I assume from what I’ve seen that a lot of DJs and producers do not produce the music for the full well-being of the listener. In other words, they do not produce at their highest capacity, because they feel the people will not understand it, that the people are not intelligent enough to figure it out. So they keep the sequences very simple, and they keep the structure very simple, because it’s easier to translate. And even I did this for many, many years, from the mid-90s, I assumed that by breaking the music down you speak to more people. But then I learned that we are all intelligent animals, we wouldn’t be here, we wouldn’t be able to survive if we weren’t, so there’s no reason why we should discount, and not put forth out best efforts in presenting this kind of music, with these kind of ideas. And so, this has become the type of mantra that I use before I sit down, that the idea of making something convenient is not the issue.
I really now do what I feel is probably best for the subject, not best for the listener, but best for the subject and how to describe it, to the best of my ability. And I know that at times it’s not easy for the listener to dance to, or to listen to, it’s too layered, or it’s not clear. …. That is my purest intention. And I think that in the end that will have more impact…. Once you really connect and understand it. So that changed the way I began to make music.
I began to go back to the time when Mike and I were making music and we did not know about music, and we were just imagining that Europe was this very, highly advanced electronic music place, where the people were mixing the genres together, and actually the DJ was at a disadvantage, because the people were so advanced, and the DJ would have to …. Have a big toolbox of how to modify the music, to keep up with the people. And when we came it wasn’t like that, so then we changed the way that we make music, so I said I want to go back to that way of thinking, of producing music and producing ideas, and that’s when I decided to at first…. Making the music for someone is highly intellectual, who has heard every pop song, every experimental, every John Cage, every Phillip Glass, every classical, has heard everything, so I must make the music in a way that will speak to that person and will say something new
it would be the perfect listener, and it started there, and then it moved on to making music for not even the person, but for…. Something that is not even human (!!!!!!!!). And so I thought that the only way to be able to speak, notes and chords are not enough, so the idea of using frequencies as notes and chords, they maybe travel further…. If you listen to the most recent, they’re very bleepy kind of, almost like data, like signals, so the idea of trying to dance to it had become not so important. So this is kind of where I’m headed now. If you listen to a lot of the music last night, it was that kind of computer in running mode type of situation, where it’s either computing or sending out information, and those are the kind of tracks that I’m kind of attracted to.
Well, if you work at something over and over and over, you begin to perfect it, you should be able to isolate exactly the type of sounds you want to have, and all the extra things, maybe in Waveform Transmissions 1 & 2, you put them aside. And Contact Special is a perfect example, at times I wanted the tracks to have the motion of a machine, computing, or the feel as if something is unnatural is happening, but is happening in a certain sequence, or BPM…. A lot of the album was based on the subject of three, of three pieces. And so these rotating three pieces would create a certain sort of sequence if spun. It was a complex album, the tracks were very simple, probably because I was so tired after trying to figure out what the sequences were…. That was a very hard album to compose.
(but it) didn’t do so well, we only released it in Japan, we didn’t have a chance to release it in Europe. But it was definitely an achievement and it showed me how to move on to One Man Spaceship, which was the next album..
it presents itself in a very obvious way, without the feeling that it was a mistake. And in electronic music we had kind of gotten away from this, for a long time we were in this very random type of way of producing because of the sequences that were coming out would allow you to produce at random. It would just pick notes out up of the keyboard and then you would say, ok, this is the bassline and this is the topline…. We had gotten away from specifically placing notes in particular places to create a certain type of equation that would speak. And I was doing that in contact special. If you listen to some of the tracks, the sounds fit…. I mean there are many different layers of sequences, but they fit almost like a puzzle, almost to the point you don’t really notice after a while that those are like six different keyboards interacting together, separately, creating the sequences kind of like themselves. And then I carried that over to one man spaceship, but with orchestration, string arrangements, and was trying to find a balance between this kind of machine computing data and soundscaping type of …. Sounds which felt like wallpaper, or a kind of feel that was multilayered. There were notes and there were chords, and then there was a also on that album ….. an aura, kind of, that went with the tracks that was different from anything else I had.. different from Contact Special. Even when I listen now, there’s a kind of strange way the tracks segue together, some of the tracks are unclear, some are very clear….
a project called Time Sensitive, Contact Special and One Man Spaceship were connected to a residency that I did in Japan. And we were acting out these albums in a live setting. So for instance Contact Special was about alien abductions. And every Friday night at a club called Womb, we would make a script of what would happen from the time the doors opened to the time the club ended. And every hour was divided, and a lighting scheme, a sound scheme, a special effects scheme was put in place, and at a certain point for contact special there was a point where the abduction would happen. So we had these enormous lights that would create almost like a sun, and we filled the club up with fog, then used strobes, and everybody would be totally disorientated, and that would be the abduction part. And after that, we used fans to blow the people, to blow them back away from the stage as if something was coming. And just try to make everything as crazy as we could. And One Man Spaceship was based on this idea that… it could be a positive aspect to be isolated. Because you would have to use your imagination to kind of create the world around you. So we designed the setting to emphasise that. So the DJ set up had six turntables, we created a whole spaceship out of equipment. And as the people came in we took photographs and exported the images to a VJ that immediately broadcast the images of that person on a large screen, so that happened in seconds. And we were trying to give the whole event a very personal kind of feel. And so this one man spaceship goes off on a journey, and The Sleeper Wakes is when he comes back after this long journey. So I have not been back to Japan since 2005 to DJ, and that’s because I needed to put this time in between One Man Spaceship and The Sleeper Wakes. So there a special party that’s going to happen on New Years Eve [2010] in Tokyo where I introduce the music that I’ve been making for The Sleeper Wakes, for all this time, for all these years. I’ve been making music for all this time, for that night. At that time, all of us will awake to a different situation. So that gives me an opportunity to make a really different type of music and introduce it in a context in which it might be accepted more.