Modulations - Cinema for the Ear | Documentary

The world is not meant to be good, bad black, white, 1 or 2, 1 or zero. It's not binary. It's chaos. Around the late 40s, the atom was split. We discovered that everything was forever changed when we discovered the word could be cut up, that sound could be cut up, that everything to do with culture could be cut up and reassembled in ways that didn't exist before. That will be seen as the most radical important thing that happened this century. PMT you know? Pre-millennial tension. Surely the end

of the millennium is a good time to reassess what's happened in the century and say, look with a longer lens. There's no room for people who are resting on their laurels, who are being conservative, who are being reactionary. It's all moving so fast. All we can do is enjoy the ride. I don't think any of us know where we're going. When I was a kid, cars were the things you hot rodded, but today it's computers and electronic synthesizers. I think electronic music is the hot rodding of... it’s the

hot rodding of the 90s. Pretty much music as we have come to understand it today, I mean, in the last 30 or 40 years, is all electronic. I mean, we hear it on the radio. That's electronic whether you're hearing a recording of an acoustic instrument or not, I mean, that's...your hearing electronic music. Since the time we were able to record music on a certain medium and reproduce it, I think that's the beginning of whatever electronic... anything happened after that. It's all electricity, and i

t's all a way to have a facsimile of sound and some kind of medium. Electronic music many times is more about the character of the sound than the actual composition. It’s just sounds. It's just noise but organized. Organized noise, organized sound. People have a cliched idea about what a melody is. The melody I think could be constructed of noise or different sound. The technology has allowed us and people like us to, you know, make the boundaries between media much more fluid, and we no longer

really think of sound and image as separate things anymore. We work with them together, you know? So when you... very simply...when you press a key, you get an image and a sound, or a piece of text and a sound, or something else changes. This is no more than the top hippie idea of 'everything is everything,' but there are new realizations, new evidence coming up, new slants on the idea that everything is connected, and that as Heraclitus said, 'As above so below.' We mix up people, experiences

, records analog, digital toys and tools. It's all about mixing things to get new hybrids. It's never one thing. It's always...there's always something different. It’s chaotic. It’s calm. It’s, you know, just forever changing. As a child, my head was filled with with new, noisy sounds, sounds that couldn’t be interpreted. That is the peculiarity of ‘musique concrète’. It doesn’t come from interpretation, nor performance. It comes from the imagination. ‘Musique concrète’ was born in Pierre Schae

ffer’s studio. Schaeffer had the idea to produce sounds by using different tools, by splitting sounds, prolonging sounds by reverberation, prolonging sounds by repetition, a sort of alchemy that doesn’t exist in orchestral music. This music cannot be play with instruments, only with electronic tools. One of Kraftwerk's key innovations was to say that as soon as you entered your car, you're in a musical instrument. As soon as you travel in a train, you’re in a musical instrument. Ostensibly, ef

fortlessly pulled along through stations across Europe was a very exciting world, opening a new world of auto motion, which really impacted on people like Grandmaster Flash and people like Africa Bambaataa. We were all turned on by Kraftwerk. I was turned on by "Trans-Europe Express" when I was working at a record store when I was in high school, and then when I moved to New York, you would continually hear "Trans-Europe Express." "Planet Rock" obviously used the melodies from "Trans-Europe E

xpress," the beats from Kraftwerk's "Numbers," a whole bunch of other tracks, and it brought them together in a way which suggested a certain...a universal sound, a kind of universal electronic sound. Obviously with "Planet Rock" we married that sound with, you know, with the Bronx , with rap, with that whole, with that whole other thing. You could hear previously disconnected worlds suddenly kind of imploding together. You could hear the world of Kraftwerk impacting with the world of the Bronx

, and that seemed very exciting because at the time, those two worlds seemed very far apart, but Bambaataa connected them. The sort of analog electronic stuff the came out of Kraftwerk that was really electro, sort of, and funk, was sort of like, I don’t know, was like sort of human sounding or natural sounding but totally synthetic at the same time, and it was just a doorway into something for us…was like ‘Hey this is totally futuristic. What you think?’ And for kids it's brilliant because

you just like, you know, all you’re thinking is sci-fi, space, future. What's this? Excellent computers. You know? Oh wicked! Music made on electronic gear. I could do that. The music is based on the experience of survival, experience of oppression that we had. When the riots happened that night in 1967, you know, that brought out togetherness into the city of Detroit, you know? The city was in turmoil, we had riots, we had different types of cultural and racial barriers that, you know, plague

d the city at that time so basically now we're prodigies of that environment that happened back in those days. Detroit is such a desolate type city, you know, that you almost have to dream of the future to kind of escape the reality of your surroundings, you know, and I think that that was incorporated and instilled into music. That's just the truth because this is a working town. It's just a working town. You can only dream of what the rest of the world is like, and you want to...you want to fi

nd yourself trying to get out of there, and you want to put yourself in the position where whatever you think about, whatever you feel, you want to believe that it's going to help you get out of that scene. The Detroit techno Derek made, Kevin Saunderson, Juan Atkins…they were looked up at as the successors of Kraftwerk, the guys who took techno to the dance floor. It has spread, and and it's all called techno or dance music. It’s all electronic music regardless because it's created with techn

ological equipment. Maybe that should be the only thing: dance music. Because everybody has a different vision of what techno is now, you know? A lot of this music is about states of stepping outside your normal self, you know, ecstatic states and sometimes they are just induced by the music, just by the hypnotic power of the music and the sensation of the lights. We look around for stimuli, you know, and if it's color, to music, we're bombarded with stuff. It's all about this extreme sensations

of speed and intensity which again is a kind of ecstasy. Genesis P interview. Take two. All music is innately psychedelic. The interface between technology and drugs is a...is a running theme through pop history. The whole evolution of the music in the last 10 years has been conditioned by ecstasy and by chan...and also by changing drug use. A shift, you know? This... the music in England changed dramatically in the mid 90s when a lot of people who'd been taking ecstasy for several years starte

d to experience the dark side. The music went very dark, and that was actually one of the pivotal moments in which rave music turned into jungle. Jungle is a convergence of all kinds of musics that in their own form would never have mixed so it's kind of, I call it, a mix-o-logical music. It's a kind of illogical music which combines dub which combines the bass of dub with the breaks of beats with a synthesizer of techno, and it brings all these forms to get... On one level jungle is sped up hip

-hop obviously without the rap element Hip-hop mutated into jungle because I think Britain was kind of, wanted to emulate America, and we all wanted to be b-boys and homeboys. But it's definitely not just hip-hop. That is not what jungle is. Jungle is a truly British urban experience. Jungle is a product of the technology. It's a product of digital technology. It's a form of music that couldn't have happened without those tools becoming available. A mixer. These days it moves on from old style m

ixers which are analog, still the best sounding though, but these days you've got digital ones which are fully recordable, and then at the end of the day getting everything to sound right, and that goes back from using valve or valve emulation effects to get a warmth and a sound that you used to get when we're making break beats or when people making break beats in the 60s and 70s, and then also something really modern which is...it's called a finalizer. It really maximizes the sound you can get

out of a recording. I've actually got a little Yamaha sampler. I can't see it actually. It's a little keyboard, like a toy. It's got like phono input and an output like so basically you can like, you know, use it with a studio whatever, makeup sounds on it, you know, and like, made loads of sounds on this. Like loads of stuff for my new album is done with this. People forget how...how amazing that is, you know, and like what you can do. I just like the, you know, the thing of getting out of be

d and going and getting your breakfast, then come back, and then you're straight in the studio, you know? You don't even have to go down the road and get on a bus to go to a studio. You're just there, you know? It's hands-on, straightaway. You wake up in the middle of the night and do a track. I mean, it's like that's what... I don't know. That's what sort of like revolutionized it for me. The output of the ring modulator. I'm sending it through to some other filtering. You can get some really '

out there' amazing, weird sounds, and then I would leave a...take that through the desk and sample it on here so it's all somewhat based around technology. You can't get away from that, and it dictates, you know, what music is going to be. I think in the modern day we are equally versed in using any creative software. That software can make movies, can make animation, can make sound. It can broadcast. We were never musicians. We're just collage artists. It's the juxtaposition of flavors, betwee

n images, sound, tex,t to try produce feeling, Yeah why do we do ours then? Because we think that most music is based on the idea of instant gratification, for the artist, gratification through contact with audiences, and with so many people basing their ideas of entertainment around that idea, we think there has got to simply be something interesting about the opposite, a response that myself as an ego wasn't entirely happy with because there's part of me that doesn't want to be cut out of the

process, but in a way, I see myself as a sacrificial lamb. I sacrificed myself in order to feel. Come breathe with me! I guess the whole thing comes about from people sort of like wanting to see an actor on stage and being able to put... when you're listening to the music...put a face to that music and just making the whole thing work. Yeah, we're not a faces band. We never wanted to be the two keyboard players behind the keyboard who keep their head down and that type of thing. I mean, like,

um, I'm at the back so people know I'm there. We're just not afraid to say, 'Yeah here we are. Let's go!' I don't know what I am, and I don't know what I'm gonna become. I'm a man that's crossing the desert, and I'm not stopping off in a safe, little, warm, cranny. Future Sound of London - such antisocial people. They won't even go to a party. They have to make...they have to do the gig on the telephone. You don't even understand. Well what's the point? Goodbye. Hello? Hello? Hello? They hung

up. Oh well. There's a great struggle going on, you know? What do we do with our human-ness? What do we do with our virtual selves? When do we give up our human-ness and accept the machine? I like a combination of frantic beats and atmospherical sound because to me that's like heaven. You've got the drive of a beat, and you just got these soundscapes like this, I don't know, heavenly atmospheres, if you like, around it, and the combination of the two, you just... dynamic in my... Well most beats

first of all come from 70s, and as for my belief anyway, most music come from the 70s because the last 20 years we've been into sampling the 70s and getting breaks and loops and wild, wild guitars, saxophone, flute riffs. It's all from the 70s generally. And this idea that you created the seamless flow of music that ran all night created by DJ, that came from disco, and that has been one of the most radical changes of music in the last 30 years. Giorgio Moroder did an incredible thing. He was o

ne of the most important influences on disco. I wanted to do a kind of a futuristic record with Donna Summer, and I said why don't I do it with the the new Moogs or whatever that we had at that time, and that was the song "I Feel Love," which was created almost entirely on the Moog synthesizer. And I think the only non- synthesizer was a bass drum. It really launched that whole area of sequenced high-energy disco. I mean that first hit… it has her on the audio track like basically having an org

asm. I must say that at the beginning we used the synthesizer a little bit too much as a gimmick, like whack whack, all those interesting but I guess kind of boring sounds, and while lately the synthesizer became more like an instrument than a sound effect machine. At the beginning I think everybody outside of the electronic music field thought the synthesizers were supposed to imitate traditional instruments. Whereas the people who were inside electronic music wanted to use synthesizers to make

completely new sounds. What's happened is now…now we’re respecting the disco era for what stood for. For most of the records of that era that are very popular and predominant right now are disco. It's disco, cut up. Disco cut-ups of a very famous risk of a lot of disco music which were popular in the 70s so it's gone around full circle. It's incredible. After the disco culture died and then you had, you know, the rare groove kind of following and the hip-hop, which were a predominant, and very

predominant today even, but then the beats slowed down. Nobody was just getting into slow chunky groove, and I just think in the end of the day that the energy of dance music culture was lost by it, which then producers in Chicago and Philadelphia and New York decided to create this...the disco but early 80's disco version of house music. Disco died in '79. There was a void in the music which, when Frankie Knuckles was in New York, he went to Chicago, he caught the very beginning of it. He ope

ned up a club which was called The Warehouse. So after a while, you know, people get used to the same things so they just chopped it from 'warehouse' to 'house.' People would go out after hearing Frankie play at The Warehouse and be like we want some of those house records meaning warehouse records, the club Warehouse. Mainly what it was was just disco, disco and upbeat R&B songs, and they just named it house because it was played at The 'House. My defining record is this record called “Move You

r Body: The House Music Anthem.” Another one...there's this other one called "Acid Tracks" that I produced at the beginning, and that was the first use of this machine called the TB-303, which a lot of people call the acid tracks machine. Actually that was the second record that I used it on, but it was called "Acid Tracks" so everybody started calling 'acid house, acid house, acid house, acid house," you know? And you know, they started doing that, and German techno came from that form of music

. It was like a a faster form of acid house because they were using TB-303s and 909s and all that stuff. Well, the TR-909 has nine different sounds, the kick drum. It's tunable meaning you can...one of the beauties of the machine is that you can edit in real time. You can change the parameters. The 909 was the first drum machine we made that had sampled sounds. We actually had digital samples, but they were very rudimentary samples. They did not sound incredibly great, but they became the stan

dard. I mean, you can't listen to a house track without hearing a 909 drum kit in it. It's just the standard. Okay, this is the 303. When it originally first came out, the 303 was about in the 6, $700 price range. It was trying to mimic acoustic instrument, but it didn't. The 303 lost its value, and that's why a lot of these guys in Chicago, in Detroit and Germany can pick up these things in the used market for fifty to twenty dollars. That's it. That was a distinct sound. That was the acid soun

d, and it was kind of like incorporated with the house, but then as the years went on, it's many styles of acids, like really hard aggressive acid, and you know then the acid house like, you know, kind of funky stuff so it just...over the years, it's just progressing, you know? It's just sprouted out and a whole different, you know, a whole different type of music. This whole sub-genre of house music, you know, that's just based on the 303 and the squelchy baseline that you're gonna get out of

a 303, and everybody's chasing after that one thing, you know? But then after a while, you know, just how many songs can you hear with that sound in it, you know? How much can you, you know, how much can you put up with of just this one thing? Actually I do like a little R&B and a little rap and stuff, which is pretty cool, and house music...it's where the money's at though right now so I got to stick with that for a minute. You know what I'm saying? You know how other people are like, ‘well I'

m gonna do opera’ you know? I was like, I was like ‘forget that.’ I'm gonna go ahead and do this house ‘cuz it's making the money. I think people always accepted that it was gonna be disposable. It was a hedonistic culture to start with. It was a hedonistic culture that became something far more relevant, that acquired far more cultural significance than I think its original participants ever expected. Life is hard. You got to go bust your ass at a job for eight hours a day, you know, making sh

it money, barely able to pay your bills. Like, you need a good six hours where you don't have to worry about shit. Like, you need to be able to have a chunk of time that you go somewhere and like no matter what, you know, it's raining outside, I got two dollars, like my girlfriend left me, on the way here I locked my keys in the car, like, you know, all kinds of shit. People still live for the weekend. It's very different weekend from the weekend they had ten years ago. I mean, unfortunately, th

e way that the government and society here has viewed the whole scene has really damaged the scene quite a lot. The days of the huge illegal raves are long gone. Well, obviously there's been some sort of a problem. I went there and on my way back to the fire house, I knew what this was. I knew this was a rave. Thank you everybody for coming out. It looks like we have to shut it down. What do you think about the party being closed down? It was my birthday! Yeah, she’s turning 18. This sucks! Y

ou should go in the party now and film them being arrested. They’re being handcuffed right now. There's handcuffs on Ava in there. Yeah, it's like a big chain of like six people in handcuffs. I’m a raver that doesn't do drugs, that goes out to dance to the beat, have fun yo, that’s what I’m addicted to. I’m addicted to the unison, everybody jumping to the beat at once, and the police and the fucking law and fucking… fuck all that shit because they won't let us have our fun, man. In order to

have a paradigm shift of any sort, people need to be able to expand their minds, and the times that we've seen great cultural shifts, you know, mid- 60s and the mid-80s, have been times when there was definitely the assistance of various tryptamine molecules and others, and they played their part in that. Inspiring. I think that’s what interests people, innit, sometimes because people are looking for extreme experiences, and that music's one way of sort of triggering that off or getting to that

state. That's one of the reason why drugs are so popular in music because it all just combines up some huge disorientating experience. I think that many people are frightfully confused and upset, and one reason for that is in fact traceable back to the philosophical roots of the Industrial Revolution. I mean, according to Descartes, the way you solve a problem is by breaking it into little pieces so we developed a culture in the West, particularly, that is exceedingly good at breaking problems

into tiny little bits and pieces. So we're good at that. What we're not good at is putting it back together again. The techno culture has actually become far more disparate. I think the homogeneity that we saw ten years ago when it was just one scene has fractured. It's become far more tribalistic. People are very much protective and very much into their own scene, be that, for example, say, techno has divided into gabber techno, Detroit techno, acid techno. I think the techno that people are in

to in America is very different from techno in Britain, is very different from techno in Germany. I keep finding these raves lately, especially the bigger...I'm talking a bigger commercial, the commercial raves. Now if I get off for the gig, I'll kind of try and find out what, you know, what it's all about. What the motivation behind throwing the party is. For quite often these things are just about money. Well it's different from what it used to be. Used to be people coming together to share, l

ike, what they have, their uniqueness, and now it's about...it's about... Nothing what it used to be. Now the prices are getting way too high. Wait, how much? $15 used to be expensive for a party. $30. This was $30. $30 bucks. Being like all cramped up like...all week, like, you know, doing a daily routine, going to school, going to work or whatever, gets on you after a while. Just go to a party on the weekend and just, you know, do whatever you want to do and just have fun. It’s something tha

t you have to experience for yourself to really understand exactly where we come from. Because on the outside it looks ridiculous to some people, but to other people it’s…that's our reality. That's our thing. Culture of amnesia. How do you get people to create their culture? Well, you pull away all sorts of memory and see what happens, which is kind of what has occurred with this late 20th century generation. Most people really just don't want to think about historic references. They don't wan

t to think about their engagement of the world around them. It's much easier to be a passive consumer and wear the right Nike shoes or something. I don't know why. It's just...but it's also an internal colonized situation, mentally speaking, for a whole generation. In the beginning, it started in some really small places in a German techno scene, I would say, mostly in Berlin and in Frankfurt. The next thing was like these East Berlin parties in the big venues and then were like this explosion o

f energy, and I always call it The Liberation Dance of the East Germans. This effect of these people suddenly, you know, screaming, throwing the hands up, throwing themselves on the floor, getting up, jumping about, and that really made Berlin techno. The Love Parade started even before the wall came down, '89. The '91 Love Parade, I think, was the first where people from all over Germany, from East and West, partied together in eight years now, and we remember the first one with a hundred and f

ifty people, and now it was 1.5 million. That's quite an incredible explosion. At the end of the day, it's all about, like, a stupid party, and you see that this has... nothing achieved. Everyone who says it's this new generation, everyone is happy, new technology, I mean, that's so naive and stupid so...I think it was boredom that led to fascism and, you know, in the 20s in Germany and not hate, and this is exactly what's going on at the moment in the society. Everyone is so bored. No one want

s to change anything. For the techno guys, techno is a revolution, and it's really not, you know? Techno exists since, I don't know, six years or anything like that, six, eight years, and it's nothing, nothing. It has nothing revolutionary. There's no revolutionary aspect, and our music, our noise, our hardcore drum and bass, this is really…we want to shock the people with our music, and we're getting shocked of our music. When I'm hearing one of my records I think, ‘Oh my god what have we

done?’ We have those freaked out frequencies, you know? Those very high, very low frequencies, always very distorted in hard sounds, and it's not only the drum and the bass, we have very very ill atmospherics in it. We have all those [speaking German] beats. That’s, um, how’s it called? What is that? Trash? [Speaking German] Trashcan. Trashcan beats. You know? When you turn it around, and you beat on their…on their other side. The actual beat for a dance floor, to keep the dance floor dancing

all night, is 133 beats per minute. I mean, I play faster than that, but that's the speed a normal crowd, I mean you could have people on drugs, people drinking, but an average person on the dance floor wants to dance to music at 133 beats per minute. That's what I've learned over 10 years of doing this every week, and keep it at that tempo. You keep the flow going until early morning. You start playing jungles, happy hardcore, gabber, whatever. You get them a little testosterone jump where they

're like this for an hour and you lose it, you know? Gabber, both the bass and the kick drum fuse together into a jackhammer motion which allows a kind of piston-ing kind of quality. Gabber, therefore, becomes much more than music for...it becomes much more apocalyptic and much more nihilistic because there's no bass anchoring your heartbeat. It becomes kind of heart attack music because the music attains such a, such a punishing rate of velocity. It reaches BPMs between 180 and 210, 230 BPM, b

ut it becomes not so much a series of kick drums, more kind of a drilling noise which kind of pummels your head and kind of literally drills through your cortex, and it allows a certain synaptic rearrangement which is so intense and so strong that it becomes a kind of a terror dome, a war zone. It becomes a, kind of, how much can you take? Just, music got harder and harder, and it… people at the time, people who'd originally been into house music complained that it was...it was sort of heavy-m

etal techno. That's the way it went, and then people inevitably burned out and tried to go in softer, more chilled out directions, and yet, that's when you had the whole movement towards ambient techno and electronic listening music. I think there is a transition, and I think that what used to be called ambient music is the place to look for the more interesting philosophies and ideologies because it's more amorphous, it’s less formularized, and it doesn't require a rhythm. The rhythm is always

a very, very difficult place to work. Ambient stuff is more like texture and like shape of sounds, so it's not involved so much, you know, melody and things. And microwave sound like... It's like, to me, this is like living acoustic sound. Electronic music is a very direct reflection of the environment. In one sense I think there's more of a sound awareness in our culture now which is related to why music is taking the turn that it is. Maybe this...the awareness of constant electronic and indust

rial processes makes us more conscious of a certain kind of sound. Sounds. Sounds are continually happening whether you produce them or not, but is this music? Is it a noise? If it isn't a noise, why isn't it? Is music music? Do we have any music? But seriously if this is what music is, I could write it as well as you. Electronic music for me started with people like John Cage and Stockhausen. It didn't start with Kraftwerk or even Can, you know? It was...it was going in the 30s and 40s, and aga

in it's just technology. Once people can get their hands on it, you know, it becomes bigger and bigger. I was very liberated by the ideas by John Cage where he talked about you embracing your environment so if you're trying to work, and you're trying to write or make a film or something, and you hear these sounds in the background, you have to accept the fact that this is part of the situation you're in. It's that environment, whether it for good or bad, is reflective of that situation. When I

produce my work in a live situation, I've talked about sound Polaroids. I've talked about this work being very reflective of that local environment. It's a kind of invisible map of the city. My input into this digital discourse, as just the individual loops...I have some sound file archives containing some several thousand loops just in each of them with several iterations and versions. And so I see myself as just editing the source material. Operating disruptions is how I like to talk about the

m...is because specifically within the electro-acoustic ambient community, music is used for kind of tripping out and about...it's a metaphor of escapism. So for me, these disruptions ultimately are about snapping the listener into their environment. I color the silences in different layers so that, for example, there's a silence, and then I take off one of the silent layers, and I hear another silent layer, and then I take that second one, and I hear a third silent layer because there is no ab

solute silence in the world, and I'm still trying to expand this relation between nothing and something. Very early I thought that a microphone is a musical instrument like a bow or like a percussion instrument, whatever you use. I use huge Chinese gong with all kinds of materials: rubber, wood, metal, glass. And the rhythm [indecipherable]... making such movements with the microphone over the surface of the tam tam, and all the movements are notated as the actions to bring the tam tams into vib

rations. Stockhausen was very important for all the young generation at the moment, and most of them don't even know why. You see, what he has done is not...I'm not now speaking in terms of his outstanding complete quality as a composer. He had so much, so many practical things done and invented, where like the dub...we say he was the first dub mixer in the world! He made it in the 60s where he was very... Late 50s already. Yeah, he was...he was a dub mixer! All these practical things that he h

as done and showing the way, you can say, for the next 50 years at least. I would say Stockhausen is the closest to what hip-hop, you know, in its true form, what Stockhausen was doing because that just, that whole idea of - hey this is what it is, and we can do something with this, and shape it, and form it, and translate it into a form of expression. When you cut and you edit, you can do it in such a way that no one will ever know. In those days, we still were doing it with a razor blade. I

mean, it's not like digital recording now, and you got the 24 tracks. You got all kinds of equipment. You can put it on a computer. You can do all the things you want to. You want to move that thing over? I mean ...that would, you know, not one bar, not one beat, but maybe a beat and a half, a beat and a sixteenth so you create a wash, you know? There's a lot of things you can do today that we didn't have the techniques to do them the late 50s and the early 60s. What we hear on released record

s from that period is the product of a great deal of analog tape editing, which is no different now than computer manipulation of sound so the edits determined the piece of music that you bought in a store in the 70s even, and I think we didn't know that, and we thought this was the way people played music, no more than we hear a record now based on techno or hip-hop and things and think that this is how it happened, but it's all manipulation. Two master tapes. Put them together on two different

machines, and record on the third one, and try to sort of sync them up but not sync them up...just a fraction so you wonder when you listen back to some of the Miles [Davis] things, for instance, you'll wonder how this sound was created. Now I did all that in the studio. 'Miles,' I'd say, 'Do you like? It if you like it, we'll leave it in. If you don't like, I'll remix it again.' I consider the studio a musical instrument. I toy with it all the time. I mean, there are things that I keep asking

them to do. We can't do this. We can't do that. I said, 'I don't want to hear we can't do that! Let's go do it!' I'll do a transformer, a transformer combined to a crab scratch. So that's... Both scratching and cutting were whole new...whole new kind of techniques, new operations applied to sound. What he did was...they made vinyl. They kind of activated and switched it on. Before that, all people did was put the vinyl on the record and listen to it. Suddenly the turntable obviously became a m

usical instrument in it's own right. Not only that, but vinyl became a kind of useful archive, became something that you could use to build a new sonic composition of your own. Different kind of scratches make different sounds. Like that one. The naked penguin scratch. Mm-hmm. The lips on the back of the bear scratch. Like the stuff we do, we don't even have a name for it. What would you call it? Turntable jazz or scratch, hip-hop? I don't even know what. What would you call it? Turntables and…

psychedelic scratch jazz? Yeah. Whatever. Turntable music. Mm-hmm. Yeah, well, no not really because if you play a song on it, like if you play a technical song on it, that's still turntable music. Yeah that's true. Yeah something else. I don't know maybe. We’ll call you up. We’ll page you. Yeah we’ll let you know. If you're in the passenger seat, you'd wear this side to avoid the Sun, and if you're driving, you'd probably wear this side because the steering wheel is on the left side of the car

. If you're eloquent at your style on two turntables with all these effects in it too, you could, you know, the sky's the limit. You can do dub reggae tricks. You could do, you know, rap tricks. You could do all types of different things. We're not gonna arrive it at a brand new sound or note or anything. It has to be a combination of elements that create another two. Two together creates a third, and all these different things go into creating new...it's the only way to, I think, to arrive at s

omething a little different...is by combining things now. When the child gets hold of a toy it does what it wants, you know? If you give a baby a guitar, they'll jump on it, smash it, hit it. They won't play chords. They won't...they won't do a beautiful piece of classical music. They will see what the entire thing does. We have limited time, you know? Fill it with fun and adventure. Expect to occasionally be shocked and surprised, and I think when in doubt, make no sense. No sense is good, and

nonsense is good. I believe that you really can't burn anything out by trying something new. I mean, even if you can't burn it out, it can be fixed. Try something new.