Sean Twitch AMA, July 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sihCO_RN1tc

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Odnzwl1jpfxobApVDBB5jBIuvZVC6oJitMDKAV3r8Qw

("From YouTube generated captions, proofread and edited for clarity and added hyperlinks by me, u/canadian-tabernacle.")

Transcript

Part 1 of 4

[vapes]

Morning. It's afternoon. Well, it depends where you are. He’s here. Hello! Yo!

“Thanks! Acropolis?”

Yeah, that was a weird one! [laughs] I really wanted that to be better than it was, but. Weird, they have a sound limit ‘cause they're scared of you vibrating it too much. Because I think they're worried that the rocks are gonna fall apart. But never mind all the local traffic and the fact that they put the sub right next to the rocks that they were worried about? So they could have put the sub near the audience. Not so much technical issues, it was the venue just had this weird sound limit. So we had to have it really quiet and we had to have the sub mixed really low because it was tripping their meter, which was set weighted towards bass, which obviously they're just worried about vibration, so. But I think it's a lot of bureaucracy really. I think more it's to do with sound leakage and local residents and stuff like that, but they don't say that. They say it's because it's this ancient structure. So they just kind of use that to get you to play ball I think. It's my take anyway, I don't know.

Morning, morning. It's not morning here, though. So, but I guess it is in the UK. So morning! [vapes]

Yeah, I'm looking forward to Barbican. I'm a bit worried about reverb, but we'll see what it's like when we get in there. I've heard good things about it so, and they did a lot of work on it like, I think in the early 2000s to try and even out the weird, because there's beams running down it that cause weird sound issues, so. Read quite a bit about it so, but I'm reasonably confident it'll be good .

“LFO ‘94?”

Yeah, totally remember that. I think that was the, I don't know if that was the first tour we did? It was around Amber, so it was like an Amber sort of related tour. Yeah it was really good. LFO were fucking ace on that tour. They're good to hang out with as well.

“How did you get all the LIVE replays on Spotify?”

I don't even know what that means. I don't use Spotify. So, can you elaborate because I'm a bit dumb.

“How different do you expect the two sets to be at Barbican?”

I don't know because it depends, I mean I'd say pretty different because hopefully, but I think Rob [Brown]'s got a bit of work to do on his bits before I know for certain. But yeah, I'm reasonably sure it'll be quite different, like quite different. I don't know, but we'll see.

“Milano recording?”

Yeah, we got that and we got the Acropolis one, which I should say is gonna sound better actually on the recording than it would have done in the gig just because of the weird mix in the venue. So I'm glad we got that down because I don't think it was a bad gig from our end, and it sounded much better on the stage than it did out front. So that's quite weird.

“Is there a soundboard quality copy of the Quirky Brixton set?”

Not that I know of, unless somebody grabbed it. But I won't put it past them given who organised it to record it and not give us it. But, “I just don't know” is the answer. But that camcorder copy that's kicking around is actually quite good, you know, considering it's from a fucking camcorder.

“Will the live 2022 stuff sound like SIGN and PLUS?”

A bit? I guess? I mean insofar as we always sound a bit sort of similar to what we're doing in studio. But yeah, not really because I mean the tracks are quite different structurally and stuff. But some of the sounds will be the same.

demo sphere: “How did the Elephant Gear collab with Venetian Snares come about?”

Yeah. So basically, Daniel Hansson died and that was a bit of a blow for everyone because he was fucking, well, smart, and then Aaron [Funk] got in touch to say that he'd been asked to do something for that compilation, and I'd already, I had like an old track from about 2005 that I'd gave them for it because they were doing a compilation to kind of commemorate Daniel, and I had, basically yeah, I had this old track. So I gave them that, and then Aaron got in touch and said that he'd been asked but he didn't have any Elektron gear. So I just twatted out like 10 minutes of just mayhem on the Machinedrum. I think just the Machinedrum. I can't remember now. I think it was just a Machinedrum, and then sent him that and then he made a track out of it, basically. So it's more or less his track but done using a load of patterns and sounds that I made, but you know, because I wanted, I didn't want to just send him sounds because that would have been a bit weak and I know he would have just took over, being how he is. So, at least I give him patterns to cut up, but he's done a good job I reckon, and he managed to sneak something like a 303 in there anyway. So, you know.

Toxie1: I was at the acropolis, it sounded mono unless you were seated dead centre.

Yeah, it would do. That rig was wrong really for that layout of space, I think. Flying a rig at the same height as the back seats at the top, which way, you know, when you fly a rig, the speakers are [tilted down], so they're like, because a line array, it's sort of designed for a big flat space like a field or whatever, or like a stadium, so. It don’t really work when the seating's at a weird angle, ‘cause all the seats are reflecting the sound back at different [levels]. So it just scatters all the way front, and you get this weird, they should have thought about it a bit more basically, but anyway. I don't want to criticise them on a technical level. I'm sure they think they know what they're doing, so.

Laughingcock: Are those Mixlr mixes you did daily in 2012/13 or so still available for download anywhere?

No. Well, they weren't really mixes. So, I'm not, by the way, I'm not keeping the scroll going here, so I'm going to miss stuff because last time, oh fuck, I've lost the chat again. Yeah. Last time, I kept scrolling around and not being in, up-to-date and missing reactions, so. Alright, Ned Rush! Alright man! Seen some of your videos. Right, so, "How do you approach making a euph…" I've started scrolling now, so I've fucked it.

18thcenturyhookr: how do you approach making a “euphoric” sounding song?

[laughs] I don't know! I don't know what that is? Euphoric? I think I'm always fucking euphoric, so I don't know. Oh my god!

Superfluousoup: Can you describe your approach to percussion? Around the time of Exai you mentioned “not being tied to the grid anymore” and I was always curious what that meant

Yeah, because using Max, so you don't really, you're not really aware of grids, but I wasn't even when we was using [Digital Performer] because DP don’t really, DP, I mean it's probably changed a bit now because I ain't used it for 20 years or something so. But back in the day, DP was like really fucking weird with regard to grids. So it never kind of, because you probably noticed in a lot of other programs, that the visual grid that you're seeing always kind of defaults to being in groups of four or multiples of four. But DP don't do that. It's like, it's weird. It's, you don't know where you are in the grid when you're using it. It doesn't really give you any pointers. It's just a kind of A/B for whatever step size you're working at, and there's no, kind of, generally bigger lumps to view, so. But I found that really liberating. So yeah, that. But then after that, yeah, using Max, I mean you don't, you're not really thinking about grids in Max. At least I'm not. I mean I guess it depends on how you're working. Because if you're using step sequences you will be, but I'm not thinking about that at all. So yeah, but I'm still thinking in terms of like there being a rhythm, like a sort of relatable human rhythm. Not some just whatever you could just call any kind of messing around with time rhythm really, but anyway. Yeah, that's a big topic.

djyozz: Are you still keeping your eye on the graff scene?

I mean not loads, but I'm on the handstyle sub. So like, I check a lot of handstyles. These days, handstyles have just gone mad. Tagging's just gone mad, and it's much more about what I used to think it was about back in the day. Not like just a mess, but like art, you know, because I think handstyles can be art. I think that's, it's lost on a lot of people because you see a lot of tags just look shit, but depending where you live obviously. But some of them are just pure art and I think, you know, I really like that you can really get a sense of someone's flow, like the way they move through just the way that letters are drawn. So yeah, I don't know. I've kind of, I have a very vague sense of what graff's about these days, but I don't, I couldn't list like loads of artists. There's that guy. I like that guy who keeps doing the same thing in Dublin. I think he's called Aches or something, and he does that weird colour bleed thing. I like his shit because it's quite fresh but he does do the same thing all the time, so. But yeah, his shit's good. But yeah, sometimes I see people and try and remember who they are, but most of the writers that I really rate, you know, they were around back in the day. I still really rate [Too Damn Kreative]. I think they were fucking really, really good, if you know who they are.

vektrian: Can u describe the live setup of the last gigs, laptop, controllers, souncard, thx

I mean you know, two, I mean the latest ones are just two M1 Macs, Kenton Killamix controllers, two interfaces; I've got an Apogee Symphony Desktop, Rob's using the Apogee Element 24. The mixer is like a little Mackie Onyx12 channel thing just because it fits on a plane easily, and it's easier to get around. And it's replaceable if it breaks, you know, it's not, we're not relying on some esoteric mixer being found by the promoter at the last minute, so. Because that's always a consideration, you know? There's only the controllers really that be hard to source. So we often carry spares like if we're on a tour bus, we'll have spares of the controllers we’ll source.

“Will you ever release an album with vocals?”

I think we did that, but you know, I guess they're not vocals. You mean singing? Like, am I going to start singing on tracks? Because that's, yeah, that's the thing innit? Like I think, I don't want to say this but I kind of do, but you know, there's just so many electronic producers think “Yeah, I'm gonna sing on my next album!” and it's just shit because you can't sing! So, you know. I think Aaron’s are alright though. I quite like his singing now [imitates Vsnares] “La!” You know.

“How the hell were the sounds on Parhelic Triangle made?” “You also said it wasn't generative.”

Yeah, I know, I'm. Yeah so, like the main kind of gong pattern is, oh what's it called now? Is it a reyong? I can't remember what it's called. It's like a gamelan instrument. There's like a row of like little pots. Metal on suspended. So that was played live and then the percussion track, so that, I took that and then put that in Logic and then the percussion track was done with samples of, yeah, like rubber bands in a shoebox sampled on an Emu E-synth and sort of, using the filters in that a bit. And that was programmed, so what I had to do in Logic, rather than like, because I didn't, there's no flex time or anything then so, I just basically timed up the project to the live gong playing because I weren’t playing to a click or anything. So I didn't have any, so it was drifting, the timing basically. So I had to time up the Logic project to the gong track, and then I'd made the percussion stuff over the top of that. So it was kind of the time, that's why the timing slips around because it's just my shit playing of the gongs to begin with that dictated the timing on the track. So yeah, and then there was a few of a couple of MIDI parts laid over the top, but I had to detune them a bit because the gongs were a bit, well they're weirdly tuned, aren't they? So, sort of, I think it was like 9 EDO or something. Yeah, I can't remember now.

“How do you feel about making the front cover of the New York Times when SIGN was released?”

Yeah cool, you know.

“What was the sample used in all end and bladelores? At least how was that sound produced?”

Gotta ask Rob about that ‘cause he did them.

Well I got a weird, you know those stick, hoverfly things. They just sit there, like holding, no, it's some weird wasp! Fuck. Okay. Try and ignore him. Wow, he's fucking cool! He's really interested in my shoes for some reason.

“What you'd changed in your performance in an amphitheater setting versus a flatter room like a band room?”

I mean, I've only played a couple of amphitheater type settings. They are really weird spaces to play because you've got that horrible combination of the steps and the kind of circular thing, because circular venues are the fucking worst. Any round space, it's just horrible acoustically. So yeah, I don't know, there's not a lot you can do with it, you know? There's like, I mean you have to mix your drums a little bit lower. But other than that, there's not really any hard and fast rules for working with it, other than how the PA is installed and stuff like that, which isn't down to us and usually we get in there and we just, like, shouting at people for doing things wrong. So that's about all you can do, and they just like get angry with you because it's their space and their egos’ been damaged.

“What do you think of the Primavera set?

Yeah! Pretty good! Like, bit gassy in that room, but yeah, pretty good!

“At what point do you decide the hair has to go and do number one?”

[laughs] I love, yeah, like usually before now because it's getting a bit long for me but, you know, like, and it's summer, but you know. I'm just lazy and I've just been patching for weeks, so, you know, you're getting hair at the moment. Rare hair!

“Have you ever used Bitwig?”

A bit, yeah. Bitwig’s fucking sick. The only thing, I mean I'd rather use Bitwig than Ableton to be honest, but it's just ‘cause it runs Max patches in Ableton and I don't really use Ableton much. But if I need to do some, like if I've got to run a patch along, you know, in sync with what I'm doing in the DAW, I use Ableton. I've been looking at REAPER recently because it seems like you can do some pretty nice little fiddly, little bits in REAPER and I know a couple of people who use it for surround multi-channel type stuff. Yeah, it looks like quite a good program, REAPER. Bitwig, why I like Bitwig is that it's just really open-ended and modular. It's nice, you know? I also think Reason doesn't get enough shouts because the DSP in Reason is fucking amazing, I think. But I don't use it. But whenever ! hear someone using it, I'm like, “fucking hell,” it sounds good, so.

“If you’re recording, does this one recording of everything or all kit running at once?”

Yeah. I mean if you, if what you mean is like, do I ever record in stereo? Yeah, all the time basically, I prefer doing that. I prefer doing the mix as I'm working because I think it's just essential to how the track sounds. I don't record parts and then have a mixing stage because, I don't know, just know how I've grown up working basically. I prefer knowing what I'm gonna get while I'm doing it, if you know what I mean. So I don't really record parts separately. I don't enjoy doing that. And when, if I do that, it's because I've got to, you know, because maybe I've only got one of a synth or something like that, so.

“Did you miss doing just DJ sets or did you ever enjoy that actually?

Oh, weirdly phrased question! Yeah, I enjoyed DJ sets loads. Oh, you mean live DJ sets, like, yeah. Eh, yeah, It's alright. I mean I think I'd just not buy enough new records these days to make a go of it properly, and also like I'm not sure if I'm giving the audience what they want because I'm a bit self-indulgent on that tip. So I think mixing for radio, you can get away with being self-indulgent a bit easier than you can in a venue. But yeah, I might be up for doing that down the line. I got a bit rusty recently. I think that's another thing, you know, just not done it for a bit.

“In a sense, extraction out of one time live jamming sessions? You can't go back to extract layers et cetera?

Yeah yeah yeah, that. Yeah, I do that all the time basically. That's mostly what I'm doing.

[Did you sample a snooker game in Pro Radii?]

No, it's not snooker balls in Pro Radii.

“And is the vocal sample John Virgo?”

No, but good guess! [vapes]

“Do you know if David Lynch is aware of your music?”

Yes I do. I'm sure he'd love it. Yeah. So before COVID, did we got invited to play at one of his fundraiser things for his transcendental meditation organization thing? I can't remember what it's called, The Lynch Foundation, or whatever it is. Sent us a nice little letter and stuff. It was really cool. I was like “fucking hell, a letter from David Lynch, mad!” Yeah. So yeah, he's aware of us and I think he likes us enough to want us to do a gig for him so, I'd be well up for it doing it actually. It's just getting it organised now that COVID’s died off, so that might happen down the line.

Memes. Yeah, memes, you know? Memes and memes. Whatever.

“What track would you play for David Lynch?”

[laughs] What, you mean if I had him sitting in a room? I'm not sure I'd be playing tracks for him. I don't know. I'm probably, somewhat unreleased because I've got a few things that I think he might like that I've not put out, so.

“Autechre live at the Roadhouse!”

Yeah, that'll never happen because it's too fucking round. So, who wants to play in the Roadhouse, really? You know.

But I need to scroll because I'm missing you all now, and these, some of these questions are mad long.

“I was at the last London gig at Queen Elizabeth Hall. Had the impression that the PA was splitted three ways and the sound seemed to travel upwards as it got into high frequencies and downwards as a lower emphasis. It was super synesthetic. Are you using these techniques when you play live?”

I mean in so far as the venue gives us that. I mean, like in that space, obviously the bass was set lower in the space and so, if you were aware of where the bass was coming from in there which is, you know, unusual but not impossible, then you would have noticed that. But that's just to do with the way the space is set up and in general, like, bass is gonna be lower down when in the venue, and it's gonna hit you more when above the ear, innit. So, in general, than an ear hits, so, you're going to get a sense of that kind of positioning anyway, just from the space. So yeah. I guess we are using the techniques but it's more like playing an instrument, the instrument being the venue if you know what I mean.

“Have you ever thought of the purpose of life? Do you think you're fulfilling any purpose or find some reason?

Yeah, this stuff I mean, I think meaning is something that we project onto things. So, you know, you can argue that life's meaningless. But you know, I mean that's because we create meaning, I think, or we find it. But yeah, I'm not, I don't read enough philosophy to have a kind of a well-informed opinion, if you like, on thi. But I get the feeling that meaning is this is just a kind of human condition.

“Any intention to do some more of those long Twitch streams?”

Yeah, maybe. I don't know. Like, I think I got a bit bored of doing it actually, after a while, but could do some more. Yeah. It was fun to do them and it was fun like developing stuff with you lot all watching. I mean I wasn't really patching on the screen or anything, but you could probably sense that it was changing suddenly. Especially day to day because I'd have more, I'd have ideas in the shower and then just cobble some it together and then just get online with it straight away so, that aspect of it was really fun. But yeah, I sort of felt like I sort of reached a plateau in terms of my interest in it, and all that kind of stuff because I'm not naturally a visual, I don't program visuals naturally, you know? It was just something I was trying out for a bit of a laugh because I thought I might get in trouble on Twitch just playing like my weird video collection over and over, so. [laughs]

“Have you used MC Max much?”

Yeah. Quite a lot. It's really flexible and amazing basically, I really rate it. I think MC's like, yeah, just amazing, and it's kind of weird because I've been doing like massively polyphonic kind of stuff and then suddenly MC popped up and it was like, oh okay! It just gave me a whole new way of looking at it, so. Used it quite a bit on SIGN actually, which you might be able to hear.

antipopboy: Older æ tracks had more timbre and tonal variety because they came from various sources. The latest Max/Msp material feel “cut from the same fabric”

Yeah that's interesting, ‘cause I'm not sure you would be able to identify which tracks we used hardware on the recent material that we've released. But it'd be interesting if you had any guesses because, you know.

antipopboy: doesn’t that concern you?

Doesn't that concern you? Is that really what you want to ask me?

“Bonang is the gamelan instrument that you're describing “

Right. Yeah. It could be.

“Would you ever stream yourself making a patch?”

Maybe? Be a bit boring, I think, for you ‘cause I tend to, I don't start with, like, ideas. I kind of feel my way around and try lots of different things out until I hit on something that I like. So, and I'm sure that you lot in the chat be going “That's good, that's good! Stop there, that's good!” and I'd just be thinking, “Yeah, you're wrong.” So, you know.

“How easy is it to come up with new song ideas? Like how many tracks you start in a day averagely?”

I don't know. Like how many tracks do you start in a day? Not more than one usually.

“Trackpad or mouse when you do live?”

Rob's mouse, I'm a trackpad guy, but I don't really use either of much. I, most of the essential stuff is on the keyboard. So I just use like key stuff and then I'm using the controller. So, I don't really have to use the mouse much. I mean I could do, but it'd be a bit slower and weird because, obviously, you can't do two things at once all.

“All new tracks feel like parts of a bigger track. Whereas in older releases, each track sounded different.”

Hm. Yeah. I don't really understand what that means.

“Are you guys going to release some more of the old releases on vinyl?”

Yeah. Like we've got, so at the moment, we've got Confield and Draft [7.30] ready to go. I don't know if they're going to go any further than Draft. They might want to do [Untilted], this just comes from Warp really. And you know, obviously like I'm aware of the resale value and I think they are too, so. I think once the resale value for stuff goes really high, then they're worth doing because, you know, you're stopping people getting ripped off, scout and stuff, so. But otherwise I don't know if I can be bothered. Like if there's no demand for it that I can see, then I won't bother doing them. But yeah I think, it's basically Warp want to do and I think and it's because, originally when we signed to Warp, we had a kind of weird agreement that they'd keep all our stuff in print constantly because I remember that was a thing from, I'd read this in a Depeche Mode interview sometime in the 80s that they agreed with Mute to keep their stuff in print forever. I always thought that was really cool because I thought, yeah, it'd be good to just be able to do this for the rest of my life. So, I wanted to do that, but then it just got really expensive storing records. So a lot of them just fell out of print and I think Warp intended when they signed us to honour that, but they just couldn't over time, and it was only a kind of verbal agreement anyway. So, you know, them repressing stuff, it's what I'd prefer. I'd prefer the stuff to be available all the time. That's why everything's on digital now as well, so. But you know, like for me that'd be enough because I don't mind just having the music. I don't really need all the packaging and stuff, but I know some people really like to have physical items and some people prefer listening to vinyl. So, you know, I've got to keep everyone happy.

demo sphere: “Could you please explain your mention in the Metroid Prime credits?”

Well I can now because they've talked about it themselves, so even though I am violating an NDA technically by saying this, but basically we got asked to do the soundtrack by, what was that company in Austin that developed it? I can't remember the name now [Retro Studios]. But yeah, we met up with them in Austin and they were really keen and we were really keen because it was fucking Metroid, you know? Best game ever. So, and then Nintendo kind of balked it for some reason and wanted their guy to do it. So that was that really, and I think that they, I don't know how much involvement they had in the sound of it, whether they intentionally tried to make it sound a bit more us, ish? But I don't think so really. You know, I've read people saying that they think it sounds a bit like us, but I don't think it does. So, but it’s subjective that, innit, so.

“Do you have any say of the right direction on your record covers”

Yeah, a lot. Yeah. We're pretty involved in it, but it does depend. Sometimes, like I'll give Ian [Anderson] a rough idea and he'll go away and come back with something. But we'll have kind of very, we’ll make a lot of suggestions but they won't be like in terms of how it looks graphically, and other times I'll just tell him what kind of colours I'm seeing and associating it with the music and he'll come back and try and satisfy a very rough description. But I never give him a description that says, you know, this kind of shape or, but I'll kind of give him vague pointers for stuff. And Rob's the same, you know, he has, we're both quite synesthetic so we both have kind of some visual ideas usually associated with the work but they're usually like difficult to communicate and that vaguery, you know, the fact that it's so difficult to talk about makes it a bit makes it easy for Ian to find a way in and express himself and sort of, sometimes he undermines what we've said on purpose and sometimes I really like that. I really like working with Ian. He's super creative, I think. He always finds a way of slightly subverting what you've asked him for and improving it at the same time and I really rate that.

“What do you use in Max to write patterns on the grid but still having an electro vibe to it with eight times more kicks?”

Yeah, I don't know, like, what do I use in Max? All sorts of stuff you know, phasors, metronomes, delays. You know, just the usual Max stuff, you know. I kind of think in terms of events causing other events, you know, like when I used to think about rhythm, I didn't used to really like rhythms where there were a lot of overlapping sounds. I preferred it to sound like there was a kind of ball bouncing off different surfaces, so you hear it kind of moving around. [twists head] Kind of like that, you know. Does that, there’s this kid across the road that’d this thing called Matchbox Cascade. I don't know if you've ever seen that. It was like a, there's like a kind of helter skelter, not a helter skelter, what you call it, like a screw thing that would make balls go up in a tube and then they'd come out the top, and then they'd just bounce off all these little trampolines. And you could set the trampolines up around the room. So we used to just fill the room with these trampolines and have this thing going off constantly. I think that's slightly informed the way I think about rhythm because I used to really like listening to the rhythms you could make with that thing. It's fucking cool.

“Do you have any acoustic covers of your songs that you like?”

Yeah, I like all the Pink Freud stuff quite a lot actually. I really like how they develop the tracks, especially the Goz Quarter one. It's really good. So yeah, that, and, like, occasionally I find people on YouTube, there was a guy, fucking hell, there's one guy, I can't remember his name now. [Shigaraki] I ended up finding him on Bandcamp, but he was basically, he's like a fretless bass player and he was playing the bass along with one of the AE_LIVE things. Which I just think is mad because there's no sequence for that anywhere. It's just all generated, but he's playing it, like verbatim. He'd learned like about a minute of it and he was just playing it. He's somewhere on YouTube if you look for it. Can't remember his name. He's got this amazing bass. Like the sound of his bass is fucking beautiful. It's so felty and kind of velvety. Beautiful sound, and it's really good because it sort of really mirrors the synth that's doing the bass part on the track. So yeah, sometimes I see stuff like that and I'm just like “wow, fuck,” you know? That's just crazy dedication that, but you know. But yeah, it's often, and I remember seeing a guy doing Eggshell with like a guitar and a looper pedal. I quite like that as well. Then he ended up sounding like some kind of early 90s kind of grunge thing and I was like wow, this is weird, we're like a, sort of, because I didn't even realise how post-rock them melodies are on that because I don't listen to a lot of that kind of stuff. But you know, hearing it played on a guitar it suddenly made sense. I was like “wow, it’s really American, that melody.” I've never really thought about that because I don't really know what I'm doing musically, or I didn't in ‘93, you know.

“Relatively recent snapshots of your Max patches just to get a sense of their general appearance and tidiness?”

[laughs] Yeah, I like this. Yeah. It's funny, this thing of like people's patch styles, you know? Like, I look at Mark Fell’s patches, and they're like, so different to the way I patch visually, and sort of the whole vibe of it and everything. Yeah, I might do. I mean, you know, I don't know what to, what I'd do it with, but yeah.

bladelores question. Yeah, I just said ask Rob because, you know, because it's Rob and he did it.

wattle_ebby: have you tried or used other visual programming languages besides maxmsp for music creation?

I mean, I don't know. Yeah, I've used other Max type things, so like Turbosynth. I've used Reaktor a little bit, but I don't really, I didn't really get along with it. [vape]

“How did you make the rolling pitch effect of the cowbell in C/Pach, Ensoniq EPS-16+?”

Yeah, it's just sampled on the EPS. I think there was a reverb on the sample, and then we had to loop in the EPS, extending that and then it's just pitch bent, basically.

My favourite MCs at the moment? I'm always getting asked that. I mean just the usual like Roc [Marciano], KA, Conway, Westside [Gunn], I still really rate Kool Keith. I can't not rate him really, you know. He's not always good these days, but when he is, he's fucking really good. Jean Grae, you know, love Jean Grae. Funny as fuck. Yeah, don't know. Who have I heard recently? Like that ANKHLEJOHN guy, I quite like him. He's funny to me, you know. It's like so fucked up it becomes like it's like pure comedy to me, you know. KA, I rate. Willie the Kid, I like. Earl Sweatshirt, you know, I know it's [Odd Future], but he's the best one, and I still rate Tyler [the Creator], you know. I know a lot of people don't like Tyler for fucking weird reasons, but I rate Tyler. Tyler's good! You should rate Tyler.

“Favourite place to go in Norway?”

I like the South Coast at the moment because it's summer and the rocks are really round and beautiful. So, I'm going to say that because it's not what most people would say, is it, so. But I haven't been up north yet and I keep getting told to. So I'm going to do it at some point because I want to see the northern lights.

“Older AE tracks,” this guy again! “Older AE tracks had more timbral and tonal variety because they came from various sources and different hardware. The latest Max/MSP material, while prolific, feels cut from the same fabric. Isn't that the confinements of the system?”

God that's such a big question. Yeah, I mean it'd be interesting to know which tracks you think aren't made in Max/MSP that we've released recently. Can you tell me which ones you think they are or is it just that our kind of ability to nail what we're into aesthetically has improved? Because I think like, it's easy back in the day to hear a track that was made on an [Yamaha] RY30 because there's only so much you can do with it. But you can do more with it than you can do with the [Roland] R8, you know? So I think it's actually the confinements of the hardware that lead to the tracks having more variation and that variation isn't necessarily what I would have done if I had more control. That would have been more homogenetic, if you like. So yeah, that's how I'd respond to that. I hope you understand my answer there, because I do mean it.

“What's your approach to DJing?”

Just playing shit I like, which isn't really what you're supposed to do, is it? You know, you're supposed to play to the audience, but yeah. I'm not really very good at doing that. I tend to just do what I'm into. So, and hope that there's enough people there who are into it and stuff, so.

“How did the SOPHIE remix come about?”

We got asked basically. And yeah, that was it really. We just got asked and then sent loads of stuff. I've still got all the parts for Product. Got like the whole album in parts, so I could do more of them if I wanted to, which, I don't know, I might do at some point because I just picked out bits, because it was the first thing I heard by her that I really rated. So, but yeah, I've got, there's a few others that I really like from Product that I might be remixing at some point, but if I do it, it'll just be for the crack really. It's not, you know, there's no need for it.

mrnoah: “I respect that.”

Yeah. You're right, I’ll accept this, this is correct. Don't even bother.

“How do you normally pass your time outside the studio?”

Well, I mean it, outside the studio? I'm never really outside the studio because I've always got my fucking laptop with me. So if I feel like just doing something, I'll do it. So there is no outside the studio anymore. Like, I could have my laptop here and be doing tunes there. Although I won't be able to talk to you lot, so.

pupp3tmaster_VER10: what is the sample on Pro radii? you said it wasn’t a football or soccer sample so what is it 🤔

I'm not telling you. [laughs] You're supposed to figure it out. It's no fun if I tell you, is it? Fucking, where's the fun in that?

pupp3tmaster_VER10: also am I tripping or is there a voice in the second half of the track saying the song’s name, thx!

Yeah, you're tripping. Or maybe there is!

“You mentioned using Synplant on a track. Do you have any other notable digital synths or effects used?”

Yeah, I only used Synplant on a couple of tracks. So I was trying to figure out what they were. I think one of them's not actually released, and then there's that ts1a thing, I think it might be on that. No, because it's, I was using FS1R for a lot of that kind of wacky FM stuff back then and all, and then Synplant came out and I did check it out and use it on a couple of things. But it gets old quick, you know, because it does what it does and then you know you're just like, yeah, okay. It does that. So it's a bit of a gimmick synth, but I do kind of like those kind of synths in the short term, you know? So I will download stuff and check it out for a minute, but they don't end up being like part of the toolset. Like I haven't had Synplant for 10 years at least, so. Zebra was a good one. I'd say Zebra. I still really rate Zebra and it's old as fuck now. But it was just a really good modular VST thing for a while. You know, generally the more flexible they are, the more I’m into them, and FM7 and FM8 just ‘cause they're good for doing DX stuff, but they're like so flexible and fast, you know, with the patch thing. It's a really good interpretation of Yamaha FM, I think. It's one of the best things Native [Instruments] have done. It's like, because it's really kind of inspired, so I really rate FM7 and FM8. I think they're really good. They're, yeah, they're my favourite Native things.

