum, basically all the producers who do beatpacks or beatpack-related music on SoundCloud, some artists include me, Tekea, chenpol, yuri online/djlougy, ddertbag, mh, inno, hywel. Have you heard of Tarozan? It is kind of difficult to say, as you know.
(Laughs.) You’ve been in a lot of collectives and whatnot since the pandemic, which ones?
Skoolio: I started being part of the beat community in 2019, do you know the artist lb66? He was one of the first people I interacted with in the scene, and through him I got into a collective called innercircle, which wasn’t that big but it was interesting because there were a lot of people like kuru, midwxst, who now do different things. After innercircle I was in 7serene. It’s hard to say if it was a “digicore” group but it had a lot of defining sounds.
Before 2019, I was listening to a lot of stuff from Ivvy League, which was the defining group for the beat scene, especially Lovbug. He is the defining producer of the beatpack producer scene. He kind of defined the evolution of the producer scene, and then lunaris pushed them further. If you’re thinking about the lineage of the beatpack scene, it’s Lovbug then lunaris. Tekea also gets a lot of inspiration from lunaris. It’s kind of crazy he’s so talented but he deletes everything.
Are you still selling beats at all now?
Skoolio: Not really, it seems pretty common now because there are so many producers in general. It’s so saturated I don’t think it’s actually profitable, or I hear from people that they don’t really sell, which is different from a few years ago.
Do you know the artist Dazegxd?
Skoolio: Wait, who was Dazegxd again? Oh yeah, of course.
He’s more local to New York and I’ve seen him play here a lot. I’m not sure if he was affiliated with the same particular scene you were in, his trajectory of starting out as a producer rather than making exclusively electronic music feels kind of similar because if you are making beats and let go of the need to use them in a song, it may as well be electronic music. But you’re still presenting them in the form of beatpacks?
Skoolio: Dazegxd definitely is affiliated with the scene, he used to make lots of beats for a lot of different artists who hung around the space. I don’t think he made beatpacks themselves but he was there for sure. Beatpacks by themselves are an interesting thing, it’s not a format which has existed for very long, it’s quite a new format.
There’s probably some equivalent with beat tapes in the ‘90s and stuff, but not in the single continuous SoundCloud track format.
Skoolio: Beatpacks are similar to creating an album, EP, or compilation. But you strip away the things which are annoying to do. With beatpacks you are just creating 30-40 seconds, before the drop and after the drop, that’s it.
Just get to the good shit!
Skoolio: Exactly! I’ve thought about it being comparable to TikToks or Reels as the fastest way of transmitting an idea to another person, removing everything that doesn’t interest you. It feels like beatpacks are the result of the medium that we are using, they are the result of how SoundCloud is built. People used to create beatpacks to sell them, but it got to a point where a beatpack represents one coherent concept. It’s more efficient for presenting cool ideas in a way.
More efficient than a full album?
Skoolio: Creating a beatpack is faster than creating an album. You need to finish every track, arrange it, mix and master it, create a cover, plan the release etc. But in a beatpack you can start on a song and stop whenever you like, it’s by definition finished because that’s a beatpack. It’s a nice format for what a lot of people are struggling with, where they start a track but get bottlenecked because they get burned out by the process of creating a full track.
I feel like some artists have over-perfectionist tendencies. Like my friends are in a band, and they really stress about every song they’re making a lot. I guess the critique of what you’re doing is that you’re being lazy for not finishing the songs, but I feel like weaving together as many unfinished ideas in the way that you’re doing, is an art in and of itself, and I think it sort of challenges how people think about what it means for a song to be finished.
Skoolio: I agree. The beatpack format basically is the finished product. Of course I could take these beats and make them more finished, but the format is something quite new in a way.
It feels more raw to me sometimes, like you’re just trying shit a little bit. It feels more open to weird ideas than a lot of what I listen to now.
Skoolio: For sure. One thing about beatpacks I really like is because you don’t really have to sit through the tedious task of creating a whole album or project, you’re able to be more efficient and work with the inspiration you have right now. A lot of people they create music when they have this certain drive, but at some point it’s going to vanish, and then when it’s gone it’s difficult to continue working, so it’s best to keep one project or track to its bare minimum, and then when the inspiration is over you compile everything together and you have a full project.
Yeah right now I have to wait for it to really hit and have an idea where I have to make this right now. But yeah allowing you to capture that without stepping into a box necessarily. I feel like it also parallels… you ever read Derrida? His ideas are just a bunch of fragments, a lot of French writers, their ideas are kind of everywhere, they’re not finishing anything, but the way you weave those fragments together creates something greater than the sum of its parts.
