I wanted to start by talking about the early records, like Iohora Tahiti. How were they recorded?
Since we started we had a studio. First it was in Andy's home. You could say bedroom. It was the biggest room in his house. I don't remember what the first board we had was, but now we have a Soundcraft DC2020, and a Studer 24-track machine was always there. That was Andy's baby. He always loved it. Also, lots of outboard gear. For samplers, at first we used an Atari, then Akai and EMU samplers. And lots of effect pedals — I think what was maybe not that common at that time was to use guitar gear for electronic music or to mix things like using guitar on an electronic record, like beats and guitar and breaking these clichés. You had techno, trance, and ambient for chill-out rooms, which were popular at that time. On the other end you had indie rock, and some of the indie rock opened up to more exotic sounds — a bit loungy stuff. But everything was still in its niche. We always wanted to be like a band, like the music we made somehow was abstract and was just there, but if you could imagine someplace where this was coming from it would be instruments being played. It would be a sound that is physically coming from somewhere and not having an abstract moody electronic soundtrack, strange and synthetic. For instance, I always hated synthesizers. When I was young I was a big Queen fan and I was always going for the no- synthesizer aspect of the records. I always liked that all the effects and sounds were made with tape manipulations. When we started working with Mouse on Mars, we didn't really want to use synthesizers. We didn't really want that sound.
Usually when you hear a record you can hear the process. On your records I listen all the time and never really understand the process.