But yeah, I don't really check out a lot of VSTs now. I'm a bit shit because I'm just using Max for everything. So if I want to do something, I'll try and figure out how to do it in there and I don't run any Audio Units or VSTs in Max. That's just a point of principle really, because there are some things where you think it would be easier to run a VST and quite often I'll find that my versions of them are better. And yeah, there's a lot of things that I would just wouldn't be able to run like synths and stuff like that, it wouldn't work really because of the way our synths need to know in advance what the duration of the note is, and our sequencers aren't outputting no offs. They're just outputting durations. So there's a kind of limit in terms of how much stuff we can use and know, least so far with the way MIDI works. A lot, I'd say most Audio Units and VSTs don't. Effects units don't accept note information and that's really important to us that they can do that, so. Because it's weird, because like some MIDI stuff can do it like the Quadraverb could do that. It could receive MIDI note info and do things with it. But, you know, it's weird that you can't do it with Audio Units and VSTs and that. But you know, so all our stuff does that and we kind of rely on it a lot because I think it's important. so. Yeah, there's some hard limits on us using them, but also just because I don't, I'd rather build the thing and have my own version of it because then I can probably improve on a commercial one.

“What keeps you making music?”

I don't know. Like honestly, like I'd love to know what, why I want to keep doing it, but I just do, so. I think if I got bored with it, I'd stop because it is kind of compulsive for me to make music. I'm not, you know, I don't really have a reason for doing it other than doing it and I'm pretty sure if I had to get a shit job, if I stopped earning money off it, I'd still be doing music all the time, anyway, my spare time, because that's, you know, I was doing it for five years before we started making any money off it, and before that I was doing mixing for a few years, so. You know, for me, sitting in my room with my headphones on, kind of obsessively working on one little bit of audio, it’s just like, it's just so normal. It's like I've been doing it since I was a kid, so, you know.

“There's one I have called Convoluter which simulates a crusty voice call effect, which makes for a nice audio design.”

Okay.

“Do both of you run the same software at your live shows?”

Yeah. So like, sort of. I mean my version's a bit different to Rob’s now. When we started out using this setup, it was pretty much the same. But Rob started adding features to his, and some of them I didn't want to add to mine becauseIi felt like that they were a little bit, not necessarily, I wouldn't say unnecessary but they were just, you know, the trade-off between, kind of, the feature working and it causing too much of a CPU spike. Wasn't worth it to me. So mine's a little bit more limited and bare bones than his. And as time's gone on, he's just become a bit more mutant. So it's quite a different setup now, and when I send him updated versions, he has to kind of somehow fit them into his system, which is a lot of work for him. So, you know, I just keep mine as bare as I can, and I'm always trying to make it more efficient, and he's always trying to add more features. So it's kind of, I think we kind of balance each other out in some weird way.

“Last time, you described your library, because having modules that would interconnect. Can you describe some of the essential modules?”

Not quickly. I mean that, it's sort of hard to describe things because you sort of have to look at the patch really. I mean some of them I can use very, kind of, vague descriptors. Like, I could say, you know, a spectral compressor, and you would know what that was. But it wouldn't, you know, a lot of them, you can't really describe in that sense because there's no precedent for them, because they're weird. I don't know really. I wouldn't know where to start with it. Trying to think of one that's easy to describe, you know what I mean? I mean the ones that are easy to describe already kind of does, there's some kind of [version], there'd be something for you to refer to, so it wouldn't, almost wouldn't be worth telling you about them, if you know what I mean. Like if I say a monosynth with a 303 type filter, you know, you're gonna know what that is. So that's just, you know, what's the point of me even telling you about it? But yeah, that would be something that's in there. But the more esoteric, interesting things that just, I don't really have descriptions for because they don't really exist outside the setup, so. That's a hard question to answer, really, in here.

“David Lynch is aware of you?”

Yeah. He's aware of everyone though, let's be honest. He probably watches you when you're sleeping through meditation, you know what I mean? He has an out-of-body experience. He can go anywhere, David Lynch. He can be anywhere and everywhere.

“You describe the latest track you've been working on through onomatopoeia or whatever?”

Erm. [*click hum*] That's as far as I'm gonna go with that. [*click hum*].

“Do you have any preference with trackers or do you have any recordings using them with AE or solo?

Yeah! There's a few tracker tunes in that last leak, actually. Quite a few of them are tracker tunes. Mostly Renoise. Bits Sunbox. Never used MadTracker, ProTracker, OpenMPT, never used any of them. Never had an Amiga. It's not really my thing, trackers, but I've fucked with them a bit. But I've got mates who are really, really into them and live for it. So, you know, and I like the sound of them but I just get a bit bored with a list and I think it, there's a thing of like making your tracks incrementally more and more perfect until they've done that I find a little bit, just doesn't work for me. I don't think like that.

“You seem like a really nice guy!

Thank you, but I'm not really. Well I suppose I am, a bit. I don't know? Fucking hell, don't say stuff like that!

“Can we get a peek into your studio?”

No, because I'm not there. I'm in Norway. Well, I do have a studio here, but it's not really a studio. It's just a room with a desk, two speakers and a laptop and a Kenton. So it's basically like what you'd see on stage for me, and nothing else, so. And an interface obviously because, you know, you need that and headphones.

“Do you choose randomness in your tracks or are your processes always deterministic?”

Here's a question. Fucking hell, randomness. Yeah, so like I tried to avoid randomness for quite a while, and then I kind of embraced it but in a very different way to just using the random object. Everything's deterministic now. Everything's algorithm, so I have some, I have a thing that up works, so it's got the same inlets and outlets as a, as like the random object, but it doesn't behave in a random way. It's chaos stuff and it's really controllable and you can seed it in very specific ways. So it's not quite random, but it can give me, if I need something that feels random, I can make it, I can get it into a state where it'll give me something that feels random but I know it isn't. So yeah, I'm kind of a bit funny about randomness in general, but I think it can be good because I think, quite often you know, if you generate like 20 random things and you pick one and then you breed it with another thing and then you, kind of, create spawn from that, you can end up in territories and with results that are really interesting and good aesthetically, and randomness is quite powerful in that sense. But I think it just all depends on application and taste. So, I don't like the idea of just randomly generating a track and saying “there, it's done,” you know? That's not, I can't do that. I know there is people who do that, but it's just not for me. So, I used to be a lot more fiery about this topic than I am these days, because I can understand why, what the strengths are in noise, if you like. But you know, you have to direct it and you have to kind of, be very aware of what it's doing and stuff. So, I have a lot of respect for noise these days.

“What kind of person are you? How do you perceive yourself?“

“What kind of person are you,” I don't fucking know, like “what kind of person are you?" “Well, I'm this kind of person.” Yeah, I don't do that Twitter bio shit. So no, basically.

“How do you reckon you changed over the years?”

I'm older. Probably a bit smarter hopefully, and maybe a bit slower as well? If that makes sense.

[laughs] Is that true about [Volodymyr] Zelenskiy? Oh no, I feel sorry for him. But at the same time, you know, you understand where he's coming from, don't you, you know what I mean? So, he just means well, you know. Don't take it personally.

[Angelo] Badalamenti? I love Badalamenti. It's so kind of childlike. Yeah, his stuff's great. I love the Italian approach to, kind of, I don't even know if he's really Italian. Isn’t his real name Bedella or something like that?

“Speaking about working outside the grid, what are your thoughts in Tidal Cycle?”

Yeah nice, I like Tidal Cycle. I think it's a quite smart approach to pattern generation. It don’t really play nice with our stuff because of the note on/note off thing. But yeah, it's good. Rated, this interesting approach. Although I won't call it outside the grid necessarily. It's just application of differently sized grids, isn't it?

“How would you answer ‘What is the meaning of life?’”

Yeah, I wouldn't answer that.

“Outh9X is one of the most beautiful things.”

Oh thanks. I'm sorry, why am I just reading out compliments? That's no good, is it?

“What's your weakness?”

My weakness? Meltdowns when people are lying about stuff. Definitely. So now I've told you that, you're gonna just start lying about stuff, aren't you, to trigger me. Which will be really horrible and bullying, but you know, I'm ready for it.

“Is Skam going to keep releasing music?”

Ask Andy [Maddocks] about that. I expect so because knowing Andy, he's just having a bit of a rest. But I don't know, you know? I never know where he's at with stuff. Yeah, you need to ask him really, not me.

“Autechre live in Melbourne 2018 [at the Croxton] was kind of like the Roadhouse as a venue.”

Yeah! Interesting.

“Do you ever feel like cranking out 20 hours of generative music and then just bleeding it out over a group of releases?”

Yeah. Eh. It's a bit unfulfilling, innit? So.

“I saw you said you don't use step sequencers. So, how do you approach your sequencing?”

I just kind of build a thing that makes it, that makes a nice pattern and then when it starts getting a bit funky, I'll start recording it. But I don't know, really, it's just a bit weird, innit, these questions, because it's sort of, it's too open-ended and I have so many different things I try out all the time that, you know, how I approach my sequencing, it's not really, I can't answer that succinctly anymore. There was probably a time when I thought I'd be able to do that, but I can't now. I just make too many different things. I don't really have an approach, you know. I don't think I could have been doing it this long if I'd have had an approach. Rob doesn't either. We have habits, I suppose, because everyone does, but I'm not really a creature of habit, if you know what I mean. I don't kind of, I don't know. I think it's weird when people just keep delivering the same thing over and over. I get bored with artists who do that so, and I'd get bored of myself if I did it as well so.

“Any more tracks or albums similar to Untilted in the works?”

I don't really know. [vapes] It was a very different time in my life. I don't want to talk about the emotional stuff I was dealing with at the time, but it was, I was in a really different place. And also like, you know, just the technology was different. My approach to using it was different. My feelings about aesthetics in general were different. So I doubt it, but it's not impossible that I might start to re-explore some of the same ideas. Because I do have things that I like that are kind of base things, you know, that I'll kind of revert to. So yeah, maybe.

“Have you seen the AE: In the Studio spoof someone's put on YouTube recently?”

Yeah, I have seen that, yeah. It's really accurate. It's exactly what we’re like. So that was a bit scary because I think they might be spying on us, you know? I think they've set up cameras around the farm and stuff “Are you imagining things when making music? It reminded me of Russ Abbot as well. Which was great because, you know, I love nostalgia.

“Are you imagining things when making up music or are you just focused on the content technically?”

Yeah, a bit both really. I kind of, the content, it sort of, I can sort of see it and feel it and it triggers things and memories and thoughts and associations and weird images and, but also, you know, there's the sort of synesthetic thing going on. So I can kind of, yeah, I don't know. I have a lot of stuff going on in my head when I'm doing tracks, you know. It sort of takes me off into some weird sort of internal spaces, I don't know.

“It's interesting that there's no end product to the Twitch streams. How in the moment it all was.”

Yeah. Yeah, I mean my life in the studio is a lot like those Twitch streams. So it'll just be like one patch jamming out all day while I'm just tweaking it, and I love the kind of, the never complete feeling. But at the same time it's a bit, you got to be careful with that, you know. You have to kind of capture things sometimes, and then review them, and they quite often sound different when you listen back. So, but yeah, I like the kind of impermanence and the sort of, whatever it is, drifting thing, you know?

“How did the Skeng remix come about?”

I just got asked by [Kevin Martin] ‘cause he'd heard me playing bits of Pressure on a mix that I'd done, and I think he was a bit surprised that we liked Pressure, and I really like Pressure. It's one of my favourite things he's done, which is a shit thing to say, I know, because you don't want to just rate someone's first album, but I really liked it. I loved the kind of emptiness of it and how ghostly it is. So yeah, and I was kind of, he got in touch and I was like “Yeah man, I fucking love that. It’s an amazing album. It's serious.” And then he's like “oh, do you want to do a remix?” So, and then, I hadn't actually heard Skeng because I weren't keeping up with stuff much. And then so I'd listen through all the tracks on the album and I went “oh yeah, that one,” and I hadn't realised it was as big a tune as it was. And then, and he was like “Oh, are you sure? Because we've had a Kode9 mix of that already and don't you want to do one of the other ones?” And I was like “no, that's the one I want to do,” because I was like, thinking to myself “No, that's the best track on there.” I want to do that, so. Yeah, that's how that came about. I don't know.

Do I like a lot of the Bug stuff? Yeah, I mean like, I like it when it's not that distorted and kind of screamy. But I also like that side of his stuff, and I feel like that's where he is naturally, so. It's a weird one with him. But yeah, I like some of his really kind of drawn out ambienty, sort of weird drony, but I don't know what to call them. But you know what I mean, them things. But, yeah I don't know. I sort of, I think I prefer the more, kind of like, I think Pressure’s my favourite thing he’s done, actually, because it's quite bold. As a statement, you know.

“Anyone recording this talk, love…“

Blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah.

“Do you use much more multiband compression?”

No. What I tend to do, I don't really like multiband compression much and I'll only use it if I absolutely fucking have to because something's impossible to control, and I don't like the way it fucks phase. I don't like things where the EQ is changing too much, but I will use sidechain EQ compression quite a lot. So, where I've got the sidechain going through a brutal EQ, and I'm only compressing it when that part of the spectrum is too loud, but I'm compressing the whole thing. So I think that sounds a lot nicer on individual parts. You can even do it on full tracks and it'll give you a different feel, and a lot of my compressors have these, the ones I've done in MSP, have these sort of, have built in kind of a similar, not quite Fletcher-Munson, but like a kind of more similar, it's got,  there's like a bump at 3k and then a slightly bigger bump around 6k and that's variable. So you can kind of, you've automatically got a kind of ear based compression thing built into the compressor. There's a sort of separate knob, and some of them just got it built in by default, so. And I find that compressors where it slightly takes into account what the ear is hearing actually sound better. So if that makes any sense, if you know how to implement something similar to that. That's quite an effective strategy, and just even just having a comp, like when you do set up a compressor, just put in a little bump around 3k on the side chain can be useful. Just as a default setting because you'll find that it'll kind of get rid of some of the more harsh elements of the sounds, you know, without fucking the sound up too much.

“What do you think of the two-guy theory of electronic music?”

I don't really know. I think like some people work really well as solo artists, and I think from a marketing perspective, being a solo artist is a lot easier because you can play the kind of genius card. So while, the kind of role, rogue, kind of different person, you know? You can be a snowflake. Special snowflake if you're like one person. You can't really do that if you're two people. You can't have two geniuses. It doesn't really work like that, does it? So, but I think from a tracking perspective, it's definitely easier for me because, you know, I often, I'm not sure if things are good or not. Like I'll think that they're really good, but I'm not sure how the rest of the world's going to react and it helps having Rob around because he can sort of tell me whether or not they're shit and vice versa. I think it's good having another person to bounce stuff off because I figure if I like it and he likes it, there's probably some number of people who would like it, and so it's worth releasing. If I like it a lot and he doesn't like it, then I’ll have doubts because I trust his opinion because I know him really well, and I only really can trust opinions of people who I know because I kind of know what their parameters are, and you know, maybe I like their taste. I agree with their taste and their decisions a lot of the time. So even though they might be a bit different to me, I kind of, the fact that I know them helps me to understand their opinion. And like my other mates, it's the same sort of thing. If I play a track to Ged [O'Hara] and he likes it, then I'll know that I had satisfied that, and that I'd managed to communicate to that type of person, you know what I mean? So whereas opinions of people I don't know, I just don't know what to do with it, you know. It's just like if I don't know you, then I don't really know what, how to understand your opinion, so.

“There's a lot of apparent warmth in SIGN compared to the previous recent albums. Any particular reason?”

Don't know? Like maybe just the tech, because there's a lot of MC stuff used inside, so. And a lot of, kind of, a lot of the sounds were quite thick as a result of that. So that might be it.

“I remember reading that you are just using Max, Gen and some C externals. What kind of things were necessary to work code into externals as opposed to regular patches?”

Well originally, like I don't use any C externals anymore. I used to, but I've redone all of that stuff in Gen now, so. But anything that required single sample delay, basically, originally, like filters and stuff, because I didn't really know, in feedback FM, you know, I didn't really know how to do that. Well, you couldn't do it with vectors. So basically, I had to do that. But there were real basic things, you know, just a few FM algorithms and a few filters. Just basic stuff, and I didn't really do any oscillators, but I wanted to do oscillators in C, but I wasn't quite up to it. And then, but I've got good enough to do them now, so. I use Gen for them though. I just used GenExpr, so yeah. Oscillators, you know, anti-aliasing oscillators, which took me a bit to figure out, actually. Yeah, those things. Stuff like that, you know.

“What's your favourite type of water?”

What does that mean, type of water? Is that, is it a joke or is it about bottled water? Or is it about actual types of water on the chemical level? Because I, kind of, I mean my chemistry stops at GCSE level, so I could ask my girlfriend. She studied organic chemistry.

“Thai music is macrotonal, you know.”

Who said what? [laughs] Who said that to me? Thai music. I don't know anything about Thai music.

“Do you find yourself romantic and if so, in what way?”

Romantic? Romance? Romantic? I don't know. That's one of those fucking words, right, that's a little bit too vague. Like I'm not sure what meaning of the word you mean when you ask the question, and I'm not sure how to answer it, you know? Do, you know, do you mean it from the point of view as sentimental, or do you mean that I like to just talk bullshit? I can't tell, are they the same thing? Why do we have the same word for both of those things? That's pretty weird, right?

“How do you think about tuning systems? Good with 12-TET EDO or…?”

I answered this in the last one, so. But yeah, you, the system can run with any arbitrary number EDO where you can mix and match EDOs in the same scales, so, and then you can just detune them arbitrarily however you like, beyond that. So yeah, I use all kinds of combinations of EDOs. “Would you ever do tracks on just hardware?” But you know, I like 19 and I like 31 EDOs because they're interesting, and they're sort of very similar to 12-TET in places. So, you know, you can kind of do other things with the weird overlaps that you find within them, so. But I'm sure you know that already if you're asking the question.

“Do you ever do tracks on just hardware again?”

Maybe? I don't know, like, I don't really, I don't think “I'm gonna do a hardware track” or “I'm gonna do a software track.” I don't think like that. I think this whole hardware versus software thing is a bit strange. You know, so much hardware is digital anyway, and so many of the techniques that you do in software is derived from analog techniques, so, there are, you know, there are areas where you can only do it one way or another way, right. You know, like edge cases, which we can go off on one getting anal about, but I don't really find that very interesting personally. I'm more interested in what you can do, like what I can do. It's like if you've got a synth, you know, you've got one synth on you, but if you've got, if you're using software, you can have like 20 of them and then you can have, you can modify them all to be a little bit different to each other. You know, that, I find that more interesting personally just from a creative standpoint. So I guess I'd probably stick to using software for a while. I don't really see the benefits in hardware because hardware is like, basically like software where you can't change anything apart from, obviously you can build your own hardware, but again with a lot of analog stuff, it gets very time consuming if you want to build something that's got loads of voices or that's got a lot of flexibility. But not impossible and obviously if you've got unlimited funds, it can just be something where you just amass loads and loads and loads of it. But again, working with it can be quite slow as well. And then you have problems with stability and patch recall and these kind of things, so. But yeah, I guess unlimited funds would mean that you could do it, but you might, it might still be quite slow to work with, so I don't know. I like just having a laptop and low power consumption. Just having it in my bag and getting on planes without trucks full of gear and stuff like that, so.

“Do you see a value in Ambisonics, Dolby Atmos, binaural and such complex space things?”

Well they're all different and like, I can answer questions on each one of them individually if you like. But I don't think of it as a gimmick, no. I think that there are good strong kind of mathematical reasons why working with several speakers can be better in terms of determining source position, even though you've only got two ears and even though you can do it in theory, two speakers. As soon as you put them in a real space, where you've got walls and stuff like that, source location identification becomes harder if you've only got two speakers than it is if you've got several speakers and that's for reasons I don't fully understand. I've just looked at studies on it, so yeah. I mean, there are reasons why you might want to use several speakers, but also you can play around with it a lot, you know. But I think the most interesting version of those types of technology is probably wave field synthesis, but I'm not sure that there are that many people who've taken advantage of it yet, so, and I don't see that as a gimmick at all. I think it's really interesting.

“Any health issues considering the long time spent sitting in a studio?”

Probably. Yeah. I don't think that health issues are caused by sitting in the studio though, but I don't know, actually. I hadn't really thought about it enough, you know? I mean, I suppose the great thing about laptops is you can use them anywhere, right? So you're not really sitting in a studio all the time, and I have a chair that's really adjustable. I think that helps having a chair where you can sit in a number of different positions and you're not, you know, having your desk at the right height, and having your screen in the right position so you're not over extended and that your arms are in the right position and all. That helps a lot. So, but you know, you can get it wrong and I'm sure a lot of musicians do. I mean I see a lot of people's setups and I'm thinking “Wow, your back is going to hurt in 10 years.” But you know, it's a lot easier if you're just using a computer obviously.

Right, I need a piss, so I'll be back at some point. Wait, how do you get this thing to stop?

Part 2 of 4

Ah, that's better! Relief! Yeah. [vapes]

“Are you getting that Twitch money?”

Probably, eventually, yeah. I think they only send you a check when you've got, like, when you've earned 100 quid or something. So I'm nowhere near that. So, you know, I'm not really relying on subscriber income here. But you know, they sent me an affiliate link up after I'd done the long streams and I thought “yeah, fuck it.” So, you never know. Things might get really weird. I might have to turn into, like, a gaming streamer. Get, you know, like a RECARO chair and all that and a fucking stupidly expensive pointless microphone

“Tinnitus is destroying my ability to make music. Is it something you ever deal with?”

Yeah, it comes and goes though. Like actually, like good strategies for dealing with tinnitus that I've found. Listen, it's gonna sound totally, this is gonna sound really pretentious but it does work, right, it's listening to Computer World by Kraftwerk on decent speakers and something about those little zap sounds, the high [frequency] sound, [*the zapping*], them sounds, cleans my ears out, cleans my ear brain out. But apparently tinnitus is like neural feedback loop. so obviously like, from how I understand it, and I might be wrong about this because it's not my field obviously, but it's the, you know, certain hairs in your ears, certain cells die off. So that part of the spectrum drops out and then the feedback loops gets just, gets, occurs in the brain because the brain is trying really hard to amplify that frequency and it tries so hard that I think it resonates itself into self-oscillation. But I found that not concentrating on it makes it go away, which kind of makes sense if you think about it, because I think it's a tension that drives the internal brain amplification of that part of the spectrum. So, but you know, don't listen to me. I'm not a fucking scientist, so I don't know. But yeah, Kraftwerk Computer World, really helps me for some reason. Yeah, but you know, it's just nice to listen to anyway innit, you know. Maybe it's just that I really like listening to it. So I'm listening to it in a certain way. Don't know.

“How'd you deal with preset management live?”

It's all pattr, so like, yeah it's all pattr now. It used to be pattr and then presets. So the global stuff was a pattr and then the stuff in the modules was presets, but it got too unwieldy. I had to build, rebuild it all with pattr. Plus I like being able to morph them because  morphing is just tons of fun, innit? So, see it's all pattr and then I built a thing that where I can name them. So there's like a little box, you just type the name in and click enter and it just saves it with that name. So then I have like a new menu with all the names in. I found that loads easier to work with than numbers. So yeah, it's pattr all the way down, but it's pattr, it's like a global pattr and then each module has its own pattrs because the modules are loaded dynamically. I couldn't have pattr, the global pattr reaching into the modules, if you know what I mean. so they all have to have their own pattr storage in each module. But that's okay, you know?

What games would I stream? I don't know, you know. It'd probably just be me playing Centipede for like two hours or something like that, which I'm sure it would drive everyone mental. I don't know why. I just really like these kind of repetitive groove games, you know, you're just in a groove with it and you're just kind of doing a thing, but there's just this constant variation. I like Centipede. It's never the same game twice, you know. You can say that from most games really. kind of, but you know. I don't know why Centipede’s my favourite game ever. It's just so good.

“Hot tub stream?”

Yeah, that's not gonna happen. Partly because I don't own a hot tub, but also because why? Why would you? Why would you stream yourself in a hot tub with something like champagne and rack out a few lines of baking soda?

“This is bordering on podcast. Half of what's on Twitch already.”

Is it? Does that mean I shouldn't be doing it? I don't know!

“Do you have the Analord series on vinyl?”

Uh, no. I've got digital, so. [laughs] I keep losing the chat. Alright. I'm just looking for interesting questions now.

“Do you want my Machinedrum? I don't use it.”

Don't give it to me! Fucking, give it to one of these buds in the chat if you're serious which, you know, you probably know, are you? So, just making a point. Yeah, I actually lent mine out to Mike, but I just got a bit, I've reached a bit of a ceiling with it. I was a bit amazed when the Machinedrum came out because I was like wow, this is like loads of techniques that we used to use on using different hardware. Like obscure combinations of hardware that other people weren't using, but all together in like a box. It was almost like somebody had listened to our stuff and then just made a box so that you could generate what we did. So I was quite into it when it first came out. But it, you know, once I've kind of done everything that you could do with it, I just thought yeah, I've done that now. But yeah, I rate them though. I think they're good, and I like, I really like that kind of kick drum modeling, whatever the physmod kick drum thing that's in there. It's just so nice. Sometimes it sounds like a bit like a, you know, like when you tap a beach ball and it's all like [*thuding*]. That sound. I love that sound because I don't know how they've done that exactly. It's different to my model kicks. Mine are just membranes. So they sound a bit, you know, they sound a bit more like an actual kick drum. But theirs’ fucking well strange.

“Have you ever heard the Hum?”

Yeah, I've heard of the Hum, and like I've seen people talking about it. The one I really liked was that sky trumpets thing. I don't know, I'm pretty sure it's fake because it's so fucking extreme, but it's mad sounding. It sounds like metal grating. It's like a big metal plate kind of being dragged across the floor or something, but it's got this weird like, yeah, I love the sound of it, and I love it, like whoever's done, if it is fake, whoever's done it, it's pretty good with the reverb and stuff because it does sound a little bit like a thunder reverb, you know. It's got that kind of [*clapping*], sort of distance, you know. But yeah, I don't really know about the Hum because the way I figured that there's probably an awful lot of low frequency shit going on anyway without a known source. I mean it'd be pretty easy to find a bunch of potential sources for something like that surely. Unless I'm misunderstanding how it actually sounds, you know. I don't know. Maybe if you could post more info in the chat about it, I can speculate a bit better.

“JJOS is brilliant”

I don't really use it much, though. Rob's the one to ask about that because he's really, he was all over it. I hardly used the MPC. I've got a 1000 at my house, but it was Rob's spare that after a bit, he just left at mine, but I barely used it. But he was all over it. He loved it. I didn't quite get along with the OS. There was something I didn't like about it, but I know that on paper it's great because it's like an R8 where you can just have all your own sounds in and the filters are quite nice because they're all Akai filters. They're quite rezzy and sort of, they've got a good feel to them and he's used them really well. Some of the tracks that he did with it like Perlence, I think are just fucking amazing. Like really nice sounding, you know, beyond the composition being interesting and good. But yeah, Rob made some fucking amazing shit on the MPC. Pro Radii as well, like all the beginning beats on that he done. They're just beautiful I think. So yeah, I do rate them, but I rate them as a kind of spectator more than a user.

“Do your laptops communicate during live shows?”

Yeah. It's not sidechaining, no. We're weirdly, we've been discussing that recently, so.

“Do you use Open Sound Control?”

No. We're just sending each other really basic stuff and using MIDI to send stuff back and forth. So it's mainly numbers and everything like a, kind of, bit extender thing that I've built that just uses several MIDI channels to give higher definition floats and stuff like that. So yeah, it's kind of bare bones but it's quite reliable because you can use network MIDI then, which is if you're using Thunderbolt, it's super fast. Whereas OSC with its packets and stuff, it's not quite as good for timing stuff. But it would probably be better for sending floats around, but I'm not sure if it'd be tight enough for what we're doing. But yeah, I've thought about using OSC and not really used it for much. I've used it in the past. Maybe I should look at it again because it's probably a bit faster now we're on much faster ports and stuff. So I don't know how that works really with packet based stuff.

Would I say SuperCollider is just as powerful as Max? Apples and oranges. I mean, yeah, I probably would, yeah. How much time have I spent in it? Not much since SuperCollider 2 first came out, which is when I last had a bit of a go in it. So I kind of looked at SuperCollider 1 and I was like “ehh,” and then, I think it was [Richard D. James] actually, he said to me like “now 2's a lot easier. You can just write” and then he sort of gave me some code examples for oscillators and stuff and I was thinking “yeah, I'll have a look at it,” and I did like 2, but again like I've moved away from doing the note on/note off things. So I guess I'd have to think about sequencing differently if I was using it because the sort of layer between control rate, and I should say like, yeah, I don't know. It doesn't make sense to talk about SuperCollider in that way, I suppose. But yeah, like in Max, like the difference between control rate and audio rate is sort of, you know, there are a lot more ways to get across that boundary, I think, when there are in SuperCollider. but I'm not experienced enough with SuperCollider these days to give you a proper answer on that. But I definitely like the sound of SuperCollider. It's good, and it's probably better for doing some things. But I think that since Max now has dynamic loading in poly~ and stuff like that, it’s and it, that you know, the poly~ object offers you a lot of flexibility that you didn't used to have. So there's sort of, there's been a lot of improvements in Max over the years that have brought it up to par almost with SuperCollider in terms of capability, and it just becomes about which aesthetic you prefer. Whether you prefer coding or whether you prefer visual programming, and I'm definitely a better visual programmer than the coder. But it doesn't help being dysgraphic really. I have issues with text and text-based stuff. It takes me a lot longer than most people to do that stuff,

“Yeah, the transients in Computer World”

Exactly, yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking it was. Yeah.

“Are you out in the sticks there?”

A bit? I mean, you know, there's trees and stuff, you know. Go off, trees. Much decent wildlife, I mean, we get deer, badgers, loads of squirrels, loads of birds, different birds, nutcrackers, woodpeckers, lots of different tits. Tits everywhere. Yeah, I don't know. These gray crows, I can't remember what they're called now. They're different to the ones we get in the UK. They're like gray and black jackdaws. Not corvids actually, magpies. Magpies nesting right behind the house. They've been there for generations. Same family. Pretty cool!

“Favourite track from Amber?”

Hmm. Like my mind went to Nil, like immediately. So I want to say Nil. Yeah, but there's probably, I like Piezo. I like Montreal.

“How do you store and step through so many different harmonies in such a varied way?”

Ah, just, g 1 e 1? I don't know, I'd have to look, I'd have to load up the old rig because that's an old rig. So I'd have to load it up and look at the what I had loaded up, because it just depends on what the sequences were, which I can't tell you off the top of my head. I’m fucking shit at remembering things. Yeah, so I'll tend to send, I'll quite often, I'll save scales like in series so I'll have like a bunch of them, like some number of them and then some length for each one and then it'll, kind of, go through them like that. But I think that track might have just been one scale. So it was a case of like pushing it into different harmonic spaces with a controller. I can't remember now. It, that all the sequences that we build are a bit different to each other, so I don't want to fuck up the answer by just guessing. I'd have to, yeah I'd literally have to load up. I was going to say I'd have to listen to it, but I don't think I'd know from listening. “I'm going to make them in such a way, you can't really tell.” Too many versions of very similar sequences running, so, and then I'd have to just show you the patch because it sort of, doesn’t make much sense to try and describe how it works. But yeah, I mean it was, it would have been largely automatic with some user input because most of it works like that, where you need to kind of push it into a direction and then it will kind of do a thing, you know?.

“Did you use Atari to sequence stuff in the early days?”

Well when we first started, we were using just like the [Roland] 202 and the 606 to do all the sequencing. So, and we borrowed like, we'd borrow synths off Daz [Darrell “Bola” Fitton], like we borrowed an SH, I think an SH-2, and then a Korg MS-10, which we eventually just bought off him and then, it worked until we got the Juno, I think. We got the R8 first, and then that had MIDI but we weren't using it. We'd be using the Roland tape sync off that into the 202. So we'd use that with those bits, and then when we got the Juno, we got an Atari 1040, and then we were running C-Lab Creator on that, and then we used that as our main kind of hub sequencer for a long time. So from, kind of late ‘93 to, maybe earlier. Maybe like ‘90, when was it, ‘90? When we did get the Atari? Would have been ‘91, ‘92? ‘92 maybe? It's hard to remember now. Yeah, probably ‘92. So, yeah, would have been ‘92.

So then, yeah so that, because we, before that we worked in Dazzy’s studio for a bit because he used to give us keys to his studio. He had a studio built up Doctor Rock in Rochdale on Drake Street, and when we started, when we met Daz, it was in the shop where because he worked in Doctor Rock. So we used to go in there and be like, trying to get fucking DIN leads and stuff, you know, and he got, Rob got talking to him about MIDI and we'd never used MIDI, so Daz let us in his studio. This is in ‘89, so he'd let, he'd give us keys. We’d, what I'd do is I'd go from work, I worked in a shop in Rochdale at the time. So I used to, after work, I'd go into Doctor Rock, Daz would wait for me, hand me the keys then I'd go upstairs to the studio. Then Rob arrived from his work or sometimes I'd go and meet him at the station, and then we'd go in Daz’s studio for a bit and he had like a full MIDI studio. He had like a big one, [Yamaha] TX81Z, DX. He had Ensoniq VFX-SD and an Atari running a few different programs and on the Atari was like, and he had an FZ-1 as well, and an R8, was the first time we'd used an R8. And so a lot of that gear was new to us at that point, and his Atari had like [Steinberg] Pro 24, something else, fucking can't remember, some other Steinberg thing, and he had C-Lab Creator and we tried all of them and we really liked C-Lab because it was patterns and it was a bit more like using a drum machine, which was what we were used to. We'd only used the R8 that, sorry, the 606 and the 202 at that point. So we didn't really know much. We didn't really understand timeline sequencing. I just found it a bit annoying, and I didn't like Cubase. He had an early Cubase, I think, he had Pro 24 and Cubase, that's what he had and I didn't really like Cubase, but I liked C-Lab Creator.

So when we got our Atari, we were using C-Lab Creator for ages, and that was like, that was good. I fucking loved that program. You could do some really mad stuff in there and it had, like, you could save grooves and put them on other MIDI tracks and do stuff like that. So, and it had like, the fact that you could mute channels like while it was running was really good for like jamming out things live. So it was a really nice sort of, halfway house between a kind of live sequencer and, I guess what you'd think of as like a DAW or whatever.

So yeah, that was my favourite program for ages. And then when, and we used that up until about halfway through doing Chiastic Slide. We got Mac and then we got Logic because Logic, as we understood, it was the, kind of, new version. And so it still had the event list from C-Lab in there, which I really liked. So yeah, we used Logic for a little bit towards the end of doing Chiastic. So there's a couple of tracks using it on Chiastic, but most of Chiastic was still the Atari. And yeah, so like Cipater was done on the Atari, and Nuane was done on it, and I think the tracks that we did using Logic were quite basic. So I think Recury was done using Logic, and Pule was done using Logic. Yeah, I think the rest of it was Atari, thinking about it, maybe Cichli was done using Logic as well. I can't remember. I think it was, actually, yeah, I think Cichli is Logic.

So, and that's the kind of point where we stopped using the Atari, really. After that I, like LP5 is just Logic, and getting into the, in Logic, getting into the Logic Environment, and so that was our first foray into doing kind of, I don't want to call it generative music, but you know, like this kind of slightly more automatic riffing on kind of arpeggios and kind of, building our own little machines in there. Like little sequences, building little sequences in the environments window, which I believe still exists. Although I've not really used Logic much in recent years. I think it's still in there somewhere. I think you can still do that. It's like a very rudimentary version of Max and it was using that that somebody said to me, see me using that, a guy said to me like, “oh, you'd probably like Max,” and then I sort of started to explore that world a little bit more and ended up getting Max after that. So after we'd done LP5, got Max and then yeah, so. Yeah, one thing leads to another. Anyway, sorry. That was a really fucking boring, autobiographical nonsense. So I'm sure you're not very interested in.

“I stopped the Helsinki gig.” “I saw you in Stockholm, the emergency exit signs were covered.”

“Will EP7 ever get a reissue?”

That's a good question. Yeah, we didn't think about that. Maybe we should. I don't think so because we've got that EPs box out there, and I think that was Warp’s attempt to dealing with the EPs, right. So I don't think that they're going to want to do individual EPs, given that it exists as part of that, and that you can get that pretty decent price at the moment still. But I don't know. Yeah maybe. I don't know.

Yeah, I talked about metal bands last time, but, you know. I like Confessor, early Confessor, like Condemned, like Gorguts’ early, like Obscura, like, Yeah, I don't know, like, I do like Necrophagist, yeah because I quite like the fact that a lot of it's drum machine and I can kind of relate to that. I like Sleep Terror even though I always get fucking slagged off by metalheads when I say that. I don't know why, I rate Sleep Terror. I like his, sort of comedy aspects as well. I like his weird funk, kind of beach music. I think he's quite cool. Like, yeah, I don't know like Cryptopsy, good, you know. Fucking hell, it's a bit hard naming loads of metal bands. I can just, you know, I can just reel off a load of old Earache bands. I mean I had this mate I used to work with, and he was really into like Deicide and Carcass and that. So I used to listen to a bit of that back in the day, and when I were really young in school, like this lad I used to go to school with, Leif Lecherry. We were into Metallica and Megadeth and kind of 80s metal. So he used to give me tapes of that stuff and I remember really liking Metallica first time I heard them. I was like fucking hell! They had a different sound to everyone else, kind of chug, so. You know, I know I shouldn't be really naming Metallica in the list of metal bands I like, gotta be honest, you know, I was only 14. So, you know, it's fair enough, innit.

“Do you ever use any machine learning?”

Yeah a bit. I mean I fucked around with MuBu a bit. Yeah, MuBu is super interesting, actually. It's one of the more interesting IRCAM technologies I think. It's worth an explore if you're into that kind of thing. That's all I'm going to say about that because I don't want to get too, I don't want to have a big conversation about machine learning. I think it can be used well. I think it's all about curation ultimately. But, I think you know, there's going to be so much shit art made as a result of machine learning existing that, I know that any opinion that you have on it right now is going to date badly. It doesn't matter what your opinion is, you know. It's almost impossible to have an opinion on it really.

“Is there a concept behind every Autechre album?”

Well, if there was, I wouldn't talk about it. But there isn't, so stop asking.

“Can you recommend any good resources for GenExpr and anti-aliasing in Gen?”

No, because I had to fucking dig through loads of examples of other people's C code and try and figure out how they were doing things, and most of the techniques for doing that stuff like PolyBLEP and minBLEP and [efficient polynomial transition region] and all them are well documented online, and you can easily find examples for all of them. So I'm not gonna bore you with links. Yeah. Took me fucking ages, you know, hard work. [laughs] It's fucking really hard work, but worth it because I've got oscillators that are different to all you lot now. So that's good.

“Hum varies in frequency from 40Hz to 125Hz roughly.”

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know man. I am, you know what, I don't think I've ever heard it but I don't think I've ever not heard those frequencies because you know that they're just present all the time anyway just from air moving, right? So like if you just look at a spectrum from a decent microphone, you're gonna see a shit ton of just activity down there anyway because it's just always there. I don't think you can really get away from it. So I'm not sure that the Hum is a thing, but willing to be proved wrong. If you can get a recording of it, that'd be really cool. Maybe it's just a brain thing? In which case I can't help you. Well maybe I can, I don't know, eventually.

“Favourite tricks with Boss RSD-10?”

Yeah, besides the obvious like the pitch input, but even just using it as a pitch delay is quite fun. I think you can hear all that stuff on Lego Feet to be honest, ‘cause we've pretty much done it all by then anyway. But that original Accelera track, which was originally it was called Ripping Circuits, that was Rob's track from ‘89, that was like the first time that we'd done that pitch thing, and it was really cool because like on the 202, if he was using the 202 as to generate the square wave for the pitch input, and then you had your sample in there, and then you started adding resonance to it, it just start losing it slightly and getting really good. So yeah, that was the favourite. And then like discovering that if you use the sample itself as the source of pitch, right, so you get that feedback loop going and just in general, just fucking around with the square wave in different ways the pitch input square wave, fucking around with that in different ways to try and get it to do different things, and retriggering it as well like at the same time is, that like using the trigger input from the 606. But you know, these are all quite obvious things, I think if you've got one because you've probably tried all these. So I don't know beyond that. Yeah, that was our only sampler for quite a long time, like that Destroyer of Worlds track was done just using that as a sampler, done on the four track. That's why it took so long. It's like all the sounds were like sampled on that, and then just triggered on that. I remember reading once that the first Stereo MC’s album, that 33 45 78 or whatever it's called, that was done with the RSD-10 as its main sampler, and being totally amazed like how the fuck? That must’ve took forever. It's quite a well-produced album though.

“Favourite British comedy TV series?”

Do I have to kind of narrow it down like this? I mean, I've got favourites that are favourites for very kind of personal reasons. I really like Armando Iannucci's shows. I've got some that you might have missed, I used to really like that people didn't really check much. The Paul Merton shows, the first two series of Paul Mertons were really good. There was some fucking ace bits in there. I used to like Absolutely back then as well. Absolutely, you know, the Scottish series, I used to like that. There's one sketch in the first series where they're trying to get the remote control for a telly, and they can't quite reach it, that I love. I still love that, I think it's amazing. There's some really good Absolutely stuff, just fucking really silly stuff, especially the George and Donald bits. Really good.

Yeah I like Comic Strip. I like, you know, there's some Comic Strips I really really like. Mr. Jolly Lives Next Door, A Fistful of Travellers' Cheques, Gino, I mean a lot, probably like most of the early Comic Strips, but like they're the ones that I really remember fondly. Yeah, Supergrass is quite good at all. The Yob, obviously. I think, like I don't know. I mean I liked a lot of British comedy growing up. So I like Vic Reeves, you know,.I really like the second series, like, after a Big Night Out, wherever it was called, like The Smell of Reeves & Mortimer or whatever. The one with like Masterchef, [laughs] that's fucking amazing, just with his head and stuff. I'm trying to think like, I know I'm missing stuff here, that's like, oh, 15 Storeys High, that's kind of underrated. really like that. [vapes]

Obligatory Chris Morris and [Alan] Partridge mentions because you can't not mention them, but they're so obvious to me now that I feel like just even mentioning them, there's no point. But The Day Today was life-changing. It was just utterly amazing at the time. I mean if I had to pick one series out of all of them, it'd probably be The Day Today just because it was so dense and different and so fucking, it was like the good bits of RoboCop but times a million, you know, just fucking amazing. Yeah, don't know. There's too many things that I like, you know, like rally, there’s too many things. Like there's a couple of Peter Kay in that, the early, the first series, That Peter Kay Thing, the ice cream man one, I love that. Yeah, there’s like a quite a bit of Peter Kay's really early stuff was amazing actually. It's a shame that he sort of gets dissed now for being a kind of observational comedian because he was doing amazing observational comedy in a totally different, pseudo-documentary format. Way better than most people were doing it, you know, back then. It was just so well observed, but I guess maybe growing up in the same part of the world gives me a different view of it than a lot of people. So, you know, I can see how well observed it is. Anyway I don't wanna, God I could just just talk about comedy all day here. Maybe there's nothing wrong with that, I don't know. I feel like I'm excluding everyone who isn't British though.

Any pieces of vintage or newer hardware I'd like to own? Not really. I don't feel like the need to own anything in particular. I don't really, I don't, I know I should be like, “Oh yeah, I really want a Roland System 100” or whatever it is, you know? “Oh yeah, I'd really like a first generation Korg MS-20!” You know, I'm not like that really. I just tend to work with what I've got.

No way Vektroid!

vektroidlive: “Hello, I just want to say those Twitch streams, very simple TV commercials are mad inspiring.”

Oh come on, you were doing vaporwave before I was. So I'm not going to take that from you. But thank you, you know and respect Mac Plus.

“Do you guys chuckle at how long it takes for fans to get your albums?”

I think, yeah, I mean sometimes it takes us ages to get it, you know what I mean? We'll do stuff and just rack it up and then it won't be for another year that we'll realise it was quite good. So you know, I can go off things quite quickly after doing them and then get back into them later, so you know, I don't hold it against someone and also don't think, you know, I don't think all our stuff's that hard to get. I think some of it's quite instant, I think. Some of it is a bit more like they're growers, you know, and we know because they've had to grow on us before we got to a point where we think that they're releasable. So yeah, I don't really…

“Reaction to Quaristice was quite hostile originally.”

Yeah, I think it probably was, I think because we've gone from doing Untilted type hyper sequenced, very kind of DAW sequencing to doing these rough hardware jams, so it's not surprising. I think people kind of get an idea of what it is that you're doing, and they start to rate you on a technical level or rate you in terms of how much effort you're putting in, that they can perceive, and then when they don't get that from your next release, they'll be like “oh this thing is missing,” but I don't really do that with music. I tend to think get more excited about what's there than what isn't there because there's obviously a lot less there then isn't there. You can always talk about what isn't there with music, do you know what I mean? You could say like, “oh, didn't like that metal album because there weren't enough pan pipes in it.” It's like, well yeah, but you know there's loads of things that aren’t there in there, you know what I mean? There's no opera singers either or you know, whatever mouth organs or whatever it is is not on that album, you know what I mean? It's just so, I don't find that very useful, but I get that other people might expect something from you and then you don't give it to them and then they're like “oh! Well I haven't got the thing that I thought I was gonna get.” But you know. Yeah, I don't think we're making stuff in that way, though. So it's not about, it's not a competition really. It's not like we have to have a load of boxes ticked for things that are there, if you know what I mean. Just whether you're vibing off it really innit, so.

My phone's getting too hot. It's going to start complaining in a minute.

“I was just blasting Piezo really loud.”

Thanks.

[laughs] “Now I like you guys as much as RDJ.”

Thank you. That’s high praise indeed.

Fucking, I'm so much behind in the chat again. This always happens because I'm being too good trying to answer all these, somebody's highlighted the message, right. [laughs] I think I might just have a policy of not reading the ones are highlighted.

“My original copy of Confield got off Soulseek was missing Parhelic Triangle.”

Oh yeah. Well that's what you get for downloading albums on Soulseek.

“What do you see as the next big technological step in music creation?”

[vapes] How long have I got to think about this? Because it might take me five or ten minutes, so. I don't know, I don't know. Something that we're doing, probably.

“Do you like recent John Frusciante stuff?”

You know, I don't really know his stuff very well, but I believe he's a fan of ours, So that, I do appreciate that. I used to see, when I was working in the shop, because we had tellys in the shop because it's all tellys because it was that kind of shop, you know we used to have MTV on a lot, and I used to see [the Red Hot] Chili Peppers on there, and I used to think yeah, it's not bad, this. Like it weren't really the kind of thing I'd go out my way to check, but, you know, I like the funk and the drums and the movement in it. So there's some elements of it that I could get behind. So it was quite refreshing to read that he was a fan of ours. But other than that, I don't know because I’m just not familiar enough with that kind of stuff. So I'm in a bit of a bubble these days in general, so that doesn't help. But I should probably just check out a load of their stuff and then I'd have more of an opinion on what I think of this having an opinion, I don't really know. But obviously it's like, it's super humbling because he's really gone out of his way to shine a light on us and I do really appreciate that. So, you know, yeah. Thanks, basically.

“Is it disappointing how predictable and safe most music is or where mainstream internet culture went?”

That's a big question, ain't it? Bloody hell, internet culture. So we're going to talk about the early days and when everyone were [SomethingAwful] goons and when /b/ first started out, and then what happened after that. Don't think I really need to. I think you all know the history of the internet, right? I mean you don't need me to give you a kind of shit version of that. It's weird seeing people discovering shitposting on Twitter and thinking it's a new thing [laughs], you know what I mean? Because we were used to shitpost on USENET, you know. I was shitposting when these kids were zygotes. Fucking hell, so that's funny. But you know like, it was bound to end up like this. I think what bugs me the most is all the manipulation really, and all the kind of political stuff gets me down a bit. So I don't really enjoy it on socials anymore. I think it's just a lot of outrage and people getting upset about things without really asking why they're so upset, you know. I think people quite happy to inherit opinions and I think, you know, I believe that the reason conspiracy theories are so popular is because they confirm pre-existing beliefs, you know, and people want to be spoon fed a reason for their kind of prejudice a lot of the time, and there's other people who want to capitalise on that and I don't like that.

Do I think music's predictable and safe? I mean this is a hard one because I've, kind of since been a kid, I've seen group behavior is something that excludes me, and I can't, I don't really understand it a lot of the time if lots of people are saying and doing the same thing. So I don't want to criticise people for wanting to be in the group and wanting to get the approval of the group. You know, that's something that is important to them and, you know, they're wired differently to me. So, you know, I can't criticise people for being like that. But I'm not like that myself, so you know, it's not, I'm not coming at it from the angle of being critical. I think I was when I was younger and I didn't really understand as well how the world works, you know. I used to think “why is everything so shit” and now I realise that it's because everybody wants to fit in. So, you know, I'm not disappointed by how predictable and safe most music is. No, I'm not. It's just the way it is. It's always going to be like. I think it's always been like that as well, so.

“I thought things would get more interesting and fearless based on early iterations of the internet”

Yeah. I mean obviously, I think people's, I mean identity is a big part of this, right, so because I think early on that, you know, the, in, on the internet identity, it was more diffuse and you could fuck around with your identity and experiment with different identities to some extent, right? You weren't tied to your real name and your job and your fucking location and all your real friends and like that wasn't how the internet worked at all. So, and being free from that was really liberating for a lot of people. Especially weirdos like me, you know, and we've lost that to some extent and where it does exist, it's just the hell holes now, you know. They didn't used to be, but they kind of become that really because it just offers you free license to be a cunt all the time, and that's, you know, that's not going to be good if you've got a lot of people who've got that urge in one place. Things are going to be a bit weird. But you know, for a while it was a good, while identity was diffuse and people were creative and trolling was creative. Everything was creative. Memes were creative, you know. It's not like that so much now. Memes are just shitty reaction images that you download from the reaction images website, so the fuck is that, you know. Just the way words change as well, like just the word trolling, the way that changed over all the time and the way that the word meme now just means like a shit picture of something, you know. Anyway, I'm not an expert on internet culture. So, you know, just an average bloke who's been on the internet for way too fucking long and I'm not that average. I don't even know if I'm an actual bloke, to be honest. I don't know what the fuck I am, so.

“Every time I hear about Logic, I start to wonder if I made the wrong move going all in on Ableton.”

Nah, like, you know, depends on what you're doing and how you want to do it. But yeah, I like Logic better. I'd use Logic, if I could run Max patches in Logic, I'd use Logic. Like, and you know nine times out of ten, there's a lot of stuff I can't do in Ableton and I find just totally infuriating like selecting stuff, the fact that it doesn't have it, like if you to just arbitrarily select a number of regions in your tune and move them, but they're not contiguous? Fucking good luck with that. I can't, like and I've complained to them about it and they said “oh, well that code's so old. It's just going to be very hard to update it now” and that's what the fuck, you know. But you know, there's things about Ableton that are really good. The workflow’s really fast. The groups thing is phenomenal, it's really powerful. Being able to have racks of different synths in the same instrument is really cool. So there's things about Ableton I think are amazing, and there's other things that I think are really weirdly babyish and I don't understand their choices. So, like it just depends, you would find, I think if you'd grown up using Ableton and you then went to use Logic, you would find it laborious to do some very basic stuff that you got used to having in Ableton and vice versa. So you know, apples and oranges really. Gotta stop saying apples and oranges right there.

There are too many questions about frog shaking. I do appreciate them though.

vektroidlive: [Any software recs for procedural visuals like jitter?]

Do I have any tips for people interested in doing visual art with visual programming tools these days? Nah, I'm not the man to ask about this. I believe VVVV is very good and I believe Processing is very good. I don't use either of them, so I'm not.

I can't see shit. Right.

Am I still in contact with Tortoise? No, you know, it'd be good to be though. I really like John [McEntire], and Bundy [K. Brown]. I think they're fucking good. I was more in touch with Casey for a little while. Casey Rice, he's their mate, but I ain't seen him for ages either. Fucking flake there. But yeah Tortoise is good. Like, I don't know what happened with Tortoise actually. I don't know where they've gone. [laughs] Are they still doing stuff? I'm shit at keeping up with stuff.

Fave Ween albums? Yeah, I mean probably Pure Guava because it was like my introduction to them, so, and at the time I was just pure electronic listening, so a lot of the kind of drum machiney ones were a bit of a way in and I liked how well made it was. It wasn’t obviously like thrown together. But yeah, I got more into The Pod a bit later and Mollusk is good, but it's sort of, it's more of a concept album I think, but it's, I mean I really like Buckingham Green, but I like the demo of it more than I like the version on the album actually. The really long extended demo version of it, I think, is amazing and I like that, I like them when they're a bit rougher and not so overproduced. I got the [12 Golden] Country Greats album and I thought it was fucking hilarious, but also a bit like, it had a short shelf life for me just because I'm not really into that kind of music, but I thought it was such an anal project to do. But in general, yeah, I'm a big Ween fan. I really like Ween and I seen them live in the 90s, and they were just fucking, I think they were so off their heads they could barely like keep their faces in a kind of irrational [makes >:3 face], but they might have just been putting it on. But yeah, [?] man used to tour manage a bit, he's kinda old, and he knows them pretty well. But yeah, big Ween like I love how anal it is and I love how careful they are and how well they can nail other artists vibes without actually doing an impersonation of them, you know what I mean, so. And yeah, dodgy subject matter and all that, just makes it a little bit more fun because it's so absurd. It just becomes really absurd that you're listening to a song about whatever it is, you know, shit or fucking incest or whatever it is you know, child abuse. They're not good topics to make songs about but they somehow managed to make it not uncomfortable. Yeah, I don't know. It's perverse as fuck, Ween, and I think you have to have quite a twisted sense of humor to enjoy it, really. Musically as well, as kind of thematically, you know. [vapes]

Have I thought about things like Patreon or Bandcamp subscription? No, maybe I would if I didn't have any money. I don't know. I do alright. I mean, we do pretty well off gigs and stuff so.

“Is there a major shift in your methodology around the transition from Untilted to Quaristice? What was going on behind the scenes?”

Yeah, I mean, fuck, you know a lot of stuff for me. I mean my dad died in 2004, so that was a blow and that sent me off on a weird spiral of not knowing where the fuck I was or who I was, and then a lot of stuff that my family had kept from me came out, and then we toured and then, I'm not gonna talk about any of that stuff, so don't ask. And then me and Chantal [Passamonte, fka Mira Calix] split up [in] 2005 and then I moved to Manchester and I hardly had a studio for ages because we were just doing gigs for money. So for about three years, I didn't really have a studio. I just had kind of a live setup on a desk in a room and my speakers and a mixer and I was building a studio up slowly while we were doing that. So Quaristice is the sort of sound of me putting the studio back together, plus a few tracks that I did on my laptop in Renoise, sort of mixed in there. So like, Fol3, fol4, WNSN, rale, they’re all Renoise tracks. And then there's a bunch of like, Rob’s MPC things, you know, Rob was doing like MPC tracks and then yeah, I don't know like, that was a good fit, so yeah. I don't know, like a bit of a mixed bag really, of things happening, you know what I mean? But I was enjoying being in Manchester in my new space and feeling quite free and liberated and not really wanting to work with DAWs because I felt like I'd reached a bit of a ceiling with them and I didn't really want to go much further into it. I started getting a bit bored with timeline sequencing. Starting just wanting to do things in the room and have a bit more of a live vibe to them, which was a bit more like a return to roots, which is the kind of thing you do when you just split up with your wife that you've been with for ten years, you know I mean? So in a lot of ways, I was returning to my roots, really, you know, going back up to Manchester and then doing all that. I hope that offers some understandable context for that.

“Were you a fan of Captain Beefheart when you put the Magic Band on ATP?”

Yeah, of course! I wouldn't have put them on otherwise. But that Mirror Man Sessions has been a favourite for a long time, and I really like John French. I really like his drumming but I wasn't expecting him to get on stage and start singing like Beefheart. That was weird, but okay. That's what you want to do, you’re John French it's fine, you know. I mean he did most of it, if you know, you know. And yeah, it was just such inventive music. Just amazing and his drumming is fucking brilliant. It's just amazing. Amazing drummer. One of my, you know, all-time favourite drummers. Just beautiful. Just amazing sense of timing and his microtiming and his groove and the way that he's decided to flop his grooves over slowly over the course of this, like these jams from Mirror Man with like 15 minute jams, where the loops just changing slowly and kind of, it's just right up my street. I love that shit, but so much funk, you know? Yeah, I think he really gets it. So yeah, we're huge fans of theirs. Huge, huge fan.

“Twitch streams was a good way of embracing internet media to release your music. Thought about doing this more?”

I mean, to be fair, I mean that happened kind of organically. It wasn't like I had the thought to do it. It was just that I was doing the Mixlr streaming, and we've been doing streaming for as long as we've, it's been possible to do streaming, because obviously coming from a pirate radio background makes you want to do, you know, it's just we're just into doing broadcasting in general. We've always been into it. And yeah, as soon as it was possible to do decent radio streaming, we were doing it, using at first we were using, like what was it called now? I can't even remember what it was called? People still use it as well. You can stream from it on your computer. [laughs] This doesn't sound like a fucking, it's not like I don't know what I'm talking about. But yeah, we basically, you'd be streaming directly from your machine so, not via a server and then, you know, so you'd have like all kinds of overhead bandwidth issues with that, but it was fun for a while. And then, actually I think [Aleksi Perälä’s] still uses that shit because I've seen his streams are like that same platform. And then, yeah, started using Ustream, and then for a bit, when that first came out. And then yeah, and then Mixlr.

So like, after a few weeks of doing that lockdown streaming, it got to a point where I was thinking, well fuck it, people, no it was Phil, asked if we'd do some video streaming on Twitch. We've had to stream my fucking obscure experimental film and video collection and video art because I'm quite into video art on the quiet. I don't talk about it much, but I've been for a long time. So he wanted to, he wanted me to do that. So I went on Twitch and started streaming that shit and then that got a bit boring and then I started playing films and then people were saying to me “Yo yo, you're gonna get canceled off here if you don't calm down” with the copyright strike. So I thought okay, so then I thought, well maybe I'll just stream some of this shit jitter stuff that I mess with sometimes so, and it just came out of that, if you know what I mean, so. Yeah, it wasn’t a big decision to get on this cool platform and do it. It was just that I knew that you could stream video on Twitch and you'd probably get away without a strike if you just did it on the dl. You know, if you only had a few people listening, but it started to get a bit out of hand, so and then it wound down again and then I got bored. So that was that.

“Do you recommend a good cheap FM synth?”

You mean a hardware synth? I don't know anymore. I'm so out of the loop. You just ask any other person than me because I just use Max for everything now. I mean cheap FM synth for me would be Max because I won't have to buy anything. I just build one, so.

“I'm desperate to leave the UK. Can I be your gardener? I'll live in your shed!”

We don't need a gardener, you know. But yeah, I mean, like if you want to leave the UK, just leave the UK. It's surely not that difficult, you know. It is weird not living in the UK for a while. It's different out here, you know. Not in a bad way, but just very different.

“Did you ever hear any Norwegian folk music?”

Only bits of like, I mean, no, not really. No, because I wouldn't call it Norwegian. [vapes]

“Is that an owl on the door?“

Yes it is! Well spotted!

“For those interpersonal questions, what one says about one's self is the opposite of truth. So, invert the statements.”

What? Trying to work out what you mean by that, but yeah, I mean I can't, I think it's more what you want other people to think, right? I mean it's not necessarily not true. You might just have identified the one thing that you think is worth saying. So you might be saying that. So yeah, I don't buy that “it's the opposite of the truth,” you know. I'm not, this isn't like some KGB propaganda channel.

“Do you like the Future Sound of London's new stuff?”

Not heard much of their new stuff actually, for a bit. I've got that Stakker, actually, Humanoid album on De:tuned, whenever it was, a couple of years ago. It was really good, I thought. It was really, really good. Yeah, so I like that a lot, but I haven't heard any other FSOL bits for a bit. I've just been keeping up with that stuff because that's more of my tip really.

What are we talking about reverse polarity for, by the way? I don't know what that's about?

“Do you have separate tasks when performing live or do you both deal with everything?”

Yeah, we do have separate tasks. We have, so we've got two rigs running concurrently, synced, and we're running different stuff on each one. So just depending on what bits we're running. So yeah, different stuff. But when you say tasks, I don't know what you mean exactly. Because obviously like I suppose you could break down the music into constituent elements and say “oh, this is a rhythm bit, and this is a melody, and who does the rhythm and who does the melodies?” In which case, you know, it's just, yeah, we do deal with everything because we’re, both of us are working with all kinds of different material. But it's sort of like, you know, it fits together if you like. Different things that fit together.

“How much hard drive space do you have?”

Just quite a bit because hard drives are quite cheap now. So you know, you can get like a 12TB drive for a few hundred quid. So you know, the sky's the limit really. The music doesn't take up much space because it's not like video, so.

“Do you have an organisation principle for all your files?”

Yeah. I mean I tend to label them with stuff. But you know, you can tag stuff in Mac OS, so you can just tag everything with multiple tags. So yeah, I use that quite a bit and yeah. Simple, really. Don't know what to say about that. You don't have to do a lot of organising because you can usually just derive a lot from dates and because I've got like, so the system or the rig or whatever, all the folder of patches is sort of saved as a .zip every time there's a modification. So I can easily find which version of the rig I was using for the track because the track’s creation date will be just part of the metadata for the track. So it's quite easy to get through it and figure out what's what.

“Do you have a lot of old files from the 90s or do you let them disappear, whatever all the time?”

Yeah I mean a lot of it, it's different formats. So I've got them. Like I've got all the [Ensoniq ASR-10] disks and I've got all the DATs, but they've, you know, things decay and stopped working after a while. So, and I don't maintain it very well. Rob's a bit better at maintaining these kind of archives than I am, and I'm not that concerned with it. So you know, if things die, they die. It's just part of the story of how things went, so. I quite like that. I like memory being imperfect. I don't feel the need to record everything. I don't go around with a camera taking pictures of things and stuff. I like not quite being able to remember things. Yeah, I like that better.

“Aren't you using computers like Max/MSP?”

Yeah, we are.

“I used all of the files to fertilise the earth.”

Yes, that's quite a novel approach.

“Why doesn't Bob make an AMA like you? Is he shy?”

No, he's just doing family stuff. He's like he's busy all the time. He's busy doing patching and tracks and trying to keep up with my shit and doing bits for the live set. I'm sure you could coax him on here though. I don't think it'd be that hard. He's not that shy. He's just a bit, I think he just maybe he just wouldn't enjoy it as much. I don't know. He's not really shy. I think he'd probably just see a lot of these questions and be like “oh fuck off.”

“Have you watched Limmy’s Show?”

Yeah, I like Limmy’s Show! You know, I didn't mention Limmy when I was talking about comedy. Yeah, Limmy’s top, you know? How can you not like Limmy? yeah, really creative I think, and his characters are brilliant. Like just really good, 3D as fuck. Even the ones that only appear in like one sketch, they're just fucking really good. They're like super 3d and real. They're like real people. So I think it's really good like that, and it's a shame he isn't doing more TV stuff or sketches or whatever, you know, because I think he's really good at playing different people. So, I love Dee Dee. I think he's brilliant, he's so real and kind of identifiable. I know so many people like that. But even that Benny Harvey sketch like where they're both wigging out to that A-ha track, like I just recognised it! [laughs] Totally recognised it! It's mad, like I think he's weird, Limmy. He sort of, he manages to pull things out of my unconscious that, they're almost like memories. You know, he's brilliant. There's one at a party where someone's like totally off their head and they're just talking to some other bloke and the other bloke was just going on about people in soap operas. [laughs] Oh fucking hell, that's so good! Yeah there's some shit in Limmy’s stuff that's just nailed something, I don't even know where he gets it from? Well obviously, gets it from his life, you know, I don't know why I'm saying that’s silly. It's just good that he has the same sort of thoughts as I do about some things. Yeah, really good. I really rate him. I think he's really good.

Lurkio79: The reeves and Mortimer nightclub sketches from big night out were ace

Fucking hell, yeah! The Reeves and Mortimer, right, the ones from, I think, because you said Big Night Out, but I must assumed then when I read that I thought you meant the ones with fucking, what's his name? [*grumbles*] What's his fucking name now? Where they've got the one bloke who's grown up in Hong Kong and he talks with a Chinese accent, and then you've got the other guy, who's like, that guy, what's he called now? The guy who manages that band, in the band they called like Man-Date, and they're singing about salmon and stuff. [laughs] Yeah, that's just amazing, shit, no. Okay, so.

rstephh: You have mentioned being neurodivergent during the last AMA and that was kind of a big deal for a few people - in a good way.

Yeah, I mean, I don't want to go on about this too much. Sorry, I gotta rub my eye. Fucking cry laughing thinking about Vic Reeves. Yeah so.

rstephh: Any tipps on how get through the day, routines, getting stuff done? Thanks a lot!

I'm not like, I'm not, I can't start giving out [cognitive behavioural therapy] tricks and all that because it's just different for everyone, and I'm not like, I'd never do that. I think you just got to like work with somebody who understands you, really. I think that's the key thing if you can find somebody to work with who understands you. I don't mean work work, I mean if you want to work on strategies for coping and stuff. Don't let it get you down, it's the main thing for, I mean I was lucky, right, because I didn't know for a long time. I didn't know, and I had the validation of the world. So I kind of had an outlet from quite an early age and I was lucky that because I had the typical thing of being advanced in primary school and then getting into middle school and then suddenly hitting a bit of a brick wall academically. So I did, I had really good scores until I was about 11. I was like top of the school more or less, and then I was 11 and then I went to middle school and then things got suddenly quite difficult, and, but I also had music and doing tapes and doing editing and there was a point to me kind of being obsessive and suddenly, my obsession got diverted into all this electro and doing pause button tapes and all that kind of stuff, and then buying a sampler and, you know, I was getting approval from my mates in school because electro when I was, so this is like ‘83, ‘84 when electro was big and I started first doing tapes. You know, suddenly people were talking about me as a DJ in school. They were saying “oh, he's a fucking DJ” and that was really good for my ego and didn't, you know, it didn't matter that I was different to them, suddenly. It didn't matter that I was outside the group because I was, like, getting respect for what I produced when I was outside the group, if you know what I mean. So it really helped me to have that and it's probably why I clung onto it so tightly for so long and was so obsessed with making it work, you know.

So yeah and I didn't know until much later that, you know, Asperger's and [high functioning] Autism whatever. They're not like, it's not necessarily like a diagnosis that you have to worry about. It's only if it's affected your life in a negative way. So I didn't really need to know because there wasn't really anything I needed to tweak. And by the time I found out about it, I'd learnt enough just through trial and error and experience learning enough strategies for dealing with people and social dynamics, and I'm quite good at picking emotions up in people. It's not like I'm insensitive to that stuff. It's just that I don't quite, often don't know how to behave in response because that, those things aren't hard coded in me. So, I don't know. Some, I find some types of social interaction easier than others, find it much easier to deal with somebody in on, in like, a one-on-one than dealing with a large group of people. But if I know the group of people really well, I'm quite good. If I don't know them really well, I tend to go quite quiet and I just go into lurk mode basically. I just kind of observe people. So it all depends really on what the setting is in terms of how I respond and, you know, my strategies are very personal. I suppose they're not really worth sharing because they're, you know, I'm coming at it from such a weird angle being a kind of, being a musician/artist/ whatever I am.

You know, I think that my advice probably isn't that useful to somebody who isn't doing that, you know, but I don't know. Maybe it would be? It'd be, I don't, need to really discuss individual situations and ways that I would deal with them if I was in them, you know, for it to be of any use. I can't just kind of give out general advice like that. But I do really appreciate that people, like I appreciate that people appreciate me talking about it, but I don't really know how to talk about it, and there's been a lot of situations where I've been in interviews and I've brought it up and they've quickly changed the subject. They don't want me to discuss this in interviews. Journalists see it as a little bit of an awkward subject area. It's a bit like if I started to discuss some kind of personal health problem, you know. They don't like talking about this stuff. A lot of people are kind of repulsed by anything that they perceive as a disability. Which is a shame really because I don't perceive it as a disability at all, you know, or a kind of superpower, you know, I'm not on that tip either with it, you know, I don't, I just think it's all about difference and people being different. I don't like a lot of this kind of new identity politics in that you're supposed to join some group and identify with that group and wave the flag for that group. That's just another type of group behavior to me and I can't really identify with that either, so. You know, I find certain cultural phenomena are a little bit difficult to engage with personally and that's become a little bit more of an awkward thing as I've got older because people are so fucking fixated on these prefabricated identities, you know. I don't like that. Anyway, God, that was a lot of talking. Sorry.

“The Day Today where Morris turns away from an organ after the intro.”

Yeah, On the Hour as well. Like if you'd listened to On the Hour before The Day Today, there was On the Hour on the radio because that was where we first caught it. So I remember playing Sonic 2 and listening to On the Hour and just thinking what the hell is going on? [laughs] It was like Radio 4 had just folded up. It was fucking amazing. There was some bits in On the Hour, I remember the one bit that really sticks in my mind when I was listening to it were the pips before the news. So it went beep beep beep beep and it just did it for ages, and then it went into this melody or something. I just remember thinking fucking hell, this is amazing! Like I love Iannucci's edit, like radio edit stuff because he does a lot of stuff that's on the same sort of tip as Kenny Everett's radio stuff, which I also really rated as a kid and my dad had some mate in London who was one of the van guys because my dad was in van clubs when I was a kid. They used to customise vans and all that and some of his mates were from London and they used to have these tapes of these mad edits that Kenny Everett used to do. That had a huge impact on me as a kid. And there's bits of Iannucci stuff that's like that, where he's done all these weird edits that are in The Day, there's not really in The Day, there's a couple of bits in The Day Today that are like that. That bit where it was like collecting stamps. That bit, that's like that kind of humor. It's just really obscure, like approach to editing and kind of yeah, I love that humor. It's so over the top and weird. [laughs] It's so different. But yeah, anyway, sorry.

pselodux: do you think it was funny how there was one guy on reddit who thought the hanal cd-r was fake? or just insulting that he didn't believe that you could have tracks that were a bit sketchy or less serious

I mean, every time this there's this fake thing, right, so if there's a possibility that someone's faking, people say “Autechre would never do anything this shit.” and then they're like “Oh it's real. Oh, well.” and then there's this idea that, you know, it's all about reputation. I mean I kind of, I'm kind of down with that. I mean I kind of think, well if you should just approach it on its own merits. If it didn't have our identity associated with it, what would you feel about it? Would you be into it or not? I think that really is the question, you know what I mean, whether you like something. But you might be looking for that essence of somebody within the track and trying to figure out if something seems like, remember Steinvord, thinking for ages that that must must be Richard, but I didn't know and I still don't know who that is really. But when I heard it, I was thinking yeah it must be him. There's just so much of his essence in there, but you never know if somebody's just cloning him because there's a lot of kind of Aphex tribute acts out, isn't there, you know what I mean? So, and some people it's harder to do than others. Like I don't think you could clone Luke Vibert really because he's got a very particular approach to things. But it's just not that easy to boil down into constituent parts and say this is what makes a Luke Vibert track sound like Luke Vibert, if you know what I mean. It's very difficult to emulate it. Whereas I think somebody like Rich, you can probably do it a bit easier with because you could just buy the same gear and do the same sorts of tunings and same type of patterns. But then there's some point at which you can slightly tell the difference and I think those tracks, those Gescom things, they're a bit diffused because there's a few different people on them. So depending on who's there, there's different vibes to them. So yeah, I don't know. It just depends on, I mean it's a bit different with them tracks because I don't really take it personally if somebody thinks that they don't sound like Autechre because they shouldn't, really, because they're not Autechre. So, especially like the, this penultimate track which just doesn't sound like anything that we would ever do, you know what I mean? So, but at the same time, yeah like I think the old question of whether a fake sounds like the actual artist is a bit weird for a band like us because we quite often don't sound like ourselves. I'll, you know, we do something that's a bit, you know, different or fresh for us or whatever, so.

“Have you used Dall-E 2?”

No, I'm on the list though. We'll see. The problem is I didn't tell them I was a fucking tech journalist or whatever, so I'll probably get it a year after everybody else gets it, so. [vapes] But yeah, it's weird because I'd like, I'd show you my old Reddit account, like where I post all my Dall-E shit, and some of them are pure comedy. But like okay, I'm not going to reveal any of my Reddit accounts here, so you're going to have to just guess who I am on there. [laughs] Sorry about that. But yeah, you probably see me on one of the Dall-E subs spamming fucking bullshit images. [*blows*]

“The irony of Soulseek’s that a lot of electronic music artists were on there early on.”

Yeah, me included, you know. And Audiogalaxy as well, you know?

“Props for keeping the band together for three decades! Any wisdoms?”

Not really. Just don't be a dick, you know? In general, you know. [vapes]

“What's your opinion on Wendy Carlos?”

Phenomenal talent. Just absolutely, absurdly respectable person and human and a lovely person. And it's such a shame she seems to be hiding lately and I wish she wouldn't do that, especially now, you know. Yeah, I don't want to go on about that. But you know, you know what I mean, don't you? So, yeah, it's a shame. But like, yeah, just a phenomenal talent and just like so many things to learn from Wendy Carlos in general, and I know, you know, you can listen to it and think well it's just classical music made on a synth, you know. But it's just, it's done so well and it's done with such rigor and a kind of fascination and you know, it's just, and there was so much trial and error in Wendy Carlos. You can hear it, you know. So many happy accidents and capitalising on those, and there's just so much to learn in terms of approach from the way she's done stuff. Yeah, I think she was absolutely brilliant. Just amazing basically. But you know, I mean, well discussed.

“Timesteps is mint.”

Yeah, I totally agree with that. I, you know, also the gamelan stuff that she tried to do is really convincing, and I've played that alongside other gamelan tracks and people haven't noticed that it seems, you know, people who are familiar with gamelan music, so. Yeah, it's fun. Okay.

jamesmday: have you read The Three Body Problem? any authors that you recommend, or books/stories that stand out?

Yeah, you know what, I got halfway through book two [The Dark Forest] and kind of sloped off and I still need to, forget I need to get it finished. But there's some ideas I like in it and some of it I think hmm, that doesn't really make sense. But maybe it comes together a bit more in the third book [Death’s End]. I'm hoping it does. I kind of need to get back into it. I had this with Southern Reach Trilogy and all I got halfway through book two [Authority] and was like, where the fuck is this going now? Like, and then it really came together. Book three [Acceptance] was like, wow, fuck, you know. So yeah I probably need to get back into Three Body Problem. I found it, there was something about it that was bugging me, book two, it started to bug me a little bit, but I'd probably just need to read through the bits that bugged me and it'll start to make more sense, you know?

“What Norwegian food do you enjoy the most?”

So I have this thing for, like, buying lompe and like just combining them with the wrong things. So like those little tins of mackerel with, in tomato sauce, slapping that on lompe and eating that and letting it go through the holes a little bit, or like fried eggs on lompe, and I keep getting told off for putting the wrong things on lompe, but I love it. But like straight up Norwegian food that I like is probably like hot dogs on lompe and that weird mustard that everyone eats here, and like, and fucking brown cheese. Brown cheese is ace, like totally unknown in the UK. And yeah, that company Maarud or however you pronounce it, their peanuts, like fucking amazing. They're like the best peanuts I've ever had. I really like peanuts, but their peanuts are, like particularly well roasted, like amazing. And yeah, there's some weird things, like Christmas dinner is like completely different to the UK. And that thing, I don’t, I can’t remember what it's called, where it's like, I didn't, the first time I had it, I wasn't sure. It's like cabbages and sheep and it's boiled. I can't remember what it's called now [fårikål], but I really like that now. I didn't, the first time I had it, I wasn't sure and then the second time I was like, wow this is amazing. Like the cabbage had loads of flavour and stuff and it just was amazing. So yeah, there's some, I think Norwegian cooking is quite basic in some ways. Oh, them little balls, them little reindeer meatball things that you get in them fucking weird packets that are like somthing from the 70s. I think it's called Vilti now, but it used to be called something else. I love them shits. They're fucking really good. They're like something that I would have eaten when I was a kid, and I'm sure when I eat them, I get a weird nostalgia off it but I don't know why, because obviously we didn't have that in the UK. So yeah, there's, I don't know, there's a few weird Norwegian things I like, and fiskegrateng, or whatever it's called, you know, the fish. That's like a weird 70s, you know what, it's like fucking macaroni and fish and potato. Like that's so weird. [laughs] That's like a 70s dish, but it's really good as well. That gives me weird nostalgia at all, especially with a bit of black pepper on it. It's fucking really nice. So yeah, I like these weird nostalgia foods that, it's like nostalgia for a time I didn't personally experience, you know.

“Underrated stereo widening techniques?”

Yeah, this is Rob's blag. He does a lot of this stuff. Yeah, I mean just in general, just like, there's so many things you can do like this, but like, and there's a load of unknown ones. So like one is like using denoising but then taking the inverse and then processing that and knocking one, you know, knocking one channel out of phase or knocking both channels slightly out of phase with the mono. Which is the, so you're just taking the noise basically, and widening the noise effectively, and then mixing that back in. I like doing shit like. But yeah, I mean, in general, weird matrix mixing, I'm all over it because the first person I saw doing interesting mixing like that was this lad Pole. He used to knock about with a reflex a lot. He used to be in a reggae, I remember being around him and he was playing reggae records through a four track. So he had, like the record was playing into the four track but then what he'd done was he had on each channel, he had like on one channel, he just had the bass and then on another channel, he had the same record playing but just the mids and the bass and the treble turned down, and then on the other channel, he had the highs. So he had these three faders for each EQ band, and he was sending them to different effects, and I was like “Whoa, fucking hell! That's really nice.” So yeah, I've kind of, I've just taken that to so many places over the years, like that method of thinking about splitting an original stereo signal up into multiple parts and then recombining it again later and doing slightly different processing on each part, depending on how you're splitting it up. So, splitting it up using loads of different methods. And then, you know, doing different types of processing of them. So that just opens mixing right up, doing that kind of stuff. So yeah, in general that.

Meshuggah, yeah, I fucking forgot to mention them when I was talking about metal, but that's probably because they're not strictly metal. But yeah, I really rate them. There's a kind of, it's very mechanised and obviously it appeals to me because it's mostly about the rhythm. So yeah, I do really rate them. I think they're really good, but I can only really get through one album at a time because it gets a bit, it tires my ear brain out. Oh there's a car by the way. You're gonna have to wait for the car to disappear now.

God, I'm so far behind in the chat. I'm just reading out how far behind I am.

Sasha Gray's musical career? I don't know anything about Sasha Gray's musical career. [laughs] Oh God, I'm not interested in David Tibet at all. I have no, don't care. Edgemeister. [vapes] Yeah, Qebrus was amazing. Fucking hell.

“Gamer. Must’ve owned a ZX Spectrum”

Yeah no, actually because my dad was, my dad used to fit burglar alarms and he was a bit of a tech geek. He, you know, electronics geek, so, and engineering in general. He liked cars and he liked putting little weird boxes together and this, and he didn't like the Speccy. Remember the Speccy coming out, my dad was like “nope, don't like it. It’s shit,” and he had all these reasons for not liking it, and then the BBC [Micro] came out and he was like “Yeah, Acorn of the future,” and he made us get a BBC, which meant I had a fucking BBC. Which was good for Elite, but you know, for most other games and Chuckie Egg, and you know, Manic Miner. Decent port, Manic Miner on there, but a lot of other games were shit on there. I had Yie-Ar Kung Fu and then I had just tons of adventure games that I used to hack. So yeah, I was sort of into computers but in a bit of a weird way, but it was good because, obviously school got BBC, so then I knew what I was doing and I was a bit ahead of the pack. But in any other context, it was shit ‘cause you got on your mate's house, you know, all my mates were game swapping and sharing and copying stuff and then, yeah. God, I've got some funny stories from back then but they're a bit long. But yeah, so, and had mates with VIC-20s, mates with [Commodore] 64s, mates with Spectrums and I was the one weird kid who had a BBC. So, but you know, it was ‘cause my dad thought it was a superior computer and he was right, but it just wasn't that common, you know what I mean? So, it's fucking, that's what happens when your dad's into fucking computers, innit?

Dopex82: Can you enjoy normal music anymore? 😆

What the fuck is normal music? Yeah, of course I can! Like [vapes], I mean I think we make normal music, don't we? I think? It's pretty normal.

Fuck, I haven't drunk this coffee at all. This coffee is so good. Flasks: that's my recommendation for today. Fucking flasks. Worried about spilling drinks on your computer? Worry no more! Buy a fucking flask. Flasks in general. Hot coffee all day. Best invention ever. Fuck. I nearly dropped you then. Too much coffee. Right, so.

energyisneverequal: “Can't recall whether this is true or not, but that you were one of the few people who complained about the Selected Ambient Works 85-92 pre-mastering process from…?”

[laughs] The fuck?! That's not true at all! What the fuck? Where did that come from? “You were one of the few people who complained about the Selected Ambient Works…” No, that's not right! That's, I know what that is. That's Rich, that's, right so in, I remember this conversation. This is where my memory is coming into play now, so. From what I remember, and I might be wrong, but in ‘95 I had a conversation with Rich about how I'd heard that he used to master his tracks to long play DATs and I remember saying to him like “Really? Do you really do that?” because I was thinking wow, you must have really done a lot of stuff. Like I was quite impressed, actually, how much work he used to crank out, you know? Because we were quite slow and I think just because we had less equipment and stuff really, because we had to do a lot of it on the four track like doubling synths up and stuff. So it just took us longer to do stuff, you know, and we've been recording a lot to the [TASCAM] 244, which has a quite a different sound to recording to DAT. And when we got a DAT, I was a little bit like “oh, I'm not sure I can get down with this” because it's a bit clean. But I managed to figure it out how to do cleaner mixes and all that. But you know, so I think it probably just comes from that conversation maybe. A misremembering of that or maybe something, but I do think that like some of Rich's stuff has been badly handled post all that. Like I think the Classics album sounds like junk compared to the records, which just sound fucking great still, you know. But you know, you can blame Renaat [Vandepapeliere] for that shit, can’t you? It's not Rich's fault really.

“Have you ever owned an 808 or 909?”

No. We didn't have the money because, yeah, no, we just, I was just the wrong age really. If I'd have been a few years older, I probably would have because they were cheap until about ‘88, and then they just went through the roof, which you can blame Chicago House for, and kind of middle class Brits trying to do Chicago House, you know. So we just, the only thing we could get was a 606, which we bought in ‘88, early ‘88. Rob bought it off this lad Jaffa who used to live in the flats in Rochdale for 50 quid. Anyway…

“Favourite studio monitors?”

Yeah, so probably Dynaudio BM15As because I just know them so well, but that didn't mean they're the best or anything. They're just what I know really well and what I've been using for the longest time. So probably them, but it's not a recommendation really. It's just experience you know.

“Would you be interested in remixing a track on the new Grace Jones album?”

Is that a real question? Yeah, deffo! Fucking love Grace Jones, are you serious!? It's not sounding shit, I mean, that last thing, that Corporate Cannibal thing, I thought it was really good. Don't know if that were anything to do with you, but I really liked it because someone sent it to me wondering if I'd heard it, because it they thought I might be into it. And I think it's that thing of “oh, it sounds a bit like you. Maybe you like it.” But I just really liked it. And, but I love Grace. Grace is amazing. Fucking hell, that'd be such a killer remix. I mean, I really love Grace. I think she's fucking ace, like totally ace. Yeah, hit me up man. I mean, fucking, trying to think of a way of getting an email to me. [laughs] You send an email to Ned [Beckett], maybe. I'm not putting my email in here, so. You could find me on Mastodon if you know where to look, but I'm not dishing that out in here either, so. Yeah, if there's some way sending me a DM in this shit fucking platform, maybe you can do that. I don't know if there is or not, so. Otherwise, just put your email in the chat and I'll try and scroll back and get it later.

“Amazing FM synth for the book and you can buy this stuff.”

Blah blah blah. What's this?

“Do you speak Norwegian fluently?”

Nei. Jeg snakker norsk.

“What were the tracks you streamed on Xltronic in the early/mid 00s with titles like Toy, Small Animal Reprise, etc…?”

Oh yeah! [laughs] God! Shit, that someone would remember that. Nicecast, that's the fucking program I used to use! Nicecast, there you go. I knew I'd fucking remember. Yes, it was a Nicecast thing, right, so, yeah. Yeah, fuck, what were they? Did we just, fuckabouts, little tracks, actually ended up sending a lot of those bits off to [Andrew] McKenzie for one of the Hafler things, so he's got them now. And once that was done, that was it. I didn't want to use them at any point after that. But they were, some of them were the bits that are sent off to him because that was around the same time. So, but yeah, they’re just fuckabouts, just little things that I used to do, like laptop messing around bits that, you know, that you might make something that's not a track but you might make, just record it and think, well I might use that later. I might use a bit of it or sample it or whatever so. Do with those sort of things. [vapes]

“Do you have any special tricks with Quadraverb or do you just run sounds through it?”

[laughs] Both. That's a funny question. Yeah, I mean, you know it's got loads of MIDI on it. So fuck around with it, you know. See what you can do with it. There's loads of tricks. There's loads of Quadraverb tricks. There's just a book, you could write a book about the shit you can do with the Quadraverb. They're amazing little things. It's just mainly about the MIDI, you know, just the amount you can manipulate it. So just get busy with the MIDI. [rapper voice] Get busy with the MIDI!

“I remember in an old 2000s interview, you said you were reading Derrida and found the concept of deconstruction interesting. Are there any thinkers you find stimulating these days?”

Nah, I'm like shit at reading other thinkers. I liked Derrida because he was an awkward old cunt, and he was like, “yeah, but why? Why?” about everything. And I kind of like that, but it got boring as well because I was like well anyone could do this. If you read enough philosophy, anybody could do this and I think it was interesting what he did. I mean, really for me it became about, because, this is a tangential point but you probably understand what I mean. I think like the vast majority of debates that I see on the internet are about semantics, right? So they're just people arguing about what words mean, and I feel like Derrida was doing a very kind of advanced version of that, and it's fun for a while. But really, it’s just that. And yeah, I don't know.

Language is sort of necessarily imprecise. It's one of these things that's not, it's not designed to provide clarity. It's designed to convey with some degree of vagary, an idea in a vague sense so that the other person can then work with that, and I don't feel like it's necessary to be specific most of the time, and I don't think that language is built for that. And so using language to discuss language, it's a little bit, I like how recursive that can get and how kind of meta it is. But it's sort of, it's just like watching somebody pirouette and sort of do crazy looking acrobatics really, and I feel like that's what Derrida is doing in a way. Plus, you know it's got that childish kind of “but why?” sort of element to it, you know, which is appealing on a level.

But yeah, I remember like, because my grandad used to read some sort of postmodern philosophy stuff. He used to read like this bloke, Richard Rorty, and so I've been around that a little bit, and there's some elements of that that I remember him quoting to me that I used to find interesting, but I can't really remember much of it now. My dad used to read stuff like Alan Watts, the kind of beardy Buddhist guy, you know. My dad were into eastern philosophy and martial arts and all this kind of stuff, so. I was exposed to a bit of that and all growing up. But beyond that, no, I don't really, and I'm not that much of a kind of, I won't consider myself much of a deep thinker, although I do think a lot about things. I don't know if I'm a very deep thinker in particular, I'm kind of more intuitive I think, than him up, then sort of analytical, but people describe me as analytical all the time. So I don't know, maybe I am? I don't really know. I think I'll probably just appear analytical, but a lot of my conclusions, I don't arrive at via deduction, and there's a fair amount of induction and kind of feelings really, a lot of it's just feelings. I feel like I can sense things a lot of the time, and then I have to kind of justify that sense with a load of words, so. I'm probably not making much sense right now. Anyway…

Renoise, yeah I just did, I just, most of the Renoise stuff I did was just with audio files and stuff. I didn't really do a lot of sequencing of hardware, but I did sometimes sequence VSTs and stuff, and the bits of hardware sequencing in there as well. Yeah, there's a few bits. But yeah, mainly just working with samples, but it was just, I was using it to do things like remixes and stuff like the Surgeon remix, and Black Dog remix, and the Deneir remix. They were all done in there. So yeah, there was a sort of brief period really where I was using it a bit for things. Did a remix for Mogwai that they didn't want to use, so I don't know why that was. [vapes]

Fucking hell, I'm really sorry I'm so far back in the chat again, by the way.

Covorc, you've been asking me about Covorc. Covorc is Lee Gilbert from Nottingham, and I don't know if he's still working on music, but he should be. He was an immense talent in my opinion, but then his hairdressing career took over and he's a good hairdresser, so I don't blame him really. Bless him. I've not seen him for fucking years, but I used to really like Lee. Really sound.

I love how Vektroid’s doing a mini AMA within the AMA, like a kind of meta-AMA. [laughs] Now I'm enjoying this.

“Limmy lives on Twitch now”

Yeah, I know. I see him sometimes. “Using an alt though,” well obviously. I just feel like he knows who I am though, yeah.

“Did you have a Casio FZ-1?”

Yeah well, I did for a little while. Like so when we first started working in Dazzy's studio, which was only for about at the most a year that we worked in there, and we didn't really produce that much stuff because it used to take us a while using all that MIDI gear, and it was a bit like having to learn a whole studio at once. So that was quite difficult, but thankfully Daz has got good taste in gear. Good enough anyway that I was able to enjoy a lot of his synths and find some good stuff within them, you know, like the VFX-SD. At the time I'd never heard anything like wavetable synthesis, so that transwave synthesis stuff was just mind-blowing to my young brain, you know, just like wow, what the fuck is this, you know, it was so far away from anything I'd learned about. And yeah, he had an FZ, so, and the filters were really good in it and we used it on a few things. I think the only thing that's out there that's got that on is probably one of the tracks on that Sweatbox video, which is a hard to describe one because there's not many elements that I can refer to that I don't, you know, what it is, but it, anyway, one of the tracks on there is got it on pretty heavily. And yeah, I used to like the filters a lot. I remember first hearing Aphex stuff and thinking that's got to be an FZ, that filter, like straight away recognising it and we, by that point, yeah we didn't get a sampler until ‘92, ‘93, so like a proper sampler. I mean we had the RSD-10 and the Casio SK. So, when we came to get a sampler, we went for the ASR, the EPS I mean, because it was, it had all the effects in there, and everything and we didn't have many effects units at the time, so it just made sense to get that. But I always really liked the filters on the FZ. But the fact that you could only have one of them running at a time was a bit of a limitation. But the fact that it was analog was really good, so. Yeah, I think they're beautiful samplers, but they're just like, I was able to do a lot more using the EPS than I would have been able to do on the FZ, but the FZis good for doing that, if you know what I mean. So yeah, I think I'd have preferred to have an FZ in the early days, and I like using them a lot, and there's all kinds of fun stuff you could do, like where you rotate the sound through the outputs. That was a good trick. So there's a few things you could do on there that you couldn't do otherwise. There's a few tracks, actually I think that one of the D’Breez remixes uses the FZ pretty heavily because we did that in Dazzy's studio for him. So anyway, so that's out there. But yeah, and then I bought one off Simon Pyke some point during the 90s and it just kind of sat there for a while and I didn't really use it and then I sold it again. So yeah. [vapes]

What's my skin care routine? At the moment, Just a bit of sun cream because I'm sitting out here. So, you know. Otherwise, now just fucking water. I don't really use soap on my face, so if that helps, because otherwise I get breakouts. I get acne sometimes. It's anxiety related as well. Like if I'm not getting enough sleep, I get it really bad so. Sorry. I was probably covering the mic over there.

“Many times get through the early school years of blind intelligence and don't build a foundation for efficient studying?”

Yes! Exactly, yes! I was a fucking shit student. I didn't want, I didn't like the formality really. I also like didn't like the fact that I knew more about some of the topics than some of the teachers. I don't say not to sound big or anything, but it just annoyed me that when I was learning about atoms, I knew about particles and they wouldn't teach us about it in middle school in the first two years, and I asked my physics teacher, Mr. Frohman, I'm not going to tell you stories about Mr. Frohman on here because I'll end up getting in trouble but like privately if you ever want to ask me about Mr. Frohman, I'll tell you some shit. But yeah, I remember he was teaching us about atoms and he said “atoms are the smallest thing” and I said “no there is, no they're not” like I was going “what about protons and neutrons and electrons?” I didn't know about up and down quarks and all that then, so I didn't want to go, I would have said that as well, but I didn't know then. But like he would like, you're like “yeah, well I don't have to teach you about that yet. You learn about that later,” and I said “oh. Does that mean I could do your job then?” [laughs] And he was like yeah, he laughed about it though, so that was good. But he used to fuck me off and it'd be like, I didn't like the National Curriculum at all. I think I would have been better with a one-on-one tutor. I think I would have learned more, but, so I used to get bored a lot of the time or I'd just lose, I'd like lose track, so I'd just concentrate more on how much of an arse the maths teacher was being than what she was actually saying, you know, like concentrate on how she was picking on and bullying other students in the class. I never used to really get any of that from teachers, but there were other students who would get bullied just for being curious, you know, and stuff like that. So, yeah, I don't know. I'd get distracted too much by weird little dynamics in the classroom to actually pay attention to what we're actually meant to be learning.

truedotl: That’s not asperger sy you’re describing, Ppl should stop diagnosing themselves

Okay. I mean I can give you the email address of the doctor who diagnosed me if you want. You can have a conversation with him about it. Would that be helpful?

The weird thing about Asperger's and Autism is the different parts of the brain that are affected by it, I think. You know, whether it's your hippocampus or your amygdala that are acting up. But in my case, I get like overwhelmed emotionally pretty easily. I always think like it's weird that people don't detect our emotions and stuff, it’s ‘cause, but I always think it, maybe it's just because I'm a bit more sensitive to that stuff, I don't know. Like I think average people probably just don't detect the emotion in it as easily as I do. I don't know, it's weird. I think they're less sensitive emotionally than I am.

Yeah, the flow, like that Inland Empire pullback and reveal is one of the best moments in cinema, full stop. It's amazing. I'm glad you mentioned that. It's just amazing. It's right up there with the bit in The Shining where he’s staring at the maze, and then it's zooming in and then you realise it's the actual maze. Fuck, that's an amazing moment. It's my favourite bit of The Shining.

Chris Morris’ Jam, yeah, it's so fucking twisted. It's basically, what I think Jam is, and I think a lot of people get it wrong because they think it's just edgy comedy that's trying to kind of shock you into laughing. It is that, a little bit, but it's really, I think what it is, it's a satire of British attitudes and the kind of rancid people that you find around the UK, and the stupid fucking things that they think and do all the time, and it's so savage, you know, and I think this is why you see a lot of authority figures in there, and doctors and stuff like this because, and this kind of appeal to authority problem that the UK has got in general, and just how horrible and abusive people can be to each other, and you know, how disgusting people can be. So I think he was getting to a point where he was just thinking about society at large by then, not just, you know, the media or whatever, you know, it becoming a much bigger quest. Actually, my favourite Chris Morris things are probably the Blue Jam monologues because I think they're amazing. They're such a unique view of London. I mean they dovetail quite nicely with things like The Yob and some of Charlie Brooker’s stuff, you know like Nathan Barley as well, you know? It's a kind of unique view of London that you don't really get from anywhere really. I wish there were more things like them Blue Jam monologues. I think they're incredible, actually, like real, super good. They’re beautifully made.

Alright, where are we? Fuck, I've lost you again. Sorry about being so far back in the chat, I'm trying to get through it, though. There's no stream delay, I'm just shit at answering enough questions. These are old.

What do I think of 4chan as an anonymous platform? [laughs] Oh God, this is a conversation, fucking hell, we're going to have that conversation, aren’t we? It was good in 2006, ‘07. It got a bit worse in 2009. It took a proper fucking dive around 2011. By 2014, it was basically toast. It was just, I stopped really frequenting it around 2012, 2013 because it was just so rancid. And yeah, it's always been a cesspool, we all know that. There were good people on there. There were bad people on there, but there were a lot of bad actors, you know, and obviously this there's a shitload of content that you would at first, you would try and argue with, and then you realise that there were actually teams of operators on there trying to push things ideas, agendas, stuff like that, so. I think I first realised that the late 2000s, when all the kind of anti-Semitic stuff started getting really prevalent, you know. It wasn't just kids doing like edgy internet abuse, it was like really targeted, forced memes basically by that point, and yeah, I don't know. We can have a long conversation about 4chan, but it should probably be two-way. I don't feel like I should just sit and monologue about it. Pretty sure everything I'm saying moot [Christopher Poole] would agree with though, to be honest. It must feel pretty shitty to start, you'd get kind of, to get kicked off [Something Awful] and then just end up doing your nice little anime board and then for it to turn into a propaganda channel for bad actors and fucking neo-Nazis. I mean, shit me, what a blow, you know? But then again I suppose he made a lot of money, so, whatever.

Right, I've jumped to the top, so I've probably missed a shit ton of stuff. So maybe I'll scroll back a bit. Okay, now I've, now I can always scroll back so fast, so I'll probably miss some stuff, So. But all you kind of, “where is he in the chat” people are gonna be happier because I'm closer to you now.

Ignasgutauskas: What he said on language was to the point. Language involves trickery, e.g., it inscribes us into cultural refferences, opinions,etc., and this is structurally (not conspiratorially) designed for us to not touch truth about ourselves. We say things but rarely see it is us saying them.

Yeah, I mean coming to terms with your own subjectivity is hard, innit, for humans. Especially when we're discussing things that are, you know, to do with perception, which is an active process, right? So yeah, it's fucking hard work and that's why I find like discussion art and music to be really kind of painful beyond being very basic and kind of broad strokesy about it, you know. It's hard to talk about this stuff with any real depth, and so I find it much easier to produce work than talk about it, and these chats are alright because I get to talk about a lot of different topics. But you know, we're not really talking about what I do because I don't know how to do that, and I don't even know if, I don't know if anybody ever asks the right questions and I don't know how I would answer them even if they did, you know. But it's nice when I see moments of insight popping up in the chat, so I do appreciate you doing this because, I mean you lot are contributing a lot more to this than I am, so.

“Dael, Rae, and rale only have letters that are in Rochdale. Is this intentional?”

[laughs] Prob, Dael is, yeah! [vapes] Although I'm not technically from Rochdale, I was born there but I moved to Middleton when I was one. So I grew up in Middleton, but like Rob and Ged and a lot of my other mates are from Rochdale, and when we started out sending demos out, we didn't want to put my address on the thing because it'd be an M24 postcode, which, because of Madchester bands and in 1989, 1990, that weren't an association we wanted to have. We didn't want to be part of that Madchester thing but all, you know, we wanted to be outside it. So we opted to do everything via Rob's address, which meant that when we were approaching journalists, we could say we were from Rochdale and not Manchester because, you know, then we didn't have to deal with all that. But yeah, we're about, we're a mix really of Manchester and Rochdale, and I suppose Middleton is itself a mix of Manchester and Rochdale. But so, I suppose we kind of lean towards the Rochdale thing, and my family, a lot of them are from north of the Midlands in Manchester. But a few of them from south Manchester as well, so. I'm a bit of a mixed bag really.

“Can you tell us something about the Autechre/Saw You demo?”

Yeah! So both of them are tracks that we did in Dazzy’s studio in ‘89, ‘90. They're like, one of them is on the Sweatbox video. I think it might be the last track. It's kind of a slow, plug-in kind of house beat, sort of techno thing with long keys in it, and a kind of weird saxophone sounding sound doing the, which I think was a TX81Z sound. It might have been a  from before we knew really what we were doing with that thing. Got a battery warning. So yeah, that's Saw You. And then the Autechre track that's called Autechre, I don't think that's out there. I haven't got any plans to release them songs so, no. As far as I know, that hasn't leaked anywhere. But the pictures of the tapes are real. It was funny seeing that bloke on Discogs having to argue with people that it was real, you know? They were saying like “That's, I don't believe it. Nobody was spray painting tape labels back then!” Well fuck off, yes we were! I can't help it if we're a bit of ahead of everyone graphically, you know. It's just we’re writers, of course! We’re fucking graff writers! Of course we're going to spray our tape labels, what else we're going to do with them? It's like they've never seen the sleeve for Cavity Job.

Metroid Prime, I answered that earlier so you can just watch it later.

“Arc'teryx is the shit. Love their build quality.”

I'm not going to sell Arc'teryx on here, but they are the shit. So it's, my gran, alright, so my dad's parents were both art teachers at Rochdale College, and my gran taught textiles. She actually taught fucking John Richmond and Betty Jackson in, but just GAD [general art and design?], like she taught them basics, you know, just college stuff, you know, 16 to 18. But yeah, she used to complain all the time about tailoring and Arc'teryx is one of the first sport labels I've seen that had like amazing tailoring. I know a little bit about how to make clothes. Not a lot, but a little bit. And yeah, I do really rate Arc'teryx. I'm not just saying this because it's a cool label, you know, they are really fucking well made. You can buy Arc'teryx. I've got Arc'teryx jackets that I bought 12, no, 18 years ago that are still going, so you know, you want to talk about ecologically friendly labels. You can buy Patagonia stuff, yeah. But it'll fuck up on you after five years. So yeah, you know it's made from recycled plastic, big deal, but what if it's only lasting five years.

So I'm not gonna do all this kind of, you know, one label is better than the other. But I do really rate Arc'teryx, just for build. So you’re totally right, build quality. I'm not an Arc'teryx fucking sales channel though. If they want to send me some shit though, fucking feel free because it's expensive is all fuck. But I'm not like really needing it either because it just lasts forever so. When I buy shit, I know I'm still gonna have it in 10 years so. I'm more on that tip than anything these days. It's just turning into my dad basically, that's what everyone does, innit, at a certain point, start buying things because they're well made. Apart from fucking t-shirts.

“I watched The Expanse but I already forgot how it went “

Yeah, I know. It is a bit like that, innit. It feels more substantial than it is, you know? But Avasarala is a cool character, so you know. And Drummer, I like Drummer.

“Favourite Kubrick film?”

Probably The Shining, but the European cut though, not the American one. I want to like Eyes Wide Shut, but I just think it's just a bit cheesy, the sex stuff in it, and I can't handle that scene with Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise where she's getting stoned. It's the old fucking actors pretending to be stoned thing, which it just doesn't work. I get the feeling that she's never really got stoned from that.

I don't know. Why when Americans do acting, like, pretending to be stoned, why did they go, [*squints and smokes joint*] like that, [*exhales and remove joint at the same time*], and then they go [*whiny noises*] like a stupid voice. Like what’s that? [laughs] Who does that? Who’s ever done that? [whiny voice] “I wanna talk like that now, I’m a bit stoned!” At least she didn't do that.

“Thanks for the backup on the Autism thing.”

I'm not like, I don't have to fucking, I'm not you wearing this like a badge or anything. I'm talking about it because somebody who I know who also has Asperger’s told me that it'd be useful for other people if I talked about it. So, and also because, you know, I'm one of the few who's fucking made it through unscathed, you know what I mean? I managed to turn it into a fucking, I turned an affliction into a recording career, so you know. And it isn't really an affliction for me, and I think that's something that we have to talk about a bit more, you know what I mean, that there's some of us out there who are getting through and we're doing alright, and it's actually a bit of a boon for us, you know, in the same way that you've got a lot of corporate CEOs who've got narcissistic personality disorder, and they're doing fine out of it. Everybody else is like “fuck off, you cunt.” But they're doing fine, you know what I mean? In my case, hopefully I'm not hurting anybody to get where I am. So, you know.

Did I rate Nathan Barley? Yeah, quite a lot. There's obviously echoes of The Yob in there which I really kind of click with, and I really like Charlie's kind of points of view on a lot of things. I find a bit of Black Mirror a bit depressing sometimes, so, and a bit obvious, you know, like riffing on current trends in technology and extrapolating them and then sort of doing that. So that's a bit, but that is what The Twilight Zone used to do as well, and I think as a kind of anthology series, it works fairly well but there is a kind of technophobic element to both The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror that I find a little bit off-putting in itself. But then again humans are humans and technology is an extension of us, and maybe it's more of a comment on humans being humans, right? So, but I do rate him a lot. I like Dead Set. I think Dead Set's really good. And yeah I really like Nathan Barley. I think I liked TVGoHome as well before Nathan Barley. Not the TV show, although the TV show’s alright, but the actual publication TVGoHome I used to really like, and I used to love reading The Cunt! They were really good, you know. So yeah, there, some of his stuff, I rated Charlie Brooker before he was a household name, really, when he was just doing TVGoHome. So I was really looking forward to Nathan Barley and when I first saw it I was like, “yeah, this is good. I'm not totally sure,” but it grew on me pretty quickly. I love the Jones bits, you know the fact Jones being a kind of a parody of a type of electronic musician, these kind of middle class dropouts that were running around London around the early 2000s, trying to be more extreme than one another, was so accurate. So yeah, there's loads of elements of it that I like and I really like Jonathan Whitehead. I think he's massively unsung and if you're a Morrisski, you're gonna know who he is, but like a lot of people won't, but his shit's amazing. It's properly heavyweight, you know, everything that he's done really, I mean especially the theme music to Brass Eye and all the kind of extended extreme bits of that, just epic. You know, I think he's brilliant. So, I think the Jones tracks were done by him. You can sort of feel him in there, you know. His, sort of, extrapolation techniques, you know, really good.

Four Lions, I think, you know, I can't watch Four Lions because it's quite tragic and sad. But what I remember of it is that it was very, very accurately observed slice of Northern [South] Asian Manc culture, and from what I know of Asian communities up north, it was spot on, and it's probably the best depiction of that type of community that I've seen, actually, ever, in the same way that Rita, Sue and Bob Too is the best depiction of 80s life that I've ever seen, and Alan Clarke in general is fucking amazing. Let's talk about Alan Clarke, just as a complete tangent. Everyone should see Christine and Made in Britain basically. But Alan Clarke in general is amazing.

“Who has the best sense for pitch from the traditional Warp guys? Do you know anyone with perfect pitch?”

Yeah, I think Rob's got perfect pitch. He can always tell when I'm out, when I'm out of key. Like I can sing in tune, but be out of key, and Rob will immediately know and tell me off for it and get irritated by it. He actually doesn't like it. He finds it grating, but I don't think he's, he’s funny because he's not got really any musical training. He's just born with perfect pitch. [laughs] It's like a curse, you know? But in terms of who's the best, the most musically trained, it'd have to be Tom [Jenkinson], but I think BoC are like, I think maybe BoC Mike [Sandison], actually it's between Mike and Tom because I think both of them have got quite deep musical training, you know. Although Tom's probably a bit more of a museo[?], if you know what I mean. I think Mike is like, he's just very aware of nuances. I think both of them are very good on that kind of stuff compared to me anyway. I mean that's not hard though. I'm Mr. Basic.

“The fact that people enjoy being diagnosed and very often asked to be diagnosed”

Yeah, I think maybe, I think it has become a bit of an issue. Especially that people want to feel different and part of a group. I don't really feel part of a group. Group membership was never really my thing. I think the whole idea of somebody wanting to be diagnosed with Autism so that they can become part of a group is interesting from the point of view of them having been denied group membership for so long because of their Autism that they probably do desperately want to be part of some group. But don't really know what group that is and as soon as they find a community of people who are like them, i.e all different to each other, that they define some solace in that. But I find that all the politics around Autism would be a little bit, makes me feel weird, you know? But yeah, I feel, again that's because I find group membership quite difficult and I've, so I've looked at kind of things like communities for people with Autism and it's just a bunch of people who like saying “does anybody else feel like this,” and it's like well, it's not like that. I feel like we're all just a bit more different. So yeah, I don't know. maybe somebody can correct me on that because my understanding of it is a lot less refined than my doctors, so.

vektroidlive: 4chan poked the beehive too many times during the occupy protests and now it’s just a bunch of undercover agents arguing with other undercover agents who dont realize they’re both working for the same agency

[laughs] Yeah, I mean it's just, it's a fucking mess, innit. Like why would anybody go there now, you know what I mean? Like, there's not a lot to be gained and I'm pretty sure if you set up any other anonymous online community, you go the same way as well, because it's just what you can do when you haven't got a fixed identity. You know, it's one of those things you can do. Reddit's almost as bad though. There's so many bad actors on Reddit now. It was good in the early days when everybody, all the smart people left 4chan and went to Reddit, but then it just turned to shit as well. It's better though. It's better, and I can still hang out there with some sense of self-respect still. But still, you know, it's still a fucking shithole. Then again where isn't, I mean Mastodon's probably the nicest place at the moment. It's the only place where I feel like I can be around a bunch of people who are a bit more like me, and there's a fair few smart people on Mastodon, so it feels a little bit more tame. You know what I actually liked, which is gonna be really unpopular because nobody else liked it, but was, I can't even remember what it was called now? Google's social network [Google Plus] because I was able, and everybody doesn't like this, the curate, the way the curation worked on there with circles, but I liked it because I could have all these different feeds for different people. But it didn't last long, and then it just turned to shit because nobody was on there except a bunch of scientists and academics. So that didn't last, but that could have been quite a good social network early on. I had that feeling anyway.

Wow, what's this bass? Bass.

“4chan is the last bastion of free speech.”

Is it, fuck! I mean I'm doing free speech now. There's free speech all over the internet! What are you talking about? “It's the last bastion of a certain kind of speech” and it isn't even the last bastion, if you, I mean, if you want to find that kind of speech, just look in YouTube comments. I mean look anywhere.

I don't, yeah, I mean you're right, brap, about prescriptions. But I don't need anything. So it was probably a little bit pointless in my case, and I'm probably not getting much out of it other than knowing “oh right, so that's why I feel like that.” You know, it's my amygdala is firing too much. It's malfunctioning because of the brain defect, you know that kind of thing? I'm sort of more interested in it from a kind of physical point of view, but I don't need to regulate my emotions using mood stabilisers or anything, and I fucking wouldn't anyway, even if I thought I had to unless I was actually like, I don't think I'd medicate unless I was schizophrenic or something. And I know there's a bit of an overlap with autism and schizophrenia anyway. So yeah maybe, if I was really bad, I might. But I don't have to do and I certainly wouldn't if I didn't have to.

That's pretty much what happened with USENET. It is, yeah, and that's why I'm not on USENET anymore. Although USENET, I mean it was really just became somewhere to share binaries, didn't it eventually. So you know, and share weird opinions. [vapes]

spaces how V was Rob, so I can't talk about how he did it. You're gonna have to ask him. Rob knows some mean tricks for stereo manipulation, and he doesn't even share him with me, so.

“Have you ever met up with any of the Detroit heads?”

Yeah, I know quite a few of them. Yeah, not well but yeah, I know, I met Carl Craig. Met Derrick [May]. Not met Reese [Kevin Saunderson]. Met Mad Mike [Banks], really liked him. Met Gerald Donald, really liked him. Met James Stinson, he was really nice, not at all what I expected. Aux 88. Who else? Richie Hawtin, know him. He's not Detroit obviously, is he? But you know, let's not go there. Trying to think who else. Yeah, you're gonna have to start naming names for me to say whether I know them or not. But yeah, I'd say I know Kyle [Hall] a bit, you know, I think he hates me, but you know, it is what it is, no pun intended.

“Do you smoke joints sometimes?”

Yeah.

“Kapol Introl live recording, hard to describe how much I love that. Do you know where that lead’s from?”

Dunno which one you mean, but could be a few places. Played it quite a bit back then.

“It's been mentioned before, but I think you really like the work of Béla Tarr.”

Okay, I'll check it. I don't know what that is.

“You talk about how Surripere was made?”

Yeah, so we had the back half of that. That was made already and then the front half of it was another track, and then they were sort of glued together. And then the transition was worked out sort of after the both halves had been made, if you know what I mean. So it was kind of two tracks jammed together and then a ton of work was done on the back half of it, and I don't know. It's sort of like there's a lot in there. I mean mainly, like that sampling on the back half of it is all Battery, sort of loop position modulation in Battery, which is really good for doing that. Like we used to do that before on the EPS, but you could do it better in Battery because it had a kind of, some kind of what you call like a crossfade built in, and it was quite well handled and it had a quite plasticky sound to it. So, used that on a few things. Used on that Coil remix as well. So yeah, like, and then, trying to think what else. Because the front part of it was like a PPG with Nord Drums, and just like an echo unit? I can't remember what the echo was now. Some delay thing? And yeah, you know, pretty basic really.

“Have you developed separate synth tools for percussion versus melodic harmonic stuff? Or is that distinction meaningless at this point?”

Right, yeah that got asked on YouTube. I assume you're the same person. So like, and I didn't really know how to answer it. It sort of is meaningless, yeah. I've got, so I've made a few drum synths that are just, just do drums, but I use a lot of my other synths to do drum sounds as well, because they can, and so I use both. But the drum, what's different about the drum synths compared to a lot of the other synths is that the attack portion of the envelope is fixed. So it's always going to have that same snap. Whereas the rest of the note length can be varied. Whereas a lot of my other synths don't do that. So the envelopes are more dynamic and do a lot more changing around and stuff. So they have to be told to just stay in one place, so it's a little bit different. But yeah, I don't know. I don't make as many drum synths as I do regular synths because I tend to make regular synths that could make drum sounds if I wanted them to. But I've made a few, like clap generators and things like that are quite specific things, you know?

Okay, I'm gonna need to get a power pack, so I'll be back, and on.

Part 3 of 4

[vapes]

“The best anime of all time is Macross Plus”

No, like, is it? [laughs] I don't know though, what the best, I grew with Gatchaman. So I've got like a funny, fucking, old man attitude to anime. [vapes]

I don't know how to play chess. Never played it. I've sort of, I think I have played it a couple of times, but I had somebody had to walk me through what I was doing. So I'm shit at chess. I don't got a good enough memory for it.

energyisneverequal: How do you feel about queer or religious interpretations of your music? I’ve seen it happen often with myself with records like con and exai, while others cite stuff like elseq. I would think this would be a stretch if artists like SOPHIE didn’t exploire that queer aesthetic in sophie’s records.

I don't really have a stance on that because I'm not queer enough to have an understanding of what that experience is like. Especially for trans people, not that trans people aren’t queer, but you know, they get bracketed together, don't they? But I don't really know. I know I liked a lot of gay music growing up though. I loved Coil and synthpop in general was, you know, a lot of the artists were gay. So, and then I know Depeche Mode used to flirt a lot with that kind of imagery, but you know, in the early 80s it was like one of the main sources of electronic music, it was a gay scene. So in Manchester, originally when the house scene kicked off in sort of ‘86, ‘87, it was mainly the gay scene who were into it, apart from, you know, Black kids on my side and that. So it was like, yeah weird overlaps for us, you know what I mean? I always found it like a real source of, kind of, a different kind of energy. So I've always been interested in that stuff but as an outsider. Pretty much.

“Hanal mentioned recentish that it was going to be a follow-up to Cavity Job called Wild Style, but didn't happen. Was the tune recorded though?”

No, but we talked about it.

“Can I ask David Lynch has influenced your practice and our work?”

I don't know if I could, if I know how, I'm sure he has, because he's been a big influence. Think the first thing I ever saw by him was The Elephant Man, and I was really kind of repulsed and drawn in at the same time, and it was really sad. It made me feel like, more sad than anything I'd seen. I remember seeing that I'm feeling, and that the sad, had the same feeling watching Frankenstein, actually, the original, I don't know if it's the original, whatever, but it was an old black and white Frankenstein film and there was a kind of deep sadness there as well. Like, so yeah, that was the first experience and then Eraserhead, and then Blue Velvet, sort of in that order. But yeah, like I think Blue Velvet was the one where I was really like, “wow, what is this vibe? Like, this is weird.” Like Eraserhead obviously had a huge impact on me and continues to mainly just the use of sound and the sort of emptiness and the bleakness of its settings. I found weirdly relatable because it's a bit like wandering around an old, because I used to live quite close to an industrial estate that you could get onto quite easily, and just wander around and at night, that place was fucking strange. Like it had a really odd vibe to it, and as a young kid, it has a, you know, you feel, it's strange. It's not like a normal place, an industrial estate. They're weird places and there were bits of that film that reminded me a bit of that. So, but he just turned up the bleak to like a million, so.

“Saw that photo where you were wearing a beautiful DBC32 Data Bank. What's your favourite wristwatch?”

Probably one of the, like ‘81, ‘82, I can't remember what year exactly. It was an AE, was it an AE-11 or an AE-12? I can't remember. It was one of the ones with a split face. So at the top it had a fake analog LCD, and the bottom was like a digital display, and then it had like little notches in the side between the buttons, and then the blue outline. I used to love that thing. I thought it was aesthetically amazing. But yeah, I've got a lot of Casios. Like I used to slightly collect them because they were quite cheap, and for a while, they just weren't at all popular. People had stopped wearing watches by that point, or they, you know when the Swatch thing happened. That pretty much killed Casios for a while in a fashion sense. But I kept buying them because I just liked them and got loads. I really like the solar one. I've got a solar one and it works without a battery. It's just got a capacitor in it, like a slow discharge capacitor in it, which I think is amazing. Like some of their designs are really good internally. Casio’s a great company, I think. Super interesting!

“Could you talk further on your relationship with Jhon Balance?”

Not really. I mean I kind of, he's one of those people who I'd see at gigs and then he'd occasionally ring me up, and we'd have really long conversations. So I don't know that I'd call it a proper normal relationship, and I never really hung out with him or anything. But I feel like I know him quite well because I kind of know what his interests are and he would send me bits of books. You know, like he sent me Society of the Spectacle, which he just thought I should read, you know what I mean? So he would send me stuff like that. He sort of introduced me to Situationism in an odd way, and yeah, I kind of, I liked his way of thinking about things. It was quite kind of, you know, he had a good understanding of the history of culture that I think it's sort of missing actually in a lot of modern artists. A lot of modern artists just sort of have a few reference points and then they set off and they go, and me and Rob are a bit like that to be honest. But he had a really deep understanding of cultural practice that's quite unusual within music. It's more common within art really. But yeah I liked him. He was cool, but I wouldn't say I knew him that well.

“Have you ever been to a psychoanalyst or therapist?”

Well, I mean clinical psychologists, but psychoanalysis is a very particular kind of stream of thinking. So I'm not that interested in that to be honest, and “therapist” could just be anybody from a counselor through to a clinical psychologist. It's just too much of a vague term. So I don't really know what to say about that.

Upstream Color, yeah, I love it! So if you're on that tip, Under the Skin, [Jonathan] Glazer's film is amazing. It's just totally amazing. It's one of my favourite science fiction films ever. I love Upstream Color. I think it's really good. I love the wet, the like, the way it's shot is really odd. It reminds me a little bit of being on acid. It's super strange, especially the outdoor daylight stuff. I don't know what he's using, what lenses and stuff, what cameras, but it's got a very odd feel to it. Very particular. Yeah I've, I think Shane Carruth is one of those people I just wish he'd made more work, you know? But I get that it takes him ages to do anything. I can relate to that. So yeah, I just wish there were more films of his that we could talk about.

Modern science fiction, you know, I kind of, some films I enjoy and they're a bit ropey.But you know, I'll kind of enjoy it because the concept is a bit mind bendy. I quite like Coherence from that point of view. It was a bit silly, but it was sort of, and it was a, there were things about it that were clunky and it was a bit like the acting was a bit ropey. But I enjoyed it, you know, it was sort of shit and good at the same time. Yeah, I don't know, like I think Under the Skin is so much better than a lot of films. I don't really know. There's not a lot I can say about it because it's just so, it's just so atmospheric and sort of interesting and the whole idea of not knowing what you are, I think it sort of it clicks with me somehow. I found it really kind of engaging and I could relate, even though I'm not, you know, an alien who goes around hunting people in a van so that they can lure them into a pool of black sludge. That's, I don't do that. Yeah, it's good.

“Hello from Wilmslow! Do you know it?”

Course I know Wilmslow! Fucking hell! [laughs] Hello Wilmslow! Yeah.

“Is it possible you're gonna do a massive SoundCloud dump like Aphex Twin?”

No, probably not. I don't know if I need to. Plus, I think a lot of our unreleased stuff are sort of, it's unreleased for a reason, you know? Like I want to leak them, that Hanal thing, I want to leak that myself. That was just, they're the kind of tracks that I'd like, I don't mind them being on a CD to DJ with at someone's party, where people are only going to hear them once, and not know where it was and not really remember it. But I wouldn't really want them out there because they're just fuckabouts or sketches, you know what I mean? So, and some of the Gescom ones are things that are just tryouts, where we've tried a few things out and we've ended up nailing it on another track, and that ended up coming out. But them bits are just bits that, you know, they're not meant to be out there really, but they're alright for DJing with, and I don't mind if some of my mates are going to play them in DJ sets, but I'm not sure that I'd want to like have them as a release. So yeah, you know, I guess you seen behind the curtain a bit there, you know. But I'm not sure I want to just do that because I think that there should be a kind of line drawn, and I think, you know, I've always been at the Kubrick mentality of just like getting all your archive and burning it just before you die. That's my tip. That's probably what I'm gonna do.

“I'm off Facebook but I am trying to get to Mastodon.”

Is that you, Aleksi? Yeah, like if you're serious about that, it's, I don't know how much you'd like it. You might find some of the people a bit annoyingly pseudo intellectual. But like, and the politics might weigh you down a bit, knowing you. But at the same time, it's, there's a lot of smart people on there. So you know, ups and downs basically. You should try it! I like it personally. I think it's a, at the moment, it's nascent enough to be like a good social network. But as soon as all the idiots flood in, it's gonna turn to shit, you know that, right? Like they all do. So, but for now, yeah, it's good. You can make friends on there, you know. Looking at how you are on Twitter, I think you probably fit in there, you know? There's some brains on there.

“Erasure was the gayest show I ever saw. Just wild for the 80s!”

Bruh. I mean, look I'm kind of, you know, Erasure were very gay, weren't they? They were about as gay as you can get. Yeah, Andy Bell is probably the gayest person ever to be on stage. That's worth thinking about, innit?

“Right, so there's a gamelan in Parhelic Triangle. Where did you get it?”

Bali.

“I always suspected you borrowed the one Tom Jenkinson brought back from Asia which he used in Gong Acid.”

Yeah, it's funny that because when I went there, he was about to go there and he was really weirded out. So we actually got, ‘cause I bought like quite a lot of gamelan stuff when I was over there, because it's cheap basically, and they'll export it for you and everything, so as long as you're willing to wait for the shipping. It's really cheap to get it. And they’ll, you can just get them to custom build you it basically. So I've done that and so yeah, it's around the same time but I think we went to different places. I'm not sure if we've gotten built in the same place. But yeah, I gave them away to the Suffolk Schools gamelan when me and Chantal split up, which is like 2005, so I haven't had them since then, but I had them all the time I was living in Suffolk. So I've got, basically bought them in ‘99. Got them shipped to Sheffield and they sat in boxes for ages, and then the lads who were storing them in the studio, which was a studio in Sheffield. A lad called Dave Willie, don't know if he's Wilkinson or Williamson, but he's a lad who lived in Sheffield and they'd opened them up. Him and this other lad, Ross, who were working on stuff, and they used them a bit, I think. And then so, and then I took them to Suffolk and I had them from about 2000 to just before, like late ‘99 to 2005. So yeah, I had them and I had them downstairs and so we had a studio, it was in like a barn, and then downstairs in the barn, I just had all the gongs laid out, like a whole room full of them. But I only used them on a few tracks. I used them on VI Scose Poise and Parhelic Triangle, that we've released and there's a few probably unreleased ones as well, so.

Dee-Shaya: “Do you often get inspired or scared of your dreams?”

Yeah. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I have fucking really weird dreams that I can't put my finger on. Fever dreams were probably the most scary. Actually, the few episodes when I was a kid where I had a fever, and I'd have what I believe may be Alice in Wonderland syndrome and where I'd get disturbing sense of, first of all, objects that were far away had appeared to be right in front of me, but very small. But, and then all very big, and so I've have this weird thing of not being able to gauge distance, and scale would get mixed up and have these weird fucking dreams that weren't really dreams. They would sort of, almost like that bit like tripping or something where you kind of be trying to conceptualise things that were impossible. So you'd have like things like an impossibly heavy rock suspended from an impossibly thin filament, or something that was sort of like an impossibly large curved surface that appeared flat because it was right next to your eyeball, or like a sphere that was also a kind of weird folded like a Pringle shape, or a kind of, or like a sort of banana, weird banana shaped sphere, and weird sounds that were like impossibly loud and this feeling of like touching your fingertips together. But it also being like, this kind of weird like a textural confusion, and the feeling of you, the very edges of your fingertips touching. The very kind of way they're almost not touching, but they are, being like an impossibly large surface.

None of this shit makes any sense, but it was like at the time it was really vivid and really fucking disturbing. And you, and it's sort of like you can feel a weird sense of the infinite and like the word perfect, something about the word perfect, I don't even know what that means. But yeah, those were pretty disturbing episodes, I've got to say, I was pretty young and not knowing the difference between little and big and like getting confused between things that was impossibly tiny and impossibly huge, and then feeling like the same thing. My brain being, not being able to understand what that means. You know, I was probably only about seven or eight or something when I was having these episodes. I had quite a few of them because I had like a lot of fevers when I was a kid because various health issues that I had. So yeah, long story. I could go on about that for ages. But yeah, basically the long and short of that is, yeah, dreams are fucking strange and I have a lot of very strange dreams that are almost like science fiction scenarios, like very odd stuff. One where lightning was striking the ground in it, but it was solid. So it was like immediately freezing into these giant kind of crystals. Anyway, I think people describing their dreams is quite boring. So I'm going to stop now.

“I often think about that Paul McCartney, from the Beatles, quote where it's like you can't sit around and wait to be inspired. You have to put in the work to find inspiration.“

Yeah. For me definitely. Like I only get ideas when I'm halfway through doing something that was sort of directionless, right? So you can start off without any sense of what it is that you're trying to achieve, and just swap things out and then at some point, you kind of have an “aha!” moment, you know? But you have to dig to find it. It's not just going to reveal itself to you. It's not how, I'm not the type of person who can sort of sit and imagine a track and then realise the track. It don’t work for me like that at all. I have to be in it to see the stuff, you know.

“Does Drane3 exist?”

I don't know.

“Fuck Freud! All my homies hate Freud!”

This [laughs], yeah, I did, as a kid, right, I preferred Jung to Freud. Like I don't, I think Freud was right about some stuff, like very early child development and how important it is and all that. I think he's probably on, he had some good intuitions about that. But a lot of the stuff about everything being about your relationship with your mother is just like well, too much coke, man. But I like Jung and I like the idea of archetypes and I found it quite a romantic, kind of appealing idea. I like the idea that your dreams are sort of acting out scenarios that are hardcoded, almost. I find that quite appealing but I'm not sure what it means, and I'm not sure if he was right either. it's just appealing on some level, you know. Jung's one of those people I rediscover every few years and think yeah man! Fucking hell, so yeah, more than I would Freud. I find Freud a little bit, you know, he's like a dictator in he or something, you know.

dj_shapely: any comments on the role humor plays in your music? I’ve def found certain moments quite funny, odd juxtapositions, etc.

Yeah, I mean it does because I kind of like, I like absurd humor a lot. So there's a kind of, there's sometimes, there's some, like I'd say like getting Gantz Graf on MTV was kind of a Situationist absurdist move. it was about like, because we knew it was really good, don't get me wrong, like we knew Alex [Rutterford] was onto something and that this was some heavy fucking, incredibly involving kind of synesthetic, almost kind of heavyweight moves, amazing CG and beautiful aesthetics. Everything about it, we nailed it, but we also knew that putting that shit on MTV was like, it would be ridiculous to get people to watch that and be like “There you go! There's a pop video!” and it's just this fucking meshing cube flying around, like we thought that was funny. I thought that there’s a kind of humor element to it. But at the same time we knew it was good. So quite often there's things like in our tracks where we're just like, yeah, this is, it's quite funny and absurd to do this because people wouldn't have the nuts to do it, you know, because they'd be too worried about meeting demographic criteria or whatever the fuck it is, right? So we don't really care about our stuff. We're just like “Wow this is really good, innit? Yeah, it'd be funny to do this!” So yeah, there's like always a kind of I'd say cheekiness, but it's more about context than understanding that some things, you're just not supposed to fucking do, but why? Why are you not supposed to do that? It's really good, why are you not supposed to do it, you know I have to be fucking, you know, driving around in a lowrider, looking cool, like that's what a pop video is supposed to be. Not like, you know, not some fucking cube going like that, you know what I mean? So, but that's what we like. So at the same time, why not? You know what I mean?

Shoebills, yeah I've talked about shoebills already. Come on, who doesn't like shoebills? Fascists. Fascists don't like shoebills. That's why you can't trust them! [vapes]

“Bleep used to sell the digitals for Keynell two track Autechre remixes. There's a vinyl rip that pops in it, and they took it down. Wondering if there’s more of a source for those tracks.”

Yeah, I mean I could probably do that because it's only two tracks, and I probably could find the DATs, but they're in Manchester. So it'd be a bit. But at some point, yeah if you really want, I'll get on to it, and we can get them remastered and put up proper digis for them because I like them tracks. They're good, and I think I know where they are, so yeah.

Chris Nolan, Denis Villeneuve. Okay. These are big topics, both of them, and I don't want to just dismiss them like, and just be like “nah,” you know what I mean? Because I think it's not fair. Chris Nolan, upright, okay, so I like his Batman films. I thought the third one [The Dark Knight Rises] was fucking stupid, where he's just going around with back pain for the fucking whole film. Just like “oh, my back!” I was like, “I don’t want, that's not what you want, is it?” It's a fucking Batman film, you don't want that! So I didn't, and I thought Bane was shit. I don't like Bane. He's one of the least interesting characters for me, you know, and his voice. He was just doing a bad impression of Patrick McGoohan, I think. So not a fan of the third Batman film. I liked the first two. I think Heath Ledger's Joker's quite good. It was sort of, at first, I was like “oh he's just doing the Jack Nicholson one but with a twist.” But like, I actually quite like it. He's charismatic enough and he nails it and, you know, the scene with the pencil and the table is just fantastic. The whole scene in the room where he's in there is just brilliant. I love that.

There's some, yeah, there's some elements of those films that I like, but I don't really don't like the kind of, you know, the kind of, some of the kind of meta-narrative stuff, you know, the sort of tacit implication that it's fine to just fucking monitor everybody if you've got a bigger purpose that needs to be served. Like just, fuck off man. Like no, like there's some stuff in there that I just can't get down with. Some of the action scenes were good though, like all the driving in the tunnel stuff, I think it's all really smartly done. I think the new Batman film [The Batman] has a beautiful feel to it, but there's something, I've only seen it once though, but there's something a bit off about it. But anyway, I don't want to just talk about Batman films.

But Nolan, yeah, I mean, I thought Inception was messy. I didn't really like it. It just felt too long. I think a lot of Nolan's films feel a bit long to me. I think, yeah, I thought, what's that latest one called now? The backwards one. It was alright. It doesn't, didn't make a lot of sense from a physics point of view, really. I found it a little bit, this is just, this isn't causality. What's happening? Like it's very difficult for me to wrap my head around how that would work on just a physical level, and I'm sure that a lot of people probably felt that watching it. Tenet, that's the one. Yeah and, but there was, some I quite liked how neatly the story dovetailed with itself. I thought that was clever, but it was a little bit like that, I don't know whether that's enough. But yeah, anyway, there's some elements of it I liked. But you know, largely, I just thought hmm. I think Memento's very good. Yeah, I don't know what else to say, really.

Villeneuve, I don't know. Didn't really like his Dune. Thought it was a bit beige and a bit Zimmer, bit BRAAAM, even though it wasn't really that from Zimmer, but it still was a bit [shit], it's just a bit beige. Not that I don't like beige. I like beige, but I just don't want to watch it for fucking two hours of beige. It was just all a little bit unimaginative. I found Lynch's Dune to be way more visually exciting and kind of arrested, even though it was a it was a mess for lots of fucking reasons. I just found the aesthetic of it way more interesting and innovative and exciting, but it might just be an age thing, that I've seen it a certain age. but you know, I think I might even prefer the Lynch Dune to the Villeneuve, anyway. Arrival, I wanna like. I kind of like the idea of the language being how it is [circular], quite like [Christopher] Wolfram's involvement in that. I think that's all very interesting, but I think the whole kind of time travel sort of thing in there is a bit [shit], and I think the whole kind of attitude and the grandeur thing, what what bugs me about this new sci-fi stuff is that it's just just trying to bowl audiences over with a lot of grandeur and kind of epic feels, and not getting in there with some mindfuck amazing ideas. I prefer sci-fi that's about mindful amazing ideas personally, but you know. Yeah.

Wong Kar-wai, I don't know and I will check. So recommend me some Wong Kar-wai. I watched that, The Burning [sic] recently. I thought that was quite good. It's fucking weird though. Oh actually, what film did I watch recently? The Innocents, Norwegian one about kids. That was really good! I thought, anyway.

energyisneverequal: [What do you feel about the Autechre Discord?]

I've never been on there. I don't really Discord much. I've used it a little bit. I used IRC a little bit back in the day, but it was just too many people hanging out on IRC. It’s why I didn't like about IRC, back in the day though. Was it like, it was just somewhere that people would go every day and they'd be like “Oh, morning June! Oh, what you having for dinner today?” and it was just like a bit, oh fucking hell. I can't do it. So yeah, don't know how I feel about it. I probably wouldn't hang out there myself, but maybe I would. I don't know. I'm not that much of a kind of constant socialiser, or I tend to socialise sporadically. So it's probably not the kind of thing I would do. But, and being in a community, I kind of, you know, I'm a more of, a kind of, I'm more of a message board person than a kind of instant chat in a group type person. I way prefer talking to people individually and I don't mind posting things and waiting. So, you know, and yeah, I quite liked, you know, originally when before 4chan turned to shit, I quite liked how fast it was and how you weren't really evaluating stuff based on personas. But that's a completely different thing, you know. So we don't need to talk about that.

“Is Andy Maddocks Velocity Kendall?”

Nope!

“What's the vocal sample being chopped up in Second Scepe?”

Oh yeah. Yeah, I'm not telling you.

“Do you speak to Board of Canada often?”

No. I ain't talk to Boards in, fucking hell, probably 20 years.

“Is it a Surripere remix you’re playing live?”

I don't know which bit you mean. But not intentionally. But it might just be the same keys. I haven’t noticed. I don't know.

“In the early ‘00s, I saw you perform one night at the Bowery Ballroom in NYC, then the next afternoon at Princeton.”

Yeah, there's a picture of that Princeton gig on Wikipedia, and it's like dated way wrong. It was 2001, that gig. So I don't know why it's dated something like 2007 or something. It doesn't even make sense. I don't even think we were doing gigs that year. But yeah, that Princeton gig, I don't know. The booking came through our agent at the time, so I wouldn't know how it actually came about, if you know what I mean. It would have just been added to the list because the date made sense in a routing, from a routing perspective, so. But Paul Lansky was there, remember meeting him there. He was really nice. It was nice to, it was good to meet him because I really rated this stuff at that point. Still do, but you know, I'd only discovered it a couple years before that. So I was just like, “Oh wow! Fucking, we're at Princeton! We've got to meet Paul!” And then somebody hooked us up with him and he was really turned out to be really nice guys, so that was good. So yeah, that happened, and on that same tour we had Curtis Roads supporting us on one day, and we had Yasunao Tone on another because we tried to get local support to where we could. So in LA we had Curtis. That was fucking ace! That was a really good gig. He had just like a red light on him. The vibe in that room is amazing.

Yeah, the Princeton thing. I don't, so I don't know how it came about. It's a bit mad afterwards because we fucking ended up in some fucking [laughs], some kind of college party where everyone was using giant bongs and fucking taking their clothes off and stuff. That was a bit insane. I think Russell [Hassell] got off with some girl. Yeah, it was mad. It was mad, actually. It was chaos. American students really party, don't they? They really go through like [frat boy voice] “whoa, we're gonna party!” It's just like, fucking hell, you're really going for it, you lot. Right, where are we now?

“Do you think electronic music is too much about gear and fancy equipment nowadays?”

I mean, you know, there's a lot like, you're gonna always get this, you know, “I know the best way of doing this! That's the only piece of equipment you should use,” or you know, like you're gonna get them people anyway. You've always had them in the sort of sound world. When I was in college, you were, because I went to sound engineering college briefly in the late ‘80s, it was like that then, you know, people had very kind of fixed ideas about what, you know, about things being objectively better than other things, you know what I mean? That kind of thinking. I find it all a little bit ehh, and this sort of idea about fancy equipment is a very kind of, you know, you have to believe in a kind of, in there being shared values and these kind of objective truths about equipment, and then have arguments with other people about objective truths about equipment. It's just all a little bit fucking hell, what does taste ever come into this? Like what makes a piece of equipment fancy? Just the price or the fact that everybody says it's good, you know, a mass kind of, mass approval like, you know, what is it Super Ann[?] said? “You can't trust the public. the public,” like he said some shit thing like the public likes Britney Spears or something shit thing like that. And you're like, you know, not that I'm not dissing Britney Spears there by the way. I'm just saying, but you know what I mean. It's just that idea that, like it's not, just because lots of people think something's good doesn't make it good, do you know what I mean? Lots of reasons why that might be the case.

So yeah, I don't know, like, a lot to think about. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think, you know, some equipment's good to me, right? I like some equipment. So do I think music's about that? I mean probably to some extent with me. Yeah, I mean if I make a tool and think “fucking hell, this is ace! I'm getting ace shit out of this tool,” then it's, I guess that's fancy equipment. So yeah, I guess in, you know, it must be about that to some extent. But do I think, you know, that you need fancy equipment to make good music? No, you know, you don't. You can make good music on shit equipment. You can make shit music on good equipment. It's not really about, there's not like a linear relationship between the two things. So you know, it could be more about that than it needs to be, if you know what I mean, and you know it's mainly just about flipping stuff and having a fly idea, or moving in a weird way, you know what I mean? It's like you have to have good shoes to be a good dancer. I mean, maybe it helps, but it's not, you know there's a lot more to it than that ain't there, so.

“Were you guys into breakdancing or sports?”

Yeah, I mean Rob is quite a good popper. Partly because his uncle moved to LA in the 80s. So, he's got that kind of tie to LA and LA culture and all that, and he kind of, so he's got that going on, and he sort of, he's quite good. He doesn't pop anymore. You have to kind of get him a bit drunk. But yeah, he can pop pretty good and like Ged is a good popper. I'm, like, not very good. I'm quite a shit popper, but I made mean tapes. So I got to hang out with all the cool electro kids because I was like the DJ guy, you know what I mean? So, not really very good. I mean, you know, I could like, I could turtle backspin. I could do ‘bout half a windmill and then I'd just fall over because my legs weren't long enough to properly windmill. So I was kind of like a shit breakdancer. I was really interested in it though, and you know, and I, like, dressed the part, and I made good tapes, so, but I had mates who were fucking good dancers, like really good. Kind of embarrassingly good, and it's mad to think that they're all just working quite boring jobs now, you know what I mean, and they're not really interested in music anymore. But they were so fucking into it when they were like 11, 12. So it's mad thinking back to them days, like how much how important music was to us all in middle school and how much of a big deal it was, you know, and how massive electro was in the 80s in the UK.

It's strange talking to Americans who don't really, didn't really have a lot of access to it, unless they were of clubbing age. So if they were younger, they wouldn't have been exposed to it much, other than seeing little bits and bobs on telly. We were seeing fucking loads of it. There was like countless BBC 2 documentaries on it and fucking, you know, we had Wild Style. I remember in ‘83 or ‘84, Wild Style was on TV in the UK, and Style Wars and Beat Street, and everybody had seen Beat Street and [Breakin’,] but you had like the more obscure kids is in Style Wars, and Wild Style, everybody knew, because everyone knew someone who had a copy of it, and you know what I mean, there was all that was going on. But you also had all these weird documentaries like that BBC, Hip-Hop: A Street History, whatever it was called like, Beat This or whatever, and these weird like Bombin’, and all these other weird shows like programmes, one-off things. And then later you had shit like Bad Meaning Good. That was on, and that was weird because we all thought Tim Westwood was a fucking weirdo. Being from up north, we weren’t exposed to him really, so. Up north, we had Stu Allen, so and before that we had Mike Shaft, and I guess before that, I mean there was Mike Shaft and he was playing like, you know, the Chuck Jackson Best of ‘84 mix, which was a huge kind of thing around Manchester. Everyone had that on tape, and then there was like, and just in general people in school listening to Mike Shaft and then later, for a little bit, it was Lee Brown, and then it was Stu Allen. Stu Allen had a huge impact on Manchester music scene in general. He really shaped it, and plus we had that shop, Spin Inn, which I first went in Spin Inn when I was 12? Me and my mate Auggie went to Manchester and Auggie's dad dropped us off and just says “I'll meet you back here in an hour” and me and Auggie went off to Spin Inn because, I'll give you where Spin Inn was, and we, and I remember walking in there and it just being like really small, and really full of people and everyone jumping, and just hip-hop and electro tunes, and just being blown away and just thinking, fuck! Is was that, like that was the first shop that I'd been in that sold imports. I couldn't believe the price of the records. There was albums were like £8.50 [£24.57 in 2023], which was unheard of and I was thinking “fuck me. So deal all this” So I'd just save up for weeks and weeks to just buy one record, you know, and the rest of it I'd just tape off Stu Allen. So yeah, I don't know, could go on about that shit for hours. But it gets boring for all you young people.

“You said in the last AMA that you don't consider your work or your music is experimental. How would you consider it?”

It's just fucking what I'm into, innit? It's just music. It's just tunes I like.

“How can we get your bandmate to join Twitch as well? Seems like there's a lot only he could answer?”

Yeah, there is quite probably anything about his tunes. Like he's on here already. I think I'm following him? So if you look on my follows, you'll see him. He's like Autechre with a seven instead of a t [au7echre], so. [vapes]

paralel Suns is a Nord Lead 1 through a Lexicon reverb, and then slabs of that were then taken, and kind of edited and faded into each other, kind of thing. So I had loads of different notes in the DAW, which I think was DP at the time. And then I was doing loads of crossfading between all these different slabs. So yeah, it's a bit long process really to get the result, considering it's just a sort of short ambient thing. But it was, it gives it that weird wet but dry sound, so.

“That’s someone else who've got the depth perception fevers.”

Yeah, they're weird, right? They're fucking weird. I'm not really sure what to make of that.

“Impossibly loud noises.”

It's funny seeing all you lot being like “oh shit! Yeah, yeah,” ‘cause I’ve, them dream things are fucking weird and nobody really talks about them. I found one thread once on the Fortean Times forums about this, and it was just all people who had it and who were all going “Shit yeah! I had that when I was a kid,” and they'd never talked to about it or if they had brought it up in conversation, other people didn't know. But yeah, I think quite a lot of people experience it and don't really have the words for it and then forget about it.

“Any fond memories of seeing Jeff Mills play?”

Yeah, The Orbit in Leeds. Fucking absolutely slamming, like I'd never seen anything like it. It was mad. It was just like, it was like someone slamming the door over and over. [laughs] It was like so banging, and not in a gabber way, where you're kind of bouncing, it was just this kind of bang-bang-bang-bang-bang. Just absolutely banging. Yeah, like really relentless. You know, when I first heard Mills, right, I first heard Waveform [Transmission], and I thought it was German or something because of his name, Jeff Mills, you know. It didn't really look like a typical Black guy surname. So I was thinking “what is this?” Like I thought he was some kind of European or like German bloke or something like that, or maybe an American white guy because it just sounded so not like Black music. It was just so banging and kind of relentless. And then, but then when I heard him DJing, it kind of made a bit more sense because you could tell he'd been a hip-hop DJ, because he was really mixing it up loads, and there was a real roughness to it, and I got this, that was when it clicked because I was like “oh fuck yeah!” They're tools that he's using and he's using them in this rough way. So yeah, I fucking love Mills. So much energy and kind of, and really good tension building. I seen him play at LOST once and he was just doing shit like just pulling the kick out for a good four minutes, and just getting everybody really hyped, and then he just flipped the kick in and it just the room just lifts. Like I know it's such a basic move, but he'd have the nuts to do it for ages. Like he's one of the best tension building DJs of techno that I've ever seen. Just amazing when he was at his peak, kind of mid to late 90s, just untouchable. Like so much funk as well, you know, but sort of hidden within this relentlessness and hardness. So yeah, I really rate Mills. Mills was great. love Mills. You can't not rate Mills really, I think, especially having grown up on hip-hop, you really get a sense of what he's trying to do because he's not doing hip-hop stylistically or rhythmically or anything like that, but he just gets it. You can tell he gets it.

“Do you do a lot of lucid dreaming?”

I talked about lucid dreaming in the last one. Not intentionally, no. But it happens by accident sometimes. [vapes]

“I am a job.”

I like that “I am, am I a job, I am a job?” [laughs] “Am I a job?”

Yes, someone's saying they don't really remember their dreams anymore. Are you a chronic stoner by any chance? ‘Cause when I was smoking loads and loads, I used to forget my dreams all the time. I'm sure I was having them, but I just didn't remember them ever. Only if I woke up like mid-dream. I didn’t remember them.

“What's your opinion on cocaine? Do you enjoy it or hate it?”

I don't really like it. I don't like what it does to other people. One thing coke does, I don't know if you know this, but like coke, what it does is it makes you less sensitive to negative criticism. And so, which is an odd thing for a drug to do. It's very specific, but if you read about it, you'll it'll bear out what I'm saying. I'm not just pulling this out my arse, it's like, you know, the studies that will reflect this, and then when you're not on coke later chronically, and for quite a long time, you'll be more sensitive to negative criticism. So there's a problem that cokeheads have in that they're really fucking thinskinned when they're not on coke, and when they're on coke, they're wankers because they can't detect when other people are pissed off with them. It's not because they're actually wankers, it's just that they don't get that feedback from looking at other people's eyes and faces that they need to fucking reign it in a bit, you know. So they can be real pricks and, you know, that can manifest itself as a kind of arrogance.

Oh, I've got a woodpecker here! Drinking out of some water. You can see this guy. Woodpeckers are fucking cool. Right, so yeah, so. Yeah, I don't know if I, I've, I don't know. I wouldn't say I hate cocaine, but I just like, it's one of the worst party drugs for me. It's one of the drugs that makes socialising really difficult but makes other people enjoy being out. It makes the person on it enjoy being out, and everybody else thinks “Christ, what a prick!” So, if you want to seem like a prick, yeah, do loads of coke, you know. I don't think it really works socially, but you know, I guess if you've got really bad anxiety, maybe it might help you personally. But just, if you're gonna do it, I'd advise never going anywhere when you're on it. So don't be around other humans.

“Frued’s personal bias and skeletons.”

Yeah, I think he was just talking about himself a lot. Yeah, Freud was a cokehead, right? So.

“Thoughts on Venetian Snares?”

Yeah, he's fucking brilliant, isn't he? He's like, he's got such a kind of, there's a such an identifiable character musically. I can always spot his tracks. Like, they're really easy to spot, you know. They feel different to other people. I mean I know he said, I've heard it said that he's sort of, what kind of tip he's on and all that. But I don't really, I think with his stuff, it's all about character and he can hear his character, like immediately, and he's certainly really good at arrangements. Like I always really rated his arrangements. They’re like odd, you know, they have a kind of, he's really good at building tension as well I think.

“My grandma worked at Kurzweil!”

That's cool! I like that, “my grandma worked at Kurzweil.” That's better than “my dad worked at Nintendo.”

Seeing you all arguing about Freud and Jung, this is an old argument by the way. This debate, it's not really worth having nowadays. But you know, when I was young, I found it a bit exciting.

“What's your favourite food/drink? I’ve seen that picture of you guys enjoying a bowl of pasta.”

Have you? I don't think I've seen that. [vapes] Where's that from? Favourite food, drink? You know I don't really have a favourite. I don't have favourites of anything, you know I mean? It's all mood dependent. I can't answer favourites questions. So let's not do them anymore.

“With Romulo Del Castillo from Phoenicia?”

Oh that! Oh yeah, I remember that. Yeah, like, there's a story that goes along with that picture, though I'm not going to tell it. I'm getting bothered.

“Ever listen to black midi?”

Don't think so.

“Favourite books/literary writers/philosophers?

I mean, I like Philip K. Dick. I used to like [Kurt] Vonnegut when I was young. You know, it was sort of irreverent and it was an interesting approach to describing humans. It sort of appeals to the bit of me that used to like Mork and Mindy when I was a kid, so. And yeah I quite like Philip K. Dick still. Like his shorts more than I like his novels actually, and I've read most of them now. I really like that one, The Electric Ant, that's one of my favourite stories of his. It stretches your head, the whole idea of it. It's just fucking brilliant.

“Favourite Norwegian artist?”

Lasse Marhaug. I'm saying his name wrong, I know, because I'm not norsk enough. But yeah, I love his stuff. Lasse’s really good. Yeah. There's another artist I want to say but I'm deliberately not saying it [laughs], so.

“The Dark Knight Rises was pretty whack.”

[laughs] Yeah, fucking, “[Christian Bale impression] Oh my back! Oh my back!” for two hours! Fucking hell!

Don't think so! [laughs] It’s just it's really bad. It's like if you want to see that I'll just fucking go around my dad's house, you know? Fucking hell! [vapes]

“Do you have any thoughts on hauntology?”

You know, I mean, I'm British and I grew up in the 70s, so it's appealing to me because, you know, like I really like Richard Littler's stuff. Scarfolk, like I really like that. And I like, obviously I like Boards of Canada, right, and there's a kind of element of that in their stuff, and it was partly what drew me to it was that they had this, and they kind of, and it was clear that it was there, even though they've spent a lot of time in Canada, and they'd sort of, not really been in Scotland, they still had this something, this tug in this direction. And yeah, I mean I kind of, I can relate to a lot of it because I've grown up in a kind of, not in a really necessarily, very spooky town, but in a town where you were close to areas where there was spooky history. So yeah, it kind of, and my mum's always been a little bit interested in the unexplained. We had all weird books on the unexplained. Actually first, the first time I got really spun out and fucking terrified was reading about in one of her books about spontaneous human combustion. Holy fuck, like that terrified me as a kid. Kept thinking it was gonna happen to me. Like, you do, don't you, when you read about things like that, you’re like “oh God, what would that be like? Oh my god!"

