KC producer Andrew Sinclair speaks a different musical language

Andrew Sinclair is nervous. He isn’t used to being interviewed, he tells me. He taps his foot against the floor inside Westport’s Tea Drops and picks distractedly at the corner of the table.

I tell Sinclair that he has no reason to be nervous, that this is just a conversation about his background and his music. He nods his head, but he looks far from relieved. He seems wired, as though one more roar from the barista’s blender would send him bolting for the door.

“I’m more nervous talking to just one person than I am getting up in front of 400 people in a warehouse and playing music,” Sinclair says. “It’s not that I dislike people. It’s just that I’m most comfortable when I have an invisible wall between me and them.”

As a DJ, Sinclair is often separated from a mass of sweaty concertgoers by a turntable. But Sinclair is most comfortable in the producer’s seat, behind a computer, surrounded by speakers.

For those keyed in to Kansas City’s burgeoning electronic-dance-music scene, Sinclair’s name is not new. He has been with EDM label Think 2wice Records — headed up by local DJ veteran Brent Tactic and his brother, Ben Tactic — since 2011.

“He’s one of the most talented guys I think I’ve ever been around,” Brent Tactic says of Sinclair, who approached him three years ago, shyly handing over a collection of demos. Tactic immediately scooped him up. “It was one of those things where I didn’t really expect much, and I listened to it three, maybe four times in a row. I was floored.”

Sinclair has released two EPs with Think 2wice, and the more recent, last July’s Sadness, is a knockout. Tactic couldn’t agree more.

“Honestly, him in a studio is scary,” Tactic says. “All of his suggestions are good. He’s an incredibly fast worker, and he’ll do a couple of things real quick. He’ll take something that sounds like a five [-star track] and in a couple seconds make it sound like a 10.”

Sadness is a mix of three original Sinclair tracks and three remixes that runs just less than 35 minutes total. Sinclair works the deep, atmospheric beats and synths like a snake charmer — slithering around, oiling up all the moving parts for a stunning whole. He might be creating under the catchall umbrella of EDM, but what Sinclair does is far more sophisticated than basic house music.

Talking to Sinclair about what he does is confounding. A simple question — How old are you? — is answered with a soliloquy that encompasses everything from his first exposure to Daft Punk (as a kid, sneaking upstairs to watch Adult Swim) to his bouncing around from one Midwestern state to another with his parents. (“I’ve never seen an ocean, but I’ve seen all the Great Lakes.”)

He always answers the question, and there is the added benefit of his immaculate attention to detail. Sinclair, 24, explains the splintering details of his subgenre — electronic garage music, maybe — in a spiraling monologue.

“I try to take concepts and cram them down,” Sinclair says. “It’s like minimal art. If you really take techno or house as an art form, and are not just making it for the dance floor. You’re taking simple elements and trying to convey something that’s simple and clean. Like ‘Time Lapse’ [off Sadness] — that’s about driving and the experience you get, the rushes through the tunnels, the lights going by.”

On the surface, what seems like an abstract song or idea is, at least for Sinclair, connected to a very real experience. Sinclair says when he first moved back to his native Kansas City, a little more than five years ago, he would drive around to release stress, to get lost and see if he could find his way back.

For an artist whose music has no lyrics, Sinclair can be suspiciously poetic. He describes his song “Sadness” as a reflection on “the overall experience of falling apart with people” and “Orbital Frame” as “a driving, mechanical track with a little bit of heart to it.” Nerves have made Sinclair a fast talker, and these notions tumble out of him at an alarming speed. More than once he mentions that he has an ADHD brain.

“We’ll ask him about something he did to a track, and he goes into all these technical terms,” Tactic says of Sinclair. “His IQ has to be through the roof, and he’s finally getting a chance to be alive and, to use a cheesy phrase, spread his wings.”

Sinclair explains parts of his background — a sheltered childhood of small Midwestern towns and home schooling — as an excuse for his own perceived awkwardness. Music is a way of organizing his thoughts and making sense of the world around him.

“I had my issues of where I don’t fit in necessarily or I don’t communicate with people in normal ways or I’ve been afraid to communicate with people on some level,” Sinclair says. “The interesting thing about music or art in general or anything humans like to do — sex, love, music, art, drugs — they all require a degree of release or a degree of vulnerability. And for me, this [my music] is a way of expressing those things without words.”

In August, Sinclair will complete a degree with the Institute of Audio Engineering Arts at BRC Audio Productions in Kansas City, Kansas. The language of his music is something that he’s still expanding.

“I think we would have seen him blossom a lot sooner,” Tactic says. “He’s got a ways to go as far as harnessing all his talent, but when he hits a home run, it’s gonna be scary.”