One thing I've noticed that's a common thread in many of your recordings is that you use the studio as an instrument. How did this develop?
I'm not sure, really. I guess it develops from conceptual ideas for pieces best achieved in a studio. For example, a desk set up whereby you might have various effects processors routed to their own channels, with the aux sends on each channel corresponding to the effects already decided upon. With this setup it is easy to set up organic matrices of feedback by sending different effects units to each other, but with some feedback paths — like if a reverb and echo were patched up on channels with aux one and two on each of those channels being assigned to the inputs of the aforementioned effects — then by sending the reverb to the echo and the echo to reverb a feedback path is established. Of course, normally the routing is more involved via several effects before feeding back to itself. In this way a very controllable and interesting instrument can be formed often not even needing any original sound input to trigger events through this "Chinese-whispered" series of routings. This sorta thing is really best approached in a studio. In fact, if you assembled the necessary gear to create and record it to its potential, you are creating, in effect, a studio. I consider anything capable of sound creation as a possible instrument, acoustic or electronic.
As an engineer and producer who influences you?
I'm very influenced by a number of "producers": Delia Derbyshire, realizer of the 1962 Dr. Who theme music and one of the great unsung heroines of electronic music. As the little-known brains behind the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, she was an originator of ambient music (pre-dating that genre by 30 years), an edge cutter in sampling — again 20 years ahead of her time. I also have the utmost respect for her "sampling" techniques. Basically what they used to call [musique] concrete techniques — the manipulation of recordings of original recordings, not wholesale robbing of riffs, sounds, songs, etc. I really don't see it as especially clever to put two pieces of someone else's recordings together and consider it on the same level as a wholly original creation. I'm not denying that it can have pleasing results, but this is really at the very most base end of what I call musical composition or songwriting. Delia was master of the edit block, often cutting attacks off of one sound and attaching it to sustains from another. Reversing, speed changing, analyzing and re-synthesizing through overdubs, magical sounds. Samplers are very useful in the way [they] allow you to access concrete techniques for manipulation of recorded waveforms to achieve wholly original results, capable of exceeding previously recorded sounds/pieces. That's really it. I think you need to have the possibility of exceeding, not just matching and mixing. Delia was responsible for much of the reputation the BBC achieved from the Radiophonic Workshop, but the inability to let her or her fellows get credit for their individual work was to be her eventual undoing.
And who else?