So yeah like, and looking at old pictures of, like you know, supposed ghost photographs, which pretty seem a bit silly now to think about. But as a kid, I would look at them. Spent ages staring at them and thinking “what is that? What am I looking at there?” Like, because I didn't really understand double exposure and these very basic things, you know? The idea of ectoplasm appearing during seances, you know, that was quite, the fuck’s happening there? Like what were they doing? Were they just getting some weird jelly and just throwing it around? [laughs] Like what, would, do you know what I mean? Like, “oh, I'm going to pretend there's some ectoplasm.”

Yeah, so like obviously, like the whole idea of it is a bit appealing. You have to excuse me, for a sec, while I just screw this on. And yeah, I don't know, like I can relate, but I think as a sort of music scene and all that, I'm not that interested. But I kind of like, I like spooky things, so I guess I can sort of relate to it. But it gets a little bit like, I get what buttons you push in and I get what references you're going for, and so it becomes a little bit, you know, done after a while. But yeah, there are overlaps with that stuff that I really rate. Like, I'd say that, you know, that there are overlaps between sort of, Boards of Canada and Look Around You and Richard Littler and these kind of things where it's sort of, a slightly scary alternative version of what the 70s felt like when you were a kid. So it's sort of, more about your memory of the 70s than what the 70s were actually like, you know what I mean? And that's what I find that really relatable, like I love Look Around You. I think it's fantastic, the first series. You know where it's doing Experiment ITV, Experiment Granada, because I grew up with that shit on TV, and used to watch it and feel you know, like it was all a little bit weird. The weird voiceover in the weird blue background and yeah, it was weird. So anyway, that's my comment on hauntology, which isn't really related to hauntology at all, is it? So.

“I need to check Lynch’s Dune.” “Summer always gets blah.”

Oh my God, we're still, is that how far up we are? I'm not that far behind already.

“Original Star Wars was pretty based.”

Yeah, I guess it was, you know. I got this feeling about Star Wars that it massively rips off Gatchaman, which for reasons, which I'll explain if you're interested. But I won't now, so.

Right, I need to piss. So, I'm going to go and piss and then be back shortly. It won't be that long. I'm going to stop.

Part 4 of 4

[vapes]

energyisneverequal: thoughts on the amount of fans that are also part of the furry fandom who also like to combine your music with furry stuff? i assume you most likely dont care about that type of stuff but it is something i keeping thinking about now haha

[laughs] Yeah, don't bother me at all. Like I think, like yeah, furry stuff's weird to me, but it's not like alienating. I don't find, I'm not like repulsed by it or anything. So I'm not, it takes quite a lot to repulse me. Like I'm not weirded out by it the way a lot of people my age seem a bit weirded out by it. But maybe because I don't think it's that weird to want to dress up as an animal and go around being an animal character. I think that's not that weird. [vapes]

“Mentioned that using some machine learning. What areas of composition/sound design do you find it useful for?”

Yeah, so what, I don't want to reveal ‘cause it's not stuff I'm using out there yet, but will be because it's already in the setup, and it's like, I don't feel it'd be that obvious what I'm using it for, and I don't like really saying in advance of using things what I'm going to be using them for so, but yeah, it's not using it in a way that I've heard other people using it. So that's cool at least. Because I was quite skeptical about how useful it could be to me for quite a while. It took me a while to figure out a way of using it that I was comfortable with. And yeah, I think I found it. So that's cool, but I don't want to talk about it yet. I'll talk about it later though. I promise.

“Greg Bear’s Blood Music.”

Nope, but I'll read it, deffo.

Do I practice meditation of any kind? Not, like, formally, but I do a lot of staring into space and drifting. So regarding mindfulness, like, so I've read studies that say that, what the brain is most active when it's not doing anything, when you're not tasking it to do anything, so you're not thinking about anything in particular, right, consciously. You’re just kind of drifting and letting your unconscious guide where what you're thinking about, and kind of not really thinking about anything in particular, and that's apparently when your brain does most of its long range forecasting. So it does its predictions and it kind of builds predictive models for what's going to occur in the future, and mindfulness gets in the way of that by making you focus too much on the present. So I like my brain to do its thing. So I'm a little bit skeptical about how powerful mindfulness is, and that's why I'm a little bit reluctant to say that I do anything approaching guided meditation, but I do let my mind wander a lot and I do a lot of staring into space and just, I guess you could call it daydreaming. But you know, just randomly thinking about things but not in a very directed way. Just letting my mind wander and thinking through things and not even thinking necessarily, just staring into space.

“Cybernetic Culture Research Unit,” I don't know what that is. “Tell us what that is. Accelerationism?”

I don't think I was interested in that. It sounds, if that's that shit from the late ‘90s, that bloke who seemed to me to be a little bit of a kind of cryptofascist. I can't fucking remember his name though. Tell me his name and I'll tell you if it's the right guy I'm thinking of. So I'll come back to that question in a minute when I get further down the chat.

“Do you do any drawing or painting outside your graffiti?”

No, not really. Most of the letter forms and stuff because I'm a bit fascinated by letter forms because, just because I'm a little bit disabled with regard to letter forms. So, which is a complicated topic.

“Did you set out to make Exai double album?”

Yeah, just, it was just, we don't set out to make anything really. It just sort of everything just grows and assembles itself. The music makes itself in a way.

“Popcorn: butter or canola oil?”

Not sure I know what the difference is because I'm not like, I mean butter I guess, because that's normally what I'd use. But I've used olive oil in the past, like, but the light stuff because it has a higher smoke point than butter, so. So yeah, I'll tend to use olive oil for things, if I can get away with it, because it's just quite good for you from what I understand, so.

“How did you synthesised those short yet heavy kicks like in ecol4 and the live sets?

Yeah, I know what you mean. It's just a bit hard to describe the patch. But yeah, I mean the transient part of it is fixed. So that's just sort of hard coded, and then the rest of the kick is just that, it has a flexible release. But it’s sort of over it, just very short. So it's a drum synth that we made. It's a bit hard to describe in a few sentences. I'd probably just have to show you the patch and I'm not likely to do that, so, sorry.

“BIPP - SOPHIE”

Talked about that already because SOPHIE wanted it. So I've got all the bits to Product. I've got all the bits, all of it. Got all the Elektron patches as well. So if I ever get my Elektrons back off Mike [Williamson], I'd be able to recreate the tracks using the Elektrons, which is quite cool, innit? It's quite a cool thing to do, to send all that stuff out. SOPHIE was cool!

“What drew you both towards the complete nonsense track titles from Quaristice onwards?”

They're not nonsense, but it was mainly a byproduct of the way that we started having to file vast amounts of stuff ‘cause we were producing a lot more material at that point, because it was quicker to produce it. So we needed a kind of filing system that worked that made sense to us. But there's a lot of our earlier track titles were nonsense as well. Like what the fuck does Augmatic Disport mean? Really. Augmatic Disport, it's not really, that doesn't mean anything, does it? Or maybe it does, I don't know.

“Answers on a postcard.” “Hello Spiral, I have a t-shirt with a gaping anus on it with the caption ‘Make America Gape Again.’ I've never worn it outside.”

Well that's on you, innit. You need to get that shit worn! I'd definitely wear that in my house.

“The problem with MIDI 2.0 is that no one wants to spend the money to be the first one to implement it.”

We were asked to consult on that. And when I told them that I didn't like DAW sequencing because it had, because it didn't communicate the note length to the instruments, they were like “well we can't do anything about that because everyone wants to use keyboards.” [laughs] So that was the end of my fucking interaction with them over that. But I'd love to have been involved in it. I mean basically, I think it's going to be good for all microtonal geeks when it eventually lands. So, it is a thing now. Yeah, it's already.

Nick Land, yes! Yes, I was thinking about Nick Land, and no, I'm not interested in his shit at all. I found it really kind of, it's like fucking, it really reminds me of like a British noise artist who's a bit of an edgemeister. Find it deeply annoying. So tell me what you think about Nick Land? See if we're on the same page. [vapes]

“I've heard you dream all the time, that dreams are like noise when the signal disappears. But the noises, they're always like signal to noise ratio.”

Yeah, I'm probably down with that. I mean that's how it feels for me because I get these weird intrusive ideas and thoughts. They don't seem to come from anywhere rational and I'm not making them appear, and I get this thing a lot when I'm working, where I'll get random a memory of a random place that's associated with a certain type of activity when I'm patching or when I'm tracking, and it'll just sit there and I'll be kind of in this place and it's quite often from a viewpoint that I've not been in physically. It's almost like a camera was somewhere else in a part of the world that I'm familiar with. Don't know if anybody else gets that. They're quite intrusive.

“Where's your buddy?”

Bristol. I don't know what [he’s] doing. Probably having a barbecue or something.

“I know in the past you said it might be boring, but I bet some of us would love to be a fly in the wall if you do a Max stream or something one day”

Yeah, I don't know. I know like people are interested in how we do things, but I think it's better if you just do your own things and let us do our things, you know what I mean? So I don't think it's that exciting. I think a lot of it is, there's too much trial and error in it for it to be that informative for you, ‘cause seeing when I have my aha moments and how I refine things down might not be that interesting to you, because I think you'd just be listening to a lot of stuff and thinking “this is just shit. What's he doing,” you know? But I'm thinking the same thing, you know, “this is just shit. What I'm doing?” So I don't think that's that useful.

“Do you have a feeling of how the new patch will turn out like?”

Yeah. You sort of, I'm guided by intuition a lot of the time.

“Favourite gigs of yours were Shortage car park and in particular the Warehouse Project with LFO”

Oh yeah, that was the first Warehouse project in Manchester when we had lasers for once, which is fun.

“Do you think you'd go back to that Untilted sound?”

That was the 2005 Elektron sound. So, unlikely that I'd go back to that sound in particular, because it was very much a product of its time. I mean the Elektrons probably only happened because of shit that had been, that had come out on Warp, because you know, Daniel Hansson was a massive Warp head and, you know, we were using combinations of gear, me and Rob, to do like quite odd things and so on, and the Elektrons kind of presented it back to us in a box with a kind of, you know, a kind of tracker underbelly, if you like that, you know, and it was a kind of rationalisation of a lot of ideas that would have previously involved using lots of obscure particular pieces of equipment, so, and it happened when it happened for a reason and I'm not sure that you could do that again. You know, that piece of hardware was very much a product of the musical environment that it grew out of, and then I'm not sure that I would want to go back to that position in timespace and do that again. So I don't know. Probably not. But they're only on loan. I've just lent them boxes out because I've got, I kind of reached a ceiling with them, and I thought, okay I'll just lend them to somebody who's got a different set of ideas and a different approach to me and see what they come up with, so. Mike's already doing tunes with them. So that's nice.

“How messy are your patches?”

Yeah, I tend not to slam stuff together or if I do slam stuff together, I tidy it up very quickly. I'm quite a tidy patcher these days. I didn't used to be, but it just became necessary for legibility and all that. So yeah, I don't really find it difficult to come back to stuff now. I'm quite quicker, but I also have a very particular way of laying things out. So I'm, you know, that helped to have a kind of, I wouldn't call it discipline really, but it's just habit based, you know, so I can kind of recognise things quite easily now. They're not, it's not hard for me to read my own patches. I find it harder to read other people's, but, that again, that just depends on how they patch. Like a lot of the Max tutorial patches are extremely clearly laid out, and people like Graham Wakefield are extremely clear in their layout and explanations and comments and stuff. So, I think Graham's patches in particular have been really useful for learning Gen. But yeah, there are other people whose patches I'll see and just think “the hell's going on?” Like I just can't even figure this out, and if there's too much abstraction in it, it can be a little bit difficult to kind of dig in and out of all the layers to try and figure out exactly what the signal flow is. So I tend to leave things as upfront as I can and use abstraction only where it's necessary if I need to make gains by having lots of instances of a process or whatever, so.

[laughs] There's this comment about FL Studio and Ableton from Vektroid. I kind of like, yeah FL is really different to other programs in that sense, but I don't know. You just use what you use, don't you? I wouldn't, why don't you just use all these programs instead of just using Ableton and then worrying about it? I mean just get all the other programs as well and use them all, and you'll find that some of them are better at certain tasks than others, you know? It won't take you long to learn Logic or REAPER or fucking any of these because basically the fundamentals are the same. It's just some of them are better at doing certain tasks, so.

Polyend, yeah, I've seen Polyend stuff, like Polyend Tracker and Polyend Play. They look fun honestly, and I'll probably use them if I was using MIDI gear. So, you know, I don't, I think they're on the right track. No pun intended.

FFT plugins that I've enjoyed? Strictly FFT stuff? I don't know because you never know like, how much of a thing is FFT. Like I always thought Adaptiverb was a nice plugin, but I found it a bit identifiable. But then if you need something to ring out like that does, then it's good, I think but it's not really strictly FFT is it, so I don't know, like what is an FFT plugin, because a lot of stuff, I suppose like Tom Erbe’s spectralcompand is really good and well designed, you know? That's good. That does what it says on the tin really well. So yeah probably, something that Tom Erbe's done probably that because I think that's quite solid useful little tool. I haven't used it in a while because I did, I've done one in MSP that's similar, so. Sorry Tom for ripping you off. But you know, I needed it to be native.

“How do you usually deal with durations in Max?”

So the duration is generated by the sequencer, and then just sent to the synth, and then the synth, depending on position and duration, will do different things. So it's not really a standard setup in that sense. It's a little bit odd, but it makes it a bit easier for me because I think more in terms of serial durations than like absolute position, and it's nice being able to have the notes changing depending on duration and position. So yeah, that's about as descriptive as I can be without either being really boring or revealing too many secret sauce details.

energyisneverequal: Do you feel like there are any particular live sets that should be regarded as album quality or discussed alongside other records, or are you fine that live sets are something more for the hardcore-is fans who are the type to attend those shows or willing to dive into those type of stuff?

Yeah, I mean it's just, you know, from my point of view, nowadays they're like probably more work than the albums are because there needs to be enough flexibility and variation within it, but it also needs to be very designed. So I don't want it to be something that's just like off the cuff because of the way I work is too trial and error for that to be useful to me. But at the same time, I don't want it to be like nailed down. So there's some degree of, I don't know, flexibility that's, and building that into a long piece, like an hour long piece is quite demanding compared to making an album where everything's just finished because you want the flexibility to always sound good. So you don't want it to be like flexible in a way where it's just going to sound shit if you just wank some parameter. So you know, and so yeah, how worked things are, it’s sort of an awkward question. Like you can bust out the live set really quickly, but the work that goes into making it beforehand can be quite long. So yeah, I don't know. I don't really dictate what people are gonna, how people are gonna approach things.

Personally, like I've found some people's live albums to be more rewarding than some of their recorded stuff, depending on what kind of band they are. Like this, you know, that Black Sabbath live in Paris 1971 or whatever it is. That's like phenomenally good gig. That's much better than the recorded versions. So you know like, I think sometimes it doesn't, I don't approach things as being like “this is the product” and “this is just a live set,” which is the way a lot of other people do, so, think maybe I just have a different view on it to other people, and we're not gonna, I don't expect other people to approach it like that just because I do, you know.

Someone's saying “I get the same places all the time when patching.” Yeah, right. It's weird, right? It's weird. Why places and what is that? What's happening there? What, why is this, what's this tie between carrying out a little process mentally or physically and sort of having this particular place that pops up? Why is that going on? It's dead weird. They don't seem to relate to each other really.

“Of all your generative works, and I know you guys are all about pushing the bounds of sound, you ever think of releasing a work that utilises classical instruments solely?”

Yeah, so like, no. I mean generally no, because I'm not that interested in doing it. It's just not, I don't know, I'm just not that interested. I don't think there's enough room for me doing a lot of trial and error experiments, but I don't want to call them experiments, but experimentation at least for me involving trying out lots of different ideas and then finding something that works. So doing that with classical instruments would be really time consuming. But it is something I could do in theory, but I don't know. Maybe, but, I know where cumov[?] made a thing that can translate any sound file into a classical score. I can't remember what it's called now. So I guess you could use that, but, be a bit suck it and see, you know. So I don't know.

“I've had dreams that are like long convoluted TV series by which…”

Great question.

“Do you still love your CME Bitstream?”

No, Rob's got it. That was Rob’s, but I think he's still got it, yeah.

“Everything's on SysEx.”

I know he's just like a SysEx demon, Rob, so. [vapes]

“Do you ever actively go birdwatching?”

Nah. Username checks out though.

“I am a horse.” Wait a minute. “I am a horse.” Why did it, see, this is so weird. This “I am a horse” thing, why are you saying that? I had to, there's some hardcore track or something that says “I am a horse” and I'm just trying to, me and Rob are trying to remember what it was the other week. “I am a horse, I am a horse” what is it? Is it some meme thing that I've misremembered? I was thinking it was an hardcore track, I don't know? I'm fucking, my memory's all fucked up these days.

“I'm gonna try an Elektron someday, but don't plan for gear anymore. I just make noise.”

Yeah.

“I've heard you were sent BoC’s Hi Scores before it was released on Skam?”

Yeah.

“If so, have you heard any of their super rare stuff?”

I don't know how rare. I mean I had Old Tunes 1 and 2 on tape before Skam picked them up. So yeah, I don't know. A long time ago all that happened.

“Have you ever used the DX7 before?”

Yeah, a bit in college, but I didn't get my head around it there and then, I think I'd understand it now because I had a DX100 for quite a while in the 90s, and I understood that pretty fully and then I just jumped straight into having an FS1R, which was a lot deeper. But so the answer, real answer is no. But I'm sure I could get my head around. What's this now?

Dee-Shaya: “How did you process Milk Dee's rapping on the track Milk DX?”

It's not Milk Dee. It's a DX100, but it was in its pitch bend, and it's just played with the pitch bend and it sounded a lot like Milk Dee because it was sort of [*wah wah-ing*]. So yeah, that was it. It was just, that's why it's called Milk DX because it's a DX100 that sounds like Milk Dee. So it's weird people actually think it's a sample, because it, I mean it really did sound quite a lot like Milk Dee. On the day I was like to Rob “listen to that! sounds like milk dee!” So that were it! So there you go. So yeah, a lot easier than processing the vocal.

“Any chance of an all-out noise album?”

It's too conservative, noise. It's just like, you already know what the parameters are before you even walk in the room. There's a few artists I like. Like, I like Lasse, I've mentioned him before. I like Incapcitants. I like bits of Merzbow’s stuff, but I mainly like Merzbow when he's not being very noisy. So, you know, what constitutes noise is a bit narrow. So I'm not sure that I would want to do a noise album, and it's just too easy. It's just not that interesting, you know. It’s noisy, okay, things are overdriven, it's quite monotonous. it's annoying, you know. A lot of things qualify as noise, I think, aren't necessarily that noisy. So, and things, I don't know, I just feel like it's very narrow, kind of, it’s too narrow. It's too restrictive. So no, and I think the whole noise scene is just really conservative. It’s safe as fuck ‘cause it's all laid out for you already before you even make anything. You already know what it's going to be. Yeah.

“What about the whole notion of an Autechre produced hip-hop album?”

Yeah, I mean, maybe? I don't know how interesting that is. My ideas of hip-hop are from another time because I grew up with b-boy culture and it being about being fresh and kind of inventive and pulling moves that nobody had thought of, and that's not really what hip-hop's about much now. It is on a subtle level, and if you're really into it, you'll find the tunes. But there's an awful lot of hip-hop that's just totally by the book. You know, it's the difference between like wearing a pair of shell toes because they’re a kind of, you're appropriating something from a sportswear company and the sportswear company aren't aware that you're appropriating innit, right? So you're doing it on your own terms and it becomes a kind of the culture's doing it, maybe. Or you're just doing it as an individual, you know, like you spray paint and your trainer’s chrome, which I did once in the 80s. Like that might be the kind of thing you do, but like if the, you know, if Adidas or Puma market a trainer that's all chrome, that's not as cool is it? It's just not as interesting, and if they’re marketing trainers directly to the actual culture and the culture of buying the trainers that the trainer company of marketing, then what's that? That's not the same thing. So that's like a different thing.

It's like, you know, because British sports casual culture, it came from kids going out to Europe to watch football and then coming back with weird Adidas trainers and flipping it, and that was a different thing to people actually just buying them down the local shop, you know I mean? It was, it's like there are levels to our how cool and interesting it is, and similar with making hip-hop now. I think like you can make hip-hop that just sounds like it's off the shelf, and you can make hip-hop that's original. But if you make it too original, it won't ever be a hit on the commercial circuit. So the, you know, you have to strike a balance as a hip-hop producer where you're kind of being fly and fresh, but only to some extent and otherwise you're towing the line. And yeah, that's not what it was about when I was growing up, really. So I've got a funny view of all that stuff. I preferred it when it was about being fresh really, you know. So yeah, I mean if we was allowed to do that, and we would be because we're us and we can do what we want. So I guess maybe. It's just finding MCs that we're going to be down with that, with you just making it a bit fucking different, you know, and not different in an obvious way, you know? There's a few producers still doing that. Not like everyone's shit, ain’t it?

energyisneverequal: Do you think that there is still a developing scene in modular/programmable DAWs like MaxMSP, VCV Rack, SuperCollider, etc where it can grow more both in terms of the market of technology and music output?

Don't really understand that question, sorry. I mean, maybe. I think they're just toolsets that allow for you to do a lot more or they, you know, they create more possibilities for you to explore different spaces or things. So yeah, I mean there's definitely room in there for people to explore stuff because there's so many configurations, even just in Max or just in SuperCollider. There’s probably a shit ton of configurations that nobody's done yet. So, you know.

“Last night, I was thinking that for the crowd, it would be a cool experience to watch a live show laying down when played in darkness. No twats trying to film darkness. Just letting the music come over you. What do you think?”

That happened once! We did a gig in Baltimore and all the kids did ketamine and lay down in sleeping bags because, you know what Baltimore's like, it’s fucking mad innit, and it was just mad. We were like “the fuck is happening here?” And then these lads come up to us and say “hey, we're the guys who started the IDM list” and we were like “oh fuck off.” I, and then there was all these other people just laying around in fucking sleeping bags on ketamine, and I was thinking Baltimore's weird, innit? It's weird, Baltimore. Never seen anything like that since either. [vapes]

pokkipox: did the onesix sets feature a remix of Leterel? the part with all the loud chords that ppl would shout in between

Yeah, that's what I was. But it's also a remix of an older tune, which I'm not going to tell you the title of, but it's under Warp Tapes. There's like a full circle type in that.

“Do you see yourself ever getting bored with Max in the foreseeable future? Or is it more likely that Max is the thing that you're going to be using until you stop all together?”

I mean, I'll use it until I get bored. I don't want to say either way. I'm sure there's always a limit in terms of my interest in things, but Max is one of those things where I'll keep thinking of new things to try, and trying them and then liking it. So, you know if it gets to the point where I can't be bothered, or I can't think of it, or it does, I'm not feeling inspired enough to try out something in it, yeah, maybe I'd stop using it. But I imagined it'd always be there as part of the studio. You know, I might branch out and start incorporating other technologies again at some point, but I haven't really had a need to do that, so. And I really like having it all in my bag because it's just good for redundancy. It's good for reproducibility in terms of me and Rob. It's good for travel, keeps costs down means that we're not using loads of fuel to move our stuff around. So there are loads of reasons why I like using Max and software in particular, but in particular Max, and also the fact that, you know, I can have gear. I can be running gear that nobody else has got. So there's a sort of exclusivity element to it and a kind of, there's a kind of b-boy element in there as well, you know? Having everything being custom. That's, I've grown up with that kind of mindset, so you know.

Someone's saying “The awesome thing about Max is it’s endless. You get bored with one patch and you can build a new one.”

Yeah, and also like the fact that it's the more you do, the more you do. So if you're building tools, you know, you build one tool, okay, you can use it in a few different ways depending on how many settings and parameters it's got. And then you build two tools and you can use those, and then you build like four or five tools, and then there's combinations of tools that you can use different combinations in different ways. And then, you know, when you've got a few hundred, it's just crazy, the number of combinations. So you can almost not get bored just using shit that you've built yourself without having to build anything else beyond a certain point, but when you couple that with constantly being able to modify everything, so if a synth isn't quite doing what you want, you can just create a copy of it with a new name and just give it another function, you know. It's just, it is basically, it starts to become endless. Like I won't say endless, but you know, obviously there's a finite range of possibilities, but it's like out into the universe type stuff, you know? It's like, it is finite, but, you know, it's way beyond my ability to catch up with it, so.

“Was Acroyear2 named after the Micronauts toy?”

Yes. Acroyear Two in the US and Acroyear One in Japan. So I named it after Acroyear Two because I grew up in the UK, and we had the Mego line, so, you get on a Micronauts conversation now. Micronauts were cool as well. First time anyone's asked me that.

What's this about labels? Trying to get back to this.

“Was it entirely Warp’s decision to not release elseq on any physical formats?”

No, it was ours. [laughs] It's a long story. When we first set up the store, I wanted an opportunity to release some stuff that people might complain about if it was released on traditional album format. Because I got the sense that the industry was sort of, into some extent, holding us back by saying that, you know, this is, you must produce an album that feels like this and has tracks that are this long, and this, these kind of weird restrictions, so. I wanted to have the store as a way of circumventing all that. You know, and this is why we can do quite weird things like the long form Twitch stream stuff, because I know that most people aren’t interested in hearing one track for five hours, you know, that's, I'm not stupid. I get that. But at the same time, I enjoy it, and I know that some people would. So why not do it? It’s, and I've thought that about a lot of things over the years, you know, why not just do this because I like it.

So yeah. You know, that was the kind of thinking there with elseq. We didn't really want to burden people with a five disc set of that kind of stuff, but we thought if we just shoved it out in digital, we'd have low costs, low risk. We can do it and it's just for the music, right? So if we make enough money back, it'll be cool. So yeah, that was the reason and the thinking behind it, and why we didn't plan to release it on physical at the time, and why we announced that. If it looked like there was mad demand for it, for a physical version of it, we'd do it. But you know, at the time I just wasn't sure. I was just thinking “these tracks are long as fuck, man. Is this okay?” I mean it's okay for us. We like it, but is it okay from a commercial standpoint? Are people gonna stand for it? Are they going to complain, you know, that they don't have this many hours in a day to listen to all this stuff? And it's like well, I don't want to be a burden on you, you know what I mean? I'm just like, doing it because for the love. So if you want it, we'll put it out there. So yeah, that's what elseq was, but when we come to doing NTS, we kind of knew that, with the boost of it being on the radio, that we might be able to get away with doing a physical for it. So we pushed it a little bit, and it turned out to be a wise move. But it was a gamble, you know. But we would have done the same for NTS otherwise. It would have been digi only, but Warp was pretty convinced that we could move physicals of it. So we tried it and it worked, so. Fair play to Warp for taking a chance on that, because I probably wouldn't have, left to my own devices, but I approached them with it and they were up for it. So we did it, so.

It's always a bit of a compromise between us and them, you know what I mean? We come up with a weird idea and we hit them with it, and they're like you know, letting us know if they think it's going to work or not. And sometimes we just think that there's too much of a limit and they might be trying to push us into doing more with it. So they might think “oh, we could do a physical of this,” and we might think, “hmm, not sure.” Like the live sets, that was always going to be too much for people, and that's really, the store exists for stuff like that so that we've got an outlet for stuff that's just pure digital. So yeah, that was the thinking. It was sort of a bit, we didn't really know, you know I mean? We just had, we just wanted to try it.

“Is that something you miss about composing songs like Flutter?”

I mean no, because I’ll be doing it if I missed it. I've still got the gear, so there's nothing stopping me getting the EPS and the R8 out and doing Flutter 2, you know. I just don't feel like doing it, so. But you are welcome to have a go if you want, you know. Just get the sound effects card for the R8, sample some kind of arbitrary sound like a vocal or something, and just knock out your own version of Flutter. I think there's like a Quadraverb on there as well, so you might need that. Not hard though. If you want it, just make it.

Oh yeah, forgot to change the filters! I'm sorry about the filters! You know. Yeah, I'm scrolled up. Do you want me to scroll back down? Right, I can't, wait, you can't, say, can you, because I've scrolled up so I won't even hear you. Let me scroll down really quickly and try and skip a few questions. I'll skip anything that I think is vaguely uncomfortable.

“I am a Horse by Horseman”

Is that true? Is that really what it's called? [laughs] I am a Horse by Horseman? I’m fucking, I'm gonna look for that later. It better be that. “I am a Horse.” Am I just imagining it? It's weird, you know, you can't, you're not sure, you just got something in your head? “I am a Horse!” I tried Googling “I am a Horse,” but that didn't really get me anywhere. Well certainly not nowadays. I shouldn't say Google, I actually DuckDuckGo because, you know, it’s supposed to be more private. [laughs] It's not, is it? I'm sure it is a bit.

“Reckon some DAWs are shit. They shove into way too much visual feedback on musicians and that ends up influencing music a bit too much. What should DAW makers do about it?”

I don't know. I mean, like I personally, like I don't like the timeline because you can see when things are coming up so you get this apprehension thing. I prefer forgetting and then listening and just making sure that the funk's right. I think in some ways that's what's good about trackers because it's just this list. You don't really, you don't get that visual kind of thing telling you what's coming, so I don't know. It depends on how you’re structuring your projects though. Sometimes it's not that easy to see where things are because, you know. But often, yeah. I don't know. Personally, I find it easier to listen to music if I've not got any visual feedback, right, so just shut my eyes or like turn the screen off. I used to do that a lot using Logic at first because I found it a bit disconcerting. So I just basically when I were listening back, I'd switch the screen off. I think that's the best way of doing it, but it's having the discipline to do it every time, you know.

I'm just looking for questions. I'm cruising. Cruising the timeline. Right, so.

“Will we ever get a release of the Autechre/Saw You thing?”

