Dalmatian
Finn Streuper Interview
by Owen Mahoney
22 March 2026
“What It’s Like to Be a Bat” Album Cover
I'm in school again. I finished school last year, and now I'm studying philosophy. I also work two days a week doing sound design for this graphic design company.
Why did you incorporate the oscilloscope into the visual language of the album?
I bought one recently. I did it on my laptop first. I just had an oscilloscope emulator thing. I got into it through a movie by Norman McLaren. It's called Around is Around, which is this abstract short movie from the '50s. I saw it and it has all these oscilloscope waves with pretty movements and very colorful backgrounds. It's also a 3D experiment, but I've never seen it in 3D. I wanted to recreate it. Also, my dad used to be an electrician, so he’d used one before but for a different purpose.
What DAW do you use?
FL Studio.
Wow, that is not what I thought you would say.
I always get this reaction. I would say what I make is 90% digital. Some saxophones on the album are fake, but some are recorded. They have a granular synth in FL Studio that I really love. I also like using Kontakt and Arturia libraries.
Finn Streuper Press Photo
How much did the essay “What It’s Like To Be A Bat”, by Thomas Nagel, inform the album?
The idea of the essay is that he concludes that there are parts of experience that aren't subjective and can’t be shared. Other people don't have access to them, so they won't know what it's like to be something. I was thinking, “Oh, music can be this.” With music, you feel like sometimes you know better what it's like to be something. You understand each other or you have access to this very subjective part of someone's experience. Some tracks or some ideas I had laying around for longer, from before I even thought of this idea. I collected them again and liked the structure, as it made sense to put them together. It was more of a way of structuring things that I made already.
In future projects, will you want to use readings or other forms of media as inspiration?
I like that process a lot. I like the idea of having this thing that you tie your music to. Classical music people would call it programmatic music. It's not music for itself, but to be heard alongside this other thing. I like that idea a lot because it helps me structure the project.
In the future, I’d like to try a couple other things. Right now, songs are very small. It's like the listener goes into this world for a very brief time and then goes into the next one. I'd love to make something musically that has a bit more body. I'd also love to work more with live musicians or to record more. At this moment, the music is not really performable because it's so dependent on FL Studio.
Has growing up in Amsterdam influenced your work?
Yes. I'm from a smaller town called Ede, which is an hour from Amsterdam. I think the environment forced me to do that because there’s no club to go to where they have stuff that I like. There are definitely people here like that but I just didn’t know them. When I got a bit older, like when I was 20, I did an internship at Paradiso, which is one of the better venues in Amsterdam. They had community jazz events. I also learned there that the Dutch scene for jazz was bigger and nicer than I thought it to be. I learned a lot about spiritual jazz when I was there, like Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and more.
Finn Streuper Press Photo
Follow Finn on Instagram. Listen to What It’s Like to Be a Bat on Spotify and Apple Music.