First off, I want to just talk about Oiseaux now that it's been a few years since its release. The album has been very influential to many people in the IDM [Intelligent Dance Music] scene. I just wanted to get a few words on how you feel about it today.
Well, I still like those pieces, and I'm pretty proud of them. I feel like some of the productions I dated poorly, obviously, like my overuse of drum breaks. Especially the "Amen". It was a great idea at the time because all I wanted to do was listen to tracks with the "Amen" break in them.* And, a year later I completely changed my mind and got so sick of it. I still like the music. I liked the way everything worked together. It's really kind of magical, I didn't use any pitch or time correction at all... at all! Everything that fits together is just a complete happy accident. It's just loops, that when put in a sampler and sped up or sped down that way, completely lock in speed and key. Some of those tracks, like on "Ghatham", there were 6 or 7 different samples that just happened to be completely in time with each other and completely in key with each other. And they're all from different songs, and they're all from different kinds of music. It's kind of amazing that it happened to work out. Some of it is less of an accident, I had a nice sample and I played other instruments to it.
On other songs like "Routine Exercise" there's this brass orchestra, were those samples from other pieces?
That's actually a piece by this composer named Alois Haba who's a contemporary of Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly. He traveled around Hungary and Transylvania in the early 20th century, making field recordings of folk music. He wrote a lot of music as well. Mainly the stuff that I'm interested in of his is his quartertone stuff. He wrote quartertone trombone quintets, and quartertone brass quartets and tons of quartertone piano pieces that are really interesting... a lot of the same quartertone stuff that Ives was doing, but has this neat Eastern swing to it. Kinda like weird tonalities, because he's using this kind of in-between-the-keys kind of notes, but kind of making this exotic music. That brass quartet specifically, I sampled the entire piece. It's 45 seconds long. It's only 8 bars.
And you just looped it in various ways?
Yeah, I just put it in the sampler and moved it around a bit so that it would fit. I think it's just called "Quartertone Brass Quartet" or something like that. But it's the whole piece. I got the score and I wanted to try and record it because there hadn't been a recording of it. And it was literally like, I was working on music, and then I walked into Tower [Records], and found the Complete Works of Alois Haba on a triple CD. I just freaked out. I bought it, went home and I made the track that day. It was this bad recording from the '70s. I did clean that one up a little bit. I ran it through some plug-ins like Finalator or something to synthesize some high-end because it was really dull. I used it straight out of the computer into the sampler and just worked from there.
Were there any other recordings of composers you had used or made for Oiseaux?
Yeah there's some. I mean that track "Atelier", the main hook is actually from a tribute LP of George Maciunas, who is the main Fluxus guy. It's this groovy track in the middle of the Fluxus tribute LP, so I sampled it. I thought it was interesting. And, also some of the slow piano. Not much else, but I kinda had that idea when I first started. I wanted to make all these tracks and sample 20th Century classical music. Just because it's a lot of what I listened to and I thought it would be a neat and subversive thing to do. To get kids to kind of have that vocabulary in their head. To know John Cage prepared piano music by hearing it in a drum and bass track. That was what the whole Hrvatski thing was.
How do you feel now, when you hear reviews, or people spouting in- fluences or similarities in under- ground D'n'B zines and IDM lists and they speak about you?
Its weird. I did it almost completely like this fuck off [project]... I just wanted to make it this complete exercise in subversion. I just wanted to construct poppy tracks out of avant-garde samples. That was my idea. But it's completely not that. I started getting into drum 'n' bass and programming, next minute I really like the music. So I couldn't be so sarcastic about it. I just began making tracks because I liked making tracks. Until I made those tracks, I wasn't ever into dance music. Then it was like [in a boomy, authoritative voice], "Ha haa! We'll teach those kids a lesson! Those crazy dance music kids! This will show 'em!" And I just got into dance music. It's weird, the influence thing, I occasionally still get emails from kids who just find the record. It's out of print now, and has been for about six months.
And then breaking away from Oiseaux, came the Raume 7"