I don't know. Yeah, there's no digitised version. I talked about it earlier. One of the tracks is on the Sweatbox thing if one of them isn't out there as far as I know. Hopefully nobody leaks it, but you know, I don't really care if they do either. But I'm not saying leak it by the way, and say I don't care. I just mean it doesn't matter to me either way really, but it's just I don't own it. Like, when I said that about that Hanal thing, you got to bear in mind, right, that I don't own the Autechre tracks on there. They're not mine, they're Warp’s. So if you're leaking it, it's them that you get in trouble with, not me. So me, okay innit, doesn't mean it's okay, you get me? Just means I don't care, so, and I didn't okay anyway, so. [vapes]

column thirteen, I think it was a live set cell. I don't know if we'd used it before NTS came out. I think we might have used a bit of it, I can't remember. Most of NTS Sessions was like cells from live sets, either at the time or a bit prior to that, that we already had jams fully recorded. So we just editing them down into things, and we basically like made it knowing that it was going to go out on the radio. So it was kind of, there's a different editing process to what we'd normally do. So bits of it from before, bits of it were from just then, bits of it were made especially for the thing, for the broadcast, you know. It was a combination of stuff.

Aleksi Perälä? Yeah, I like Aleksi Perälä, what I've heard of him. But I don't know. I've probably only got old stuff. Probably just some files I got off Rob Hall at some point. But I'm kind of shit at buying electronic music, modern stuff, so.

“Try and play any instruments?”

No. I mean, yeah, computer, I've got. Is a computer an instrument? Let’s have that conversation.

“I can't believe he isn't familiar with Villalobos' work. It's like not having heard Basic Channel or something!”

No, it isn't! They're different artists! I'm totally aware of Basic Channel, not aware of Villalobos, so. Sorry. I don't know him. Like should I go and listen to Villalobos? They probably just sound different.

“Gantz Graf and feed1 are the closest you guys have ever got to doing noise?”

No, they're not noise. They’re just sort of certain types of processes. I wouldn’t call it noisy. But I guess it could be if you can't hear the individual events or whatever. I think they're just kind of like dirty synths on feed1 and Gantz Graf is, well it’s Gantz Graf innit. It's just, it's certain kinds of, I won't call it noisy. It's not noisy. Not really. I've heard way noisier music than that. I think noise is supposed to hurt, to some extent. I think that might apparently why I don't like it. But also the kind of people who do it are quite boring, really, when you meet them. Really predictable.

I'm skipping anything that I've been asked before. So I'm sorry if I seem to be ignoring your question, but I probably already answered it.

“Can you elaborate a bit on the process behind the Confield live sets? I hear lots of FM synths?”

This, yeah, I mean it was, like so we had, I had the Nord Lead and Rob had the Nord modular, the original one, the G1 or whatever. And then we had Max running them, and then there was a couple of tracks where we used MSP to do the synthesis and that was all FM stuff, just real basic two operator FM stuff. And then there was a bunch of kind of MSP processing on that, like gating and chopping up and kind of weird reverb, delay things that we've done, but it was all quite basic processes just using them quite heavily, you know, with a lot of modulation. I guess you call it modulation. The sequencing was the main thing.

“How do you load patches during live? Using some kind of cueing system that turns certain modules and X bars and turns synths on?”

Yeah, there's like a global pattr that contains information about which modules are loaded and what pattrs each module is going to look for when it gets loaded, so, and that forms the kind of basic structure of the set. So we can move through that manually and we can jump around and do what we want within that, but we're quite often moving in a semi-linear fashion through it. So essentially, yeah they're, kind of, the information about which modules are loaded and which settings they're going to look for when they load is hard set. But there can be, it can all be flexed and the pattrs can be morphed with each other, within each module, so. The, if we have like a JSON settings, we can mark between them, sort of thing. So yeah.

[laughs] “Where'd you get your ideas from?”

[American accent] “Where'd you get your ideas from?” Yeah, not answering it. Fucking question. Fuck off man! Like that's that question, never ask someone that. But obviously I know that.

Right, wait, Right, I'm down at the bottom. I'm at the bottom!

“Can I ask about Disengage?”

Yeah, ask me about it.

“Building anything, the [human interface] level in Max, just crazy to me. Stuff gets so messy.”

Yeah, not really. This is so fast, this chat. This is why I can't keep up, right?

“Do you process samples and stuff live or would it be more sequencing synths?”

Yeah, more .

“Has Exai stuff ever been played live?”

No, because it, the rig wasn't capable of playing live at that point. It was just for, it was only useful in the studio.

“Tell me Confield stories”

No.

“I've seen chats that make this look slow “

Yeah, I'm sure you did. But I'm too slow.

“For Villalobos, check out the Fabric mix.”

Okay, I will. I will check out Villalobos. I'm not dissing it off, I just haven't checked it. There's lots of stuff I haven't checked, you know. I'm not like a fucking librarian, so.

“I'm going to the Barbican and surely catch you guys!”

Thanks, yep.

“Sign your vape?”

No.

“Would you bring Cygnus on a US tour again?”

Yeah, why not? Be fun, he's a dust to hang out with. Are you working for Cygnus? [vapes]

I don't know about Kanye and Apple. It’s not, it must be what are you talking about.

“Visit Sheffield for some shows?”

Yeah, we never get booked to play Sheffield, which is weird because I did live there quite a while.

“Have you heard Sam Interface’s beats?”

No. [vapes]

What was the approach to the Disengage mixes?

It wasn't mostly us. It was mostly Andy and Rob [Hall] and all the other Gescom lot, and Glenn [?], but we've done bits for it. Little bits of mixes and stuff. You can usually tell mine because usually some :zoviet*france: in there.

“What :zoviet*france: should one check out to prepare for the London gig?”

I don't know, ask them. I don't know what they're doing this year, so get on their Twitter. Ask them. I'm sure they won't tell you.

“You ever tried to make 303 acid in Max?”

Not authentic. no, because I'm not like up for that. I don't really do emulation. It's kind of, it's just why, and also I'm not sure I'd be able to do it because the 303 is pretty unique. Maybe? I managed to get a filter sounding quite a lot like it, so.

“Did you ever get into Emergency Broadcast Network?”

Yeah, massively! I fucking love EBN. That's a really good question and I'm glad you asked it, and you could probably tell from the Twitch streams as well. If you know, you know, right? So that was a really good question! I'm really glad you asked that. I think EBN don’t get enough shouts, you know. I think it was really good, yeah, and funny as fuck, you know. “Get down, get down!” Yeah, fucking brilliant, EBN. Not mentioned enough, especially during when, you know, when like [YouTube Poops] got really fucking interesting in the late 2000s, just before the tennis thing happened because I love YTP tennis shit. Yeah, exactly, it was the original, weren't it, totally was! Totally was. I remember first seeing that and just being like “holy fucking shit, what is happening now? Like, what is this?” [laughs] Like yeah, amazing. Funny as fuck, really good when you trippin’ as well because it's just, it's so ridiculous, you know. [vapes] Okay, Radical TV, I will!

Dall-E Mini, yeah, played with it a bit. Like it, fun, you know? All about curation innit, all about getting the right prompts, you know? I love getting the prompts just right.

Yeah, I did watch Breaking Bad. I'm a mild fan of it. It's alright, you know? I found some of it a bit eh. Some of it was cool. Never watched Better Call Saul. Okay, I will check it if it's much better, Lexie. Good shout. Thank you. Okay, I'll check it, I'll check it. Yeah

I fucking, I really like Bojack Horseman, for what it's worth. So yeah, everyone's saying Better Call Saul’s better than, okay, yeah I'll watch it. [laughs] Yeah, Bojack’s ace! [laughs] “I am a horse!” yeah exactly. “I am a horse!” Let's not do the “I am a horse” thing anymore.

No, I've not read David Foster Wallace. Recommend me something. This is good, not scrolling the chat. It's fucking hell. It's a bit different, innit?

King Gizzard? Maybe I've heard of them. I don't know what that is.

Greg Egan, I have had recommended to me a few times, and I've never checked him. But his stuff's meant to be pretty good hard sci-fi, right? So I'll probably get into it.

Infinite Jest, yeah somebody recommended that shit! Okay, yeah I'll check this. I'm getting a long list now which I'm probably gonna forget most of.

Nana Car Effects[?], I’ve heard. Yeah, pretty good.

Do I Know Karl Pilkington? I probably look, I know, I probably sound like him to you. You know, when I first heard Karl Pilkington, I was like I'm fucking sure I know this guy. He sounds like most of my mates. He's got a similar buzz, but that shouldn't be surprising, right? It's probably just from the same part of town. Similar sense of humor, maybe. There's a fucking really funny bit that Karl Pilkington did, I think it was in one of them shit Ricky Gervais things because, I just used to listen to it for Karl Pilkington, where he's going on about washing up and accidentally spotting a neighbour like in a state of half undress because she's getting dressed, and then like, anyway. I'm not gonna do it because it's funnier when it comes to you. It's one of the funniest things I've ever heard. It's just really funny. Yeah [laughs], he just gets his ass out. Fucking hell!

He’s gone a bit weird, don’t he, Ricky Gervais recently. What’s he’s on now? He’s on some sort of TERF tip. Can't get down with it. I don't know what he's doing. Anyway, let's not get into that.

“Will you play Dublin again?”

Yeah. I mean pretty soon hopefully. [vapes]

I have applied for Dall-E 2, but they don't give a shit about me, do they? So you know, if I was a tech journalist, I'd have it already. Pretty sure of it.

“Do you have a target loudness for shows?”

Yeah, no less than 103 usually. It's not db, it's just dBA though, so. It's not really a loudness level is it?

“Too bad Dublin’s a shithole.”

Oh no it isn't. Don't be like that! I've got a lot of friends in Dublin.

“Any special thing about Dublin?”

I don't know, yeah. I mean I think having mates there helps, you know. It's good playing anywhere where you got mates, is it, when your mates show, so.

My hearing? It's like on this [left] side, it's not as good as it is on this [right] side. But I can't tell like if I hear a signal, I can usually tell if it's centre or not. So it's kind of weird. So if I just listen, if I block this [right] ear off, I'm not hearing too good. But my brain somehow equalising things, so, you know, but it's basically from years of having the monitor on this, on the left side. So it's shot this ear a little bit over the years. But it's weird, I can, like I say I can just tell if a signal's mono or not. I don't seem to have any kind of bias when I'm working, you know. Yeah, it's weird.

“Do you protect it from those +103db?”

I mean that's going out front, right. So I'm behind that. So I'm not hearing it 103 at all. You lot are, though. So you might want to protect your ears. But I'm doing it for the body hit, basically. So if you want to wear hearing protection, that's up to you, innit?

“You interested in Ambisonics?”

I mean, a bit. Yeah, I've learned a bit about it, mainly because I know someone who works with it all the time, so. But she's much better at using it than I am.

“What's your advice to the Gen Z generation?”

Well, you're all getting a bit old though, aren't you? Gen Z, are we on, fucking, what's the next one? Generation Alpha? So, Gen Z? Yeah, don't let somebody else give you your identity and tell you what group you belong to. Don't let that happen. Just figure out who you are yourself, you know. That's what I'd say. There's people getting outraged about things that aren’t really worth getting outraged about as well, and then there's people who are getting outraged about things that aren’t, and the other thing is fucking recognise that there's some of us, I'd say like quite a lot of us actually, most of the people I know, they've been more right on than you lot are for most of our lives, and we're not just a bunch of Boomer cunts. So you've got to understand that. You know I mean, we're not, like we're not the way you think we are. So yeah, I don't know if that'd be my advice, if I had to give any [laughs] which I fucking hate giving advice, so don't ask me that again! Please! You know what I mean? [vapes]

Some of us were nice, you know what I mean? Fuck off, I'm Gen X, mate! And Gen X is fucking, we're supposed to be slackers, aren't we? So, and do I seem like a slacker to you? Is that how I seem to you? And plus, you know, there's two more things I've got to say, right? One is that in the UK, these generation labels didn't apply until the internet, the advent of the internet started to spread them around the world, so we didn't use these terms in the UK. Gen X wasn't a term used in the UK until the internet. And the other thing is that Boomers in the UK didn't exist, full stop. Did not exist because after the war, tax was so high in the UK, no one could afford to have fucking kids. So we didn't have the baby boom in the UK. We don't have Boomers! Boomers don't exist in the UK. People need to get a clue about that at all! So anyway,

“It's all for marketing.”

Yeah probably. [vapes] Yeah, no one called themselves Gen X. No one in America in the 90s was calling themselves Gen X when I was there. No one was like “we're Gen X!” Yeah, no one give a  fuck about any of that.

[laughs] “Bloody Gen X-ers!” Yeah yeah yeah.

“How do you manage to live as a musician without going insane?”

I don't know, maybe I am insane. How'd you know? Do I seem that sane to you? I'm probably not that sane. Probably, I mean I might be a bit insane.

“What classical music do you listen to?”

Not a lot. I mean [György] Ligeti probably. I listened to Shostakovich for a while because I quite liked how his melodies go off on weird tangents. I think some of his stuff is quite mad. But in general I find a lot of classical music a little bit like pirouetting through emotional states, and I find I'm not like that. I don't enjoy the experience of it even though it might be like musically smart or whatever.

[Luciano] Berio. Okay, I'll check Berio. Feel free to recommend classical to me that you think I might like based on what you've heard of us, you know?

“Thoughts on Oneohtrix Point Never?”

Yeah I love OPN! I think OPN's brilliant because he's really found his own voice, within a kind of a sea of shit. Yeah, I found him very interesting from a kind of intellectual and conceptual standpoint. Yeah, he's good. He's really good. You know, he touches on things, he's not like always like aesthetically exactly where I put myself, but I think he's very definitely doing his own thing, so that works for me.

“Any vaporwave you like?”

Yeah Mac Plus, let's do it, you know? I like Eccojams, you know. What can I say about it? [laughs] I don’t wanna name just them! But you know, they're the two that I'm the most familiar with, so let's have it. [vapes] Yeah, come on. accept it!

“Can the Ship of Theseus sail through the Sea of Shit or do you reckon it’d sink?”

Yes, so is the Ship of Theseus fungible or not? What’d you think?

Ah, you don't have to say that, but thanks [Vektroid]. Appreciate it!

What do I think about chiptune? I think it's all derivative of Team Doyobi. No, I'm joking, you know. But yeah, I feel like I was there at the start, you know. I seen chiptune spring up out of nowhere. Not really.

[laughs] “Is crypto a load of bullshit?”

I'm not fucking saying, I'm not saying an opinion about crypto. So I'll just have people calling me a smooth brain, so, and we can't have that, can we? Yeah I think it's like funny, the crypto thing. It's a bit like a cult, you know, but it's also really driven by a lot of speculators and you've got to recognise that, you know, if you've got a lot of money, then crypto's a useful tool for making more of it. But I don't think we should be speculating using money. I think it's weird. Currency speculation, it's a bit like currency arbitrage. It's a bit like, I'm not sure how I feel about it. I don't think money should be a vehicle for investment really. But you know, in terms of whether it's good to have decentralised currencies, yeah, probably, but maybe not using some kind of collective ledger that takes fucking years to process, you know. There's probably a better way of doing it. And yeah, I don't know, proof of work versus proof of stake, and I don't know whether we’re really there yet. Everybody talks about [Ethereum] moving over, but I'm not sure when it's going to happen. Has it happened yet, you know what I mean? I'm not a crypto expert, so don't start asking me loads about crypto. I'm not, I just have some pretty ill-informed opinions, you know what I mean? So, [vapes] yeah, exactly! Yeah the thing about it sucking in people who were on the left because they thought it was an alternative to fiat currency, and then them ending up being techbros and bullying people on the internet because they're not using crypto was just fucking perverse as fuck, you know?

“You into Tom Waits?”

Yeah, a bit. You know. There's a track by his, What's He Building in There?, that I really vibe on. I think it's fucking really good. Yeah some of his stuff's really funny. Yeah.

I haven’t heard Beyonce's new album. Should I hear that? Is that good?

“Do you master your own stuff?”

No, I get like Noel Summerville to do it ‘cause he's really good. But he does, mainly what he's trying to do is make it sound, the vinyl sound the same as a digital. So he doesn't, as a rule, doesn't touch the digital and then does as little as possible to the vinyl, or at least he processes it in a transparent enough way for you not to tell that it's different to the digital. So that's why we use him because he's very good at doing that. And that came from him actually. It wasn't us going to him and saying “don't touch it.” It was that we took our stuff to him and he just said “I don't feel like there's anything I need to do it. So I'm going to do this,” and we said okay. So yeah. But I really rate him. He's really good though. He's just fucking really good.

“Who is your favourite filmmaker?”

I don't know, [Andrei] Tarkovsky? Fucking…

“Do you like Kendrick Lamar?”

Nah, not really. I mean it's a bit issuesy, you know. It's alright. I feel like he’s trying to please people and the music doesn't really vibe for me, so.

Yeah, I love talking to Noel. He’s fucking super experienced. Really knows his shit, you know? Very transparent guy to work with. Very easy to work with him. Doesn't fuck you around.

Not heard any new Leftfield.

“How many times have you seen π?”

Once, I think? Maybe twice.

“Favourite Eurorack module?”

I don't know. Don't really have any Eurorack modules. I've got a load of old ones but Rob's got many of them, so. Probably, I mean if I had to name one, it, but from 20 years ago, but it's probably the remake of the Bode frequency shifter that Analogue Systems did. So, because that thing was really nice.

No, I haven’t seen Requiem for a Dream. Is that the one about drug addiction or something? I've not seen that. I think someone recommended it to me once, and I thought it sounds a bit depressing. So I didn't bother. Is it good? I’ll watch it then, okay.

Am I a fan of Jay-Z? I don't think so.

Everyone's saying it's really depressing. [laughs] Someone said it's a shit movie, don't watch it. Yeah okay. I don't know. I just thought about it and thought, nah, I just, I don't feel like I'm in the mood for that. So I didn't watch it. If I didn't know it was going to be depressing, I probably would have watched it. So, one of them, innit?

“Don't watch it!”

Okay, I won’t! [laughs] I won’t watch it! Fuck Yeah, I’ll watch Better Call Saul instead because you told me to, so. Yeah.

“Have you watched any anime?”

Yeah, bits. You know.

[laughs] Trainspotting. Nah, it's a different scene, heroin addicts in Scotland. It's not really my background. I'm a different generation. All these questions about things I don't know about.

Not used Cirklon, but it looks like fun. You can see why you might want to use that. Rather be doing my own stuff, but yeah. Looks cool.

“You into horror movies?”

I guess. Maybe a bit. Less into them than I used to be. Probably because they got a bit samey. Yeah.

I've been asked this question about a massive SoundCloud dump, Aphex style, about 20 times now. I wonder why that's like a meme question?

Yeah, I don't know what's interesting in Manchester, outside of the whole 80s scene. Yeah, I don't know. I don't want to list a load of things that are cool about Manchester, but it's mainly about the people, you know? So it's like if you like being around them kind of people, then it's a good place to be.

“Do you like hiking?”

Yeah, I guess I do.

“Would you ever do a microsound album?”

I don't really know what that is. Is it where you have lots of short sounds?

“Is it still Manchester?”

Nah, it's not like that at all now. It's like very different. It's been kind of gentrified quite a lot, and there's a lot of suits around, but there's still a lot of locals, you know. But depends where you live really.

“Have you ever tried limiting yourself with equipment?”

Yeah, I mean I am limiting myself to just using a computer and Max. So, it’s just very unlimited at the same time. I don't know about this limitations thing. I mean I get that it's like attractive to people. But I think that it might be a bit of a misnomer in a lot of cases because it's, you know, there's still probably like a lot of combinations of parameter settings and stuff on whatever gear you're using. There's very little gear that is actually limited in that way.

“Thoughts on Talk Talk?”

Yeah, I liked them quite a bit. You know, Spirit of Eden and even the earlier Top of the Pop stuff I used to like. But there was a girl at work who got me in Talk Talk, and she got me into The The as well. Because I wasn't really into pop music when I was a kid, I was only into electro, and then I started working in the shop. I used to try and sneak music onto the stereo in there, and they let me play Depeche Mode, but not a lot of the other stuff. I could try playing house and techno tracks in there and I get told off. So then after I was playing Depeche Mode in there, she started recommending The The and Soul Mining was the first one I got into. I really like that, and then Burning Blue Soul later and then, yeah, I like Talk Talk as well. That was because of her as well. She used to play Propaganda and stuff like that.

lfoboy89: How high is your IQ?

I don't know, 3?

“Do you ever talk to Aphex's kids?”

No, I haven't. I haven't seen Rich in a long time, actually, for quite a long time. Talked to him a few times.

“Thoughts on Roxy Music?”

I should probably listen to Roxy Music. Cause whenever I hear a track and think “oh this is interesting,” from that era, turns out to be them because some of their melodies, I think they're sort of pre-date synthpop melodies in a weird way. So, I'll probably enjoy Roxy Music. I've got a feeling I would.

“Siouxsie and the Banshees?”

A little bit. Yeah, I was more of a Cocteau Twins kind of guy. Garlands, I liked because that's a bit Siouxsie-ish.

“Netochka Nezvanova?”

Yeah, that was fun, all that NN shit. I used to enjoy interacting with NN back in the day.

Yeah, we're having a 4AD chat now. So it’s getting very kind of, okay, so, oh, Kate Bush, yeah, okay like, I see Kate Bush get this, especially lately because of all the attention. So there's been a lot of contrarians puffing up. But you know, I think The Dreaming's phenomenally interesting, right. It's like super well made and weird and I always really rated Kate as a producer because I think, obviously people talk about her histrionics and weird fucking dancing [laughs] and everything. But she's a good producer, you know what I mean? I've always thought that since the 80s, I thought that, so.

I'd love to work with Kate, are you serious? It'd be fucking amazing, that'd be like a dream come true! Fucking hell. Yeah no, she was great and so much more of an individual than a lot of punks, you know, which is a, you know, at the same time you've got punk happening right, where everyone's toeing the line and being a punk. And then you've got Kate, and what the fuck is Kate doing but being an individual. More of an individual than any of them cunts, you know?

I don't know, I hear it and all that kick. It's probably a fucking roost bus[?] or some shit like that. I don't know. Some neighbour having a rave? Yeah the mozzies aren't getting me today, I don't know why. But I noticed a few dragonflies yesterday cruising the garden. So I think they've moved in now, and they’re now the bosses, the garden bosses, and they're dealing with the mozzies. I was wondering if I could buy a box of dragonflies just to take out the mozzies, and then they just showed up by themselves. So, gotta rate nature, aren't you? Just looking after itself.

“What are your thoughts on rave culture? Would you guys ever consider releasing an album so people can remix it?”

Yeah maybe. I don't know. Rave culture, I don't know if I can have, if I can give you a reasonable comment on rave culture. It was co-opted so fucking quickly. It was good at first, you know, when we didn't know where we were going and we were meeting up at Knutsford Services to drive to some obscure location or where, you know, Blackburn raves. It was good then, but it got shit very quickly so.

“Been back to Manchester recently?”

Nah, not in a few months.

“Put up a nest for bats.”

That's a good, that's a plan. How do I do that? Is, I'll look online for a guide.

“What's your dream sound check scenario?”

InStreet[?], yeah. InStreet[?] were a fucking good sound check. I remember walking around the room and being like “shit, this is gonna be nice.” That was one of the better sound checks from the last 20 years.

Wait, what's this? “How would you feel about a track of yours was blowing up from a big show like Kate Bush recently had with Stranger Things?”

Well, I don't think it's ever going to happen, is it? People aren't going to get fucking misty eyed for some old Autechre track. They're not gonna be like “oh Autechre, I remember them! Let's celebrate Autechre and send them to number one.” It's not happening, is it? So, “Oh Basscadet, I remember that! Oh yeah, let's send Basscadet to number one!”

[laughs] “Dude yeah, Bike!”

Yeah, Bike! [laughs] Yeah, I don't know. [vapes]

Nah, I've never been to a Ben Frost gig. Should I? I don't really go to gigs much. I'm shit. I don't go to things. I’ll just sit in my room with the laptop so.

“Did you read The Wire?“

Nah. Sorry. I'm not dissing it or anything, I just can't be asked to read music, other people's opinions on music, not when I can just download the music. So I'd rather just listen to the music.

“Would you ever score a film?”

yeah, I guess. It's a lot of work though and they keep telling you what to do. So I don't know if I'd enjoy it much

Now [Haruki] Murakami gets recommended to me all the time, and I feel like I should read Murakami. I saw that film The Burning recently, and I just found it quite depressing, but it was good, but it was quite depressing, you know.

Do I like wolves? You mean the animals? Yeah, I guess. I mean I like dogs. I probably would like wolves. I met wolves once. It was at a zoo though.

Nah, don't know The Third Policeman.

“A longer version of t1a1?”

Is that even possible?

“The Bola remix,” what was that? “Did you love the composition? Any samples that you purified it?.”

Well it just took his very simple piano things and then try to make them more complex by just layering loads of them on top into, yeah. It's probably obvious what we did though. Yeah, I liked it. It was mainly just the way of approaching it that I didn't think that anyone else would take, so.

“Favourite YouTube channel?

Yeah this is gonna sound like, I don't know like, I don't know because it's, hmm. I like that guy, what's he called? Anton Petrov, I like his channel. There's a guy Rob sends me. It's this engineer guy who I quite like, and I can't remember his name now, but if I remember it I'll comment it somewhere. I like ContraPoints. Really, really well put together videos like, and just beautifully formulated arguments, you know? Yeah, PBS Space Time good, Vsauce good, yeah, Action Lab good. There's a lot of them channels I just enjoyed just because they're fun, you know. I used to like Photonicinduction when he was around, but he's gone fucking missing, so I don't know what's happened to him. He was fun though. Numberphile, oh yeah, good. Yeah, Natalie [Wynn] is great. Hello Natalie, you're great! Yeah Contra's fucking great. It really gets you thinking. It's just good, really well formulated, you know. Really well put together and thought out. There's not many channels putting that much work in. So, you know.

“Do you watch much Twitch?”

Nah, not really.

“Should Gervais retire?”

Yeah probably, because he's gone full TERF, ain’t he, so he can fuck off. So I don't really know what tip he’s on at the moment, but I can't get down with it. Think he's done that thing Louis CK did when he got called out and then he's just dug himself right in, and he's just gone “this is what I want to be now,” you know what I mean? And think Dave Chappelle as well, didn’t he, I just can't get down with it. It's like a shitty response to the problem, you get me? [vapes]

“Grateful Dead?”

I don't know. I want to, but I feel like there's a lot there to digest. People say that about us though, right, so. Yeah, maybe I should get, I should try Grateful Dead because I used to, like it's gonna sound weird, but I used to like Hawkwind because I kind of like how, I mean I was young at the time, very young, right? So I have a kind of weird relationship with Hawkwind. It's like my dad's, kind of, generation music, but I kind of liked it because it was so out there, you know, and from what I understand Grateful Dead can be a bit like that. So maybe I'd be into it. But you know.

“What's the appeal of vaping?”

Nicotine, which gives you a short, both a short term and a long-term boost in cognition and memory capability.

“Any thoughts on Nietzsche?”

No.

Yeah obviously it's a vascular constrictor or whatever, so it can be bad for you. And it can give you a stroke. So you know, use sparingly.

“Smoking weed makes you smarter?”

Probably turns you [laughs], probably makes you feel smarter. You know, it's like [stoner voice] “dude!”, but you know, I like it. I like what it does to music. I like how it really triggers my synesthesia like nothing else, so. Especially when you have loads of it, if you do buckets or whatever. If you're into that kind of thing. I guess you call them gravity bongs, but we used to do them a lot when I was a kid. Fucking hell, just but it's probably not very good for your brain. so I'm not recommending anyone do it. Plus it's illegal in a lot of places so.

I didn't know that about LSD. Is it vascular constricted? Is it? Shit!

“Sampled Hawkwind [in Cavity Job?]”

Yeah, we did. Yeah.

Candyflipping, not done that for a long, long time. I never really got into [ecstasy] though. I was a bit like, I was exposed to it and I had them a few times, but I were never really a big fan and it would mainly ‘cause like, when we was out, people would be listening to the shittiest music and thinking it was amazing because they'd had a couple of pills. So it never really did it for me. They weren't my kind of thing.

“How did you find out you were sampled by ZZ Top?”

I don't remember. Somebody sent it to me it. It was back when it happened, so. Got the bees cruising around here at the moment.

“Try Changa?”

Nah, let's not have a big conversation about different psychedelics. It gets boring, you know. Save it for the psychonauts, so. But I'm interested in hearing any stories anyone's got about salvia, because I've always been like a little bit intrigued by salvia, because it sounds like such a rough trip. But I've never had it.

“Ever tasted your own cum?”

Yeah, it's weird, innit. As a kid, I think I was about 12 or somewhere.

[laughs] Wow, that's really funny!

No, it wasn't us. This is about Conet Project. Yeah no, I was just finding, you know, I was just finding numbers stations because I sent a load of them to BoC and mainly because we were kind of going “what is this?” and then Conet Project dropped, which was a kind of cataloging of number stations. But I didn't feel like it was very comprehensive, to be honest. But it was interesting .

“Have you tried snus in Norway?”

Yeah, I mean I get the, I get like white snus. So, it's not really snus but I use it just for when I'm on planes and stuff like that because it's a good way of getting it in. You don't have to worry about getting told off of vaping which, you know when I because I started vaping like 10 years ago. Longer actually, like 2009, ‘10, so. No one used to tell me off for it back then, but they do now.

DXM, I've never had, weirdly. Although I think I might have had it as a kid and not known. Well I think I did have it as a kid, actually. It was an inactive head, I think.

Oh God, everyone's on about cough syrup now. Like it's not that good. It just makes you, I thought my mum was a monster when I had that shit. That was way too young too. My mum remembers giving it to me and me having this mad trip [laughs] and thinking she were a monster! [vapes]

That's interesting about the bath of pluggo[?] thing. Yeah.

Right, I'm gonna get out now while this chat's descended into an awful comparison of the effects of different easily available psychedelic substances, and because it's been a while. [laughs] So yeah, I'm gonna love you and leave you again, and have a nice time, and whatever. And yeah, try not to get too excited about the wrong things, Alright, bye!