Do you find yourself more of a thinker or a doer these days?Definitely a thinker, that's why I'm aware of it. When I'm telling you this I'm telling myself, I'm trying to coach myself. It's like a tool, your mind. It's good for working out problems but if you start letting it decide too much in your life it can go wrong.
My favourite tracks are ones that I can't remember making. I didn't think about them. From running a label for years when we used to get [demo] tapes I'd start at the end and go backwards. Because it was always the [tracks] that people thought that nobody else was gonna like that were the best ones. The first ones, the ones that they think are the best, the ones their ego has decided is the best, are always the most boring.
AM: Without music where do you think you’d be?
AT: I tried not making it for ages as I thought maybe I was doing it because I couldn’t think of anything else to do but soon realised that it’s what I’m meant to do. I love to make anything really, it’s what we are here to do – either help each other or create – it’s our divine gift.
AM: Have you a nemesis in music?
AT: I think if you have an enemy in art you need to rethink why you are doing it. It’s not a competition. It’s about adding flavours into the earth-mix, which were not there before.
On his 2001 album Drukqs, his protectiveness reaches almost absurd degrees. He talks of subjecting his music to a “pre-ageing” process, such as furniture undergoes, in order to throw would-be state of the art beathounds off the scent “so that it doesn’t sound like anything new or revelatory”, he says, continuing, “if you put out something that sounds completely new, it might sound revelatory in its time but, as with a lot of things, sounds rubbish a few years down the line.”
But why this constant need to wind up? It’s not, as you might suspect, some self-conscious, laddish desire to deflate any pretensions or high-minded conations attached to his music. As he once said, “I never take the piss out of anything I do creatively because I wouldn’t be worthy of existence if I did things like that.”
Then again, it isn’t the Ambient work that signifies the rural. Like random ball bearings, his frequent forays into proto-drum ‘n’ bass, always had a distinctly ‘homebrewed’ feeling to them, which made him such an inspiration to other bedroom beatheads – the equivalent of a fearsome cider concocted in a dirty vat in a garden shed. “Yes, that’s quite a good analogy,” agrees James.
o you said “no fucking lyrics”, “no fucking tunes” – but you like tunes now.
Yeah. I wouldn’t have ever said that about tunes. I’ve always liked ’em.
And fighting – you’re not into fighting anymore
Only if necessary. It’s good to remind you that you’re human – that’s the good part of it. But there’s a lot of better ways you can do it.
Just an old track of mine. I don’t know.
So basically, you gave them an old track of yours, claiming it was a remixed track of theirs – they gave you ten grand.
Yeah. Exactly.
“If you use the same keyboards as everyone else then you’re going to come up with the same sounds as everybody else and that seems pointless to me.” he explains. “There aren’t any keyboards that are built for Acid and Techno so i build them exactly how I want them, and I’ve perfected it now. I don’t think anyone else is doing that…”
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