Skoolio: This is a very valid way of doing stuff in general, because in music you do the same thing. Of course you can prepare and think about approach but the most original ideas come from being in the moment, where you don’t actively think about it, and even if you just write down the ideas that you have in your mind… you look back later and realize that all of these fragmented ideas still connect to each other in some kind of bigger way, which is quite cool.
Do you have a day job now?
Skoolio; Yeah I’m working, so doing music and stuff like this is fun times, but at the same time I have ambitions of pursuing this kind of career, not strictly in terms of being a producer or music artist but doing creative work in general, for example I’m getting into game development and I’m organizing live events with my friend Max Havé, so there are a lot of ways of doing stuff which also earns money but I’m not making music for the purpose of making money.
You’re studying computer science, or you did for a little bit?
Skoolio: Yeah I used to study computer science, but I stopped when I figured out how to code. My parents were like, ‘Don’t do that’ but I don’t really care about the degree itself. What about you?
Chemical engineering was my undergrad major. Where did you go to college? Are you from Berlin also?
Skoolio: I was born in Germany but my parents are from Korea, I went to school in Berlin.
Do you have any formative live music experiences in Berlin, are you going to shows?
Skoolio: No, it’s kind of funny cause I don’t really go out to shows, I know a lot of people who love doing that but I’m not really interested in that.
So you don’t like techno at all?
Skoolio: It’s difficult to say because on the one hand I have my Skoolio account, which is more focused on beatpacks, but I have the other djacc account, and that project is more EDM music… you told me you are also listening to budots and lento violento right?
Yeah through the djacc music actually, but I started listening to that and realized where you were drawing from a lot.
Skoolio: Yeah it’s cool to me, what I really like about lento violento and budots is that they are local-scene genres, first lento violento is more a South American genre1 and budots is Filipino, and both of them originate from Gigi d’Agostino the Italian producer.
Wait just lento violento, right?
Skoolio: I mean lento violento definitely comes from Gigi d’Agostino but I have a feeling that budots also does. It’s difficult to say, because budots I would define as Asian EDM, but I was able to search and discover a lot of mixes from budots and they have a lot of inspiration from Italo Dance and Gigi d’Agostino’s style.
I could see that, there could be some unwritten history of a budots producer finding a Gigi d’Agostino CD or something.
Skoolio: It might be wrong, but to me it feels like Gigi d’Agostino might have spawned budots and this lento violento which seems to be popular in South America and is even evolving now. Talking about budots, it feels like budots is the original Asian EDM in a way, like all this Chinese Douyin music, and to me it seems to be originating from this budots idea, which is really cool.2
Would you say the djacc project is about attempting to combine this with the style of your beatpacks?
Skoolio: The reason I started the djacc account is that I didn’t want to upload EDM music onto my Skoolio account, but I would rather have a separate account that focuses on EDM music, and I make music inspired by budots, lento violento, all this stuff.
I’m really into that shit to be honest, EP 2: egl/bjd, there are a lot of songs on that which I think are really incredible
Skoolio: It’s interesting you bring that one up, because to me this second EP I made had the least coherent vision compared to EP 3: Anthems and the one before it, to me the tracks on this EP are less coherent but I understand why you like it a lot though.
Are you familiar with any of the new hardstyle/gabber music, like this collective Helltekk? They are local to New York, but I feel like you’re hitting some of the notes of hardstyle/gabber revivalism but from totally out-of-left-field context with the Gigi d’Agostino/lento violento influence, that was crazy to me. But I see the EP 3: Anthems one with the little anime girl with curly hair on the front as more in the budots direction.
Skoolio: The anthems EP… I definitely am trying to go more this direction which is… mostly inspired by the idea that Gigi d’Agostino, it’s hard to say… it seems like he laid the foundation for this internet EDM or internet music, like the nightcore and trancey stuff. With this EP what I was trying to do is continue the idea of internet music as maybe a combination of the anime culture which the internet generally has with Gigi d’Agostino. But it’s also not like I’m sitting down and saying, “I want to mix Gigi d’Agostino and anime together.”
I hear similar-ish notes particularly in this Temperature 2 beatpack, which you label “slow trance / slow dub.” What does that mean, do you know what that means?
Skoolio: (Laughs.) It’s hard to say… labelling something as slow trance doesn’t necessarily mean that the track is trance but in a slower bpm. To me it fits because the energy is calmer and slower than trance, while having the same feeling of trance music. Slow dub is the same but in this case, I associate dub to be a specific style that Lovbug used to make, and a signature thing was that he always used the dub kick.
It makes sense when I listen, I get kind of water trance, with the Kagaya cover. I don’t know who Kagaya is but someone in the comments is like, “Thanks for showing me Kagaya.”
Skoolio: Kagaya is the guy who drew the cover and it matches the vibe.
Most of your art is just finding random pictures?
Skoolio: Yeah it’s mostly random images saved on my computer.
How many different directions do you feel yourself operating in now, what are those directions?
Skoolio: I could send you an image, kind of a mind map? I was bored and tried to see if it makes sense.
Oh I would love to see your mind map.
Wait I see the covers, oh this kind of makes sense. Wait this makes sense to me. (Laughs.)
Skoolio: Haha that’s awesome.
I actually see it. Atmos mix, a selection of skying music, these are the sparkly, sharper, but then temperature 2… these are kind of lighter, airier, less stabby and more aquatic.
Skoolio: I made this graph to see if it even makes sense. I wanted to test if some kind of archival website where you represent inspiration in this way made sense. It kind of works but at the same time it doesn’t. You are basically boiling down inspirations from a lot of different things into just whatever you define it.
Yeah just one node in a network.
Skoolio: Exactly, so it’s kind of flawed but it seems like you are understanding why I made the connections in this way.
Did you ever work with any network analysis or do any graph algorithms and shit? There’s a whole field of people who study systems of objects interacting with each other, they’ll do shit like make a network out of friends in an elementary school classroom, but the creation of networks itself is kind of an abstraction which does not map entirely onto the real thing. Also I think the scientist who did a lot of the work originating network science is personally annoying.3 And it’s like, I don’t have to respect your ideas. But also thinking about networks is too close to how my brain operates, there’s something about it that’s kind of nice to think about all this shit being connected.
This map makes perfect sense. Also, can I ask you about this anifash mix posted to Djacc, I have listened to the first track on that so many times. Do you have any thoughts about the first fans feature on SoundCloud?
Skoolio: Which one?
When you go to a track, the ranking of who has listened most often.
Skoolio: You mean like the—oh that’s you! Wait, I was wondering cause who the fuck listens to this track 3,500 times?4 Bro that’s crazy. (Laughs.)
Yeah cause the first little bit of it, I have no idea how you make that synth, like I have no idea. I just kept skipping back to the first song. I turned off that feature immediately when they rolled it out but I turned it back on to see where I’m at on this list, cause this is embarrassing. Fuck you SoundCloud for making this feature.
Skoolio: This feature is so useless I don’t understand why they made it.
It’s an easy thing to A/B test, you’re gamifying the consumption.
Skoolio: As an artist it doesn’t really change anything. What the fuck are they thinking?
If you think of people as little robots clicking buttons it makes sense. Anyway, who are you listening to right now? Do you still listen to music on SoundCloud?
Skoolio: No, but I used to. Nowadays I mostly use SoundCloud as storage to upload my unfinished tracks so I can listen to them while going about my day. I mean we can look at your map, I used to listen to SoundCloud from the very beginning, like the generation 1 people.
Do you want to just look at this thing?
Skoolio: Yeah for sure.
I feel a little weird when I look at it.
Skoolio: Why, cause it’s so old?
It’s old but I have thought way too much about this.
Skoolio: I used to listen to Hucci and a lot of people from the middle, then on and off listening to music on Spotify.
Oh yeah Hucci in the middle. Do you remember the Paulon Records producer map? That dude was just researching a lot.
Skoolio: Yeah that was wild to me.
Yeah that older shit in the middle there. I feel like the generation labels on this are kind of dumb but I was following the Paulon Records labels. (f you think about this through the lens of an A&R tool, this is kind of crazy, like there’s Yeat with 5,000 followers, a lot of very early shit.
On the nature of online community
Skoolio: The beatpack community has always been a small subgroup, a little microscene inside larger underground movements. After all, it’s just producers doing random shit. Communities start to appear, and as they reach a certain number they’re not sustainable, and I don’t know why it’s not sustainable, I was thinking it’s because it’s the nature of how people interact; at a certain point if there’s too many people it falls apart.
It might be inherent to the nature of being in an amorphous online collective. All these collectives are just a Discord that random people are joining. What does community even mean? I feel like I observe this even with large group chats of people I know locally. It seems like relationships in music are also more fragile and commodified from the start, especially when someone is trying to make it or be famous.
Skoolio: I feel like there is not really one platform or one thing which builds a community online. Musicians use SoundCloud, Instagram, Spotify, they try to be on TikTok or Reels, there is not really one dedicated space—and it seems like there is no solution for this currently. I am not sure exactly how to word it, but I can definitely feel that something is not really going right. For example, if I use SoundCloud, it is a good way for uploading and showing music but at the same time it’s not really useful for building a community. Aspects of SoundCloud are very useful but some things which are missing seem to be available other places like Discord or Instagram. One reason why I wanted to talk to you is because I wanted to ask you if you see the same thing that I am, that there seems to be something lacking in the applications people use.
I guess when you say something is missing I tie it to the general idea of cultural fragmentation and the fact there’s no change in pop music. I feel like you kind of see this manifest with the hopes of the scene peak pandemic that digicore or whatever would be the next “big thing” or that these artists would be famous, which has not happened. Does that resonate with what you mean by something missing in the way culture operates now?
Skoolio: There seems to be an issue nowadays not only in music but in general. The algorithm seems to be used in a lot of cases where it is not helping to discover new things, like the Spotify algorithm giving you music that other people have already listened to.
By default it’ll just recommend things similar to what you’re already listening to, and it’ll just become slop eventually. I think my appreciation of music comes from more than just the sound itself, like my friends also like this.
Skoolio: There seems to be an area which is missing where people don’t really realize it.
Do you mean some space free from platforms and the incentive to create music for it?
Skoolio: Let’s take SoundCloud for example. To me one thing that’s missing from SoundCloud is that there’s not a good way of seeing the history, or the connections between other people in the same scene. This is the thing you made with the map of SoundCloud which I really liked because it showed you the relationship between the artists. But one thing that is limiting about the SoundCloud map is that it’s one snapshot in time and it’s not really continuous. This part of the archival is missing in SoundCloud–well not even just SoundCloud but the whole music sphere, like Spotify, it’s missing inside the minds of other people in general.
Absolutely, I see that also as part of the death of music journalism and decline of media, there’s no real incentive to write anything down and contextualize history. A lot of artists even chafe at people writing something, but without that all you’re left with is a play button and some sounds, and why should anyone care?
There are a lot of things that are very paradoxical about streaming service economics. It is a shitty thing to use most platforms, which is a generalizable fact, but I see that as a function of the overall economic incentives of platforms. But I think platforms can be improved in some contexts. My brain goes in two ways here: one is the sort of Luddite position that all technological solutions to the problems of capitalism are dumb, and stop trying to code your way out of these problems. But I think there are still ways to make features less hostile.
Skoolio: Most of the time a company’s interests are not tied to the user’s interest, they are tied to the interests of an advertiser or a third party, so this issue of how you align a platform like SoundCloud’s incentives to the users… I am not quite sure how to solve?
Have you heard of the blog Penny Fractions?
Skoolio: No I haven’t.
It’s a blog my old coworker and friend did for a while, analyzing music industry economics and catalog acquisitions. But his overall take now is to basically give up, the only solution to streaming platforms which actually makes sense is a publicly funded streaming service—government should pay artists a minimum, and that might be the only way to align the incentives of platforms with artists. Overall, that’s where my head is at now. There is also a tendency when talking about streaming services to fantasize about a past before platforms where all artists were being paid a living wage, where music was beautiful and good, but there’s always been a large portion of art that is just funded by the government. I’ve become kind of a pessimist about the role of technology in society, but not as a blanket statement.
Skoolio: Yeah, I feel the same way about the incentives of what technology is supposed to do. Making money using music is very ass. There are two ways of approaching music: as an artform and discovering new frontiers and ideas, which I really like but it doesn’t guarantee profitability; the other is to do whatever’s most popular. That is a trap that a lot of people fall into, of settling into one thing that works. There are a lot of producers and musicians who used to be good and innovative, but they realized one thing worked and they made money from it. So instead of continuing exploration, they settled and said, “I will only do this.” Then making art just turns into work. But again, it’s difficult to say, they have to make money.
Footnotes
- Lento violento originated in Italy but the evolution of lento violento, sometimes called Slow Style, is now popular in South America, especially Ecuador.
- DJ Love is widely credited as the inventor of budots, see this Vice article for further reading. It is obviously incorrect to claim Gigi d’Agostino is the inventor of budots, but this is an interesting exercise in speculating on possible lines of more indirect aesthetic inspirations.
- This is a very reductive critique of network science as a field. But it is very annoying to me that Barabasi is able to publish bullshit like this analyzing NFT art networks in Nature of all places. Anyone who sets up a lab website where the homepage has two large buttons where you choose between “art” or “science” should have all of their grant funding revoked on the grounds of being corny. See also Lior Pachter’s wonderful takedown for a critical perspective from a computational biologist. My most cynical take may be that network analysis across disciplines may indeed be little more than a vague metaphor too wishy-washy to be analytically useful but seeming believable enough to provide confidence for academics who fancy themselves as intellectually perspicacious that they may provide a valuable contribution to a scientific subfield using network methods but on which in reality they have no business making any statement. On the other hand the amount of siloing in academia is remarkable and it’s beautiful that there could be an intellectual framework which unifies the such disparate fields in which networked systems appear. But perhaps the world has moved beyond the need for interdisciplinary scientific connections.
- During the interview I remember the first fans feature on this track saying I had given it 3.5k plays, but when I went back to take the screenshot after transcribing it now says 2.16k. Perhaps my manic scrolls back to the beginning of this pack over and over did not pass a spam filter which was only applied to my behavior retroactively.