As a Coventry teenager into Xenakis, you must have been quite an anomaly. Did you have any like-minded peers at the time?

“I had my best mate at the time, Lee Dorian – who’s still a great friend of mine, in fact. I met him in WH Smith’s: we were both standing there reading the NME so we didn’t have to buy it, and he was like, ‘Oh yeah, you ought to come and see us’ – because he’d seen I had a Swans T-shirt on. I said, ‘Who are you then?’, and he said ‘Napalm Death’, and that they were playing in the Bull & Bastard or wherever in Birmingham next Saturday. So I went to see them, and thought, ‘This is fucking brilliant.’

“In the later 80s I started just to meet more people in music, I guess. Bruce Gilbert, who was in Wire, and does a lot of experimental stuff of his own – he was somebody that I met pretty young, probably when I was about 17. There was a producer who worked at Mute called Paul Kendall who I did things with, did some editing on some groups at that time.

“I really pursued my interests – god knows how many millions of gigs and clubs I’ve spent my time in.”

Mick Harris [Napalm Death drummer, latterly of Scorn] seems to have been quite a galvanising presence in the Midlands – did you know him?

“I didn’t really ever get to know Mick that well, I mean, I used to speak to him but…At that time I got to know Carcass, I knew Ken Owen pretty well – we were quite like-minded, and when everyone else was talking about demo bloody tapes and fanzines and the metal thing, Ken and I would be talking about some Schoolly D drum-beat. So he was one. There were shitloads of people, though. I’ve been about. I really pursued my interests – god knows how many millions of gigs and clubs I’ve spent my time in, stood there all night, waiting to see whoever it is I’m there to see…

“In Amsterdam the other night, after all the concerts at the festival I’d been playing at had finished, the Paradiso became an after-hours nightclub – and I had to wait four and a half hours to see [Detroit techno icon] Shake Shakir – but it was well worth the wait. I’ve seen all those people before, I used to go to [seminal London techno party] Lost in the beginning, so I saw Jeff Mills the first few times he came over. Then later on into the 90s you’ve got things like Sonar happening every year, these more international festivals.  Austria, Germany – they were already having these festivals a few years earlier, before anyone else. I went to a quite a few; God knows how many times I saw the Gigolo people, the first wave of that, when Jeff Mills did things on Gigolo – that was aeons ago, it makes me feel really old [laughs].”

Tell me about the UPIC Diffusion Sessions.

“It’s a collaborative project I’ve got with a friend of mine, Florian Hecker, an electronic musician. Basically, we embarked on a project years ago in 2003 where we did a residency in Xenakis’s studio. I’d previously visited the studio myself, so we had some connections, and we did a residency. During the residency we recorded lots of material, which we subsequently edited at my studio in Suffolk, into a record that came out on Warner Classical: Blackest Ever Black. It was the first electronic computer music record to be released on double vinyl in Britain since 1972 or something ridiculous like that [laughs]. We cut direct metal masters at Abbey Road.

“Since then we’ve been doing concerts of the material, doing a specific edit of the material for each concert – a traditional diffusion. So every concert is numbered, and every one’s different – some of the material might appear in different concerts, but it’s been rearranged. It’s all only done with two-channel editing; there’s no cross-fading or layering of any of the material at all. We take the original sound-scape recording that we produced with the UPIC in the studio, and we re-present that, we diffuse it over a multi-channel soundsystem, as high quality as we can possibly manage. And then, in the true spirit of Xenakis, we ask [the venue/organisers] to get in the best lasers they can afford or get their hands on, and blast them around the place. It’s a multi-sensory, surround sound environment.”

“Before we went into the studio we were gathering images that would be put into the machine – whether they be abstract, whether they be influenced by existing artworks, or pornography, depictions of terror, atrocity, everything.”

How prepared were you before using the UPIC in Xenakis’s studio?

“You can replicate UPIC on a PC if you’ve got the right operating system, but we’ve always used the hardware-software version in Xenakis’s studio. And so everything we did, every experiment, was there and then. To begin with there were a few days of ‘Shit, how do we use it?’ and then we had a small window of time to actually do what we wanted to do. So it’s kind of a rushed process, but we spent a lot of time researching it in advance, we got every paper that had ever been written about it. I’d already introduced this idea of putting recognisable pictures into [UPIC], so it would become a kