Neil Landstrumm (interviewed September 2, 1998) part 2 of 2 by Andrew Duke (listen to Neil Landstrumm interview in RealAudio) Neil Landstrumm on… …computer use in music "It's the future surely. There's so much potential and possibility to twist it up. Everything pretty much ends up in the computer these days. Basically, the Apple is the new toy in the studio and you can do more with that than anything else, but still it's only part of the process. It's kind of a cut-and-paste style of working--very different from how techno has been written in the past. Basically, it's a whole new style of audio production and post production." …BIAS PEAK 1.62 "It's a program made on the western coast of America which, to my mind, is like the Photoshop of audio; it's absolutely amazing. You can literally put anything in there, completely morph it, change it around to produce sounds I've never heard before, and I consider myself quite well educated in sound. You know, working with techno for so long, that to me was what was always the cutting edge of techno-something you hadn't heard before. And BIAS PEAK is just like, 'don't need any more synths, man', it's like it's all coming out of this box. It's not a sequencer, it's just pure audio. It's like the first kind of thing which you can really mold stuff with. You use plug ins like SFX machines and other things. It's sick, man, it's really sick." …bit-rate decimation "It's breaking everything down-instead of going for that kind of 24 bit ultra clean-'ding'-kind of sound, it's just like 'rrrrrrr', very raw. It still has the essence of the original sound, but it's roughened up around the edges. It's still clean, but it's very broken up. Some of the art from the 60s and 70s was very much sort of degrading images, photocopying, etc; this is the same kind of thing, except doing it with sound. There's the beginnings of a movement in this kind of sound with things like the Trash stuff that came out on Mille Plateaux from Cristian [Vogel] and that lot-very fucked up, cut and paste beats, you know, brutal sounds. I think it's just so different from that whole Millsian techno thing. Structured, but with really busted up sounds and interesting frequencies, not that repetitive kind of boring thing. I'm going digital, but dirty." …Super Collider "There's a program called Super Collider which is another thing that's amazed me. It's just a programming language for the Mac which produces these odds sounds…you can process things through it or just churn out these bizarre sounds." …why he called the album "Pro Audio" "I don't know if you're up on the hacker kind of thing, but I use Hotline quite a lot. It's quite interesting. And when you get into that hacker kind of world, there's a whole sort of terminology and sort of digital underground. 'Pro Audio' is the thing they call all the software which they use, so I just kind of nicked that (laughs)." …the album format "I think you have to use the word 'album' very carefully these days. A lot of what is considered an album is in fact a doublepack. I don't consider eight tracks of banging techno really an album. It's not something that I personally could listen to. An album may have hard tracks on it, but it has the capability to be played in a car or at home or whatever. For this album, I tried to make it a bit more home listening, though of course it's still quite hard… It's really trying to be as different as I can be and also try and put a bit of variety into it. You know, techno albums can be very boring and I just try to sort of give of variety of tracks and music. A friend of mine called it 'a mature diversification'. It's less kind of 'raw, angry young man', (laughs) more sort of mature, placed sounds. You know, very carved, very designed, yet still pretty hard and quite dark. It's not nice, but it's definitely more CD-ish. You could listen to the whole thing. It's a bit looser. The way that the Scandinavia label is going, it's definitely breaking off from what I've done in the past. It really is trying to do something different, trying to innovate and trying to create some new styles--you know, sub bass, industrial kind of drums. I've always believed in the album thing. I love working on the artwork with Matt Consume from No Future and making the whole package, I find it quite an artistic challenge." …songs versus tracks "I like songs, you know. I hate the Swedish Drumcode stuff, I hate it. It's just so boring, it's so distributor driven. It's just like, the distributors just bang it out. You know, 'here's four tracks that are slightly different". I find that whole drummy thing just dull." ..his induction into the Edinburgh music scene "I like a lot of the early British rave stuff that isn't easy cheesey. That was what brought me into the whole thing--early acid house, early rave." Neil Landstrumm's "Pro Audio" album is out now on Berlin's Tresor label. The "Pro Audio" EP, 4 tracks not on the album, will be released in October on Landstrumm's Scandinavia imprint. Neil Landstrumm album discography: Brown By The August - Peacefrog Understanding Disinformation - Tresor Bedrooms And Cities - Tresor Pro Audio - Tresor Check out Landstrumm's Scandinavia website for sounds, sights, and plenty more info Neil Landstrumm--"Pro Audio" (DM Tresor) album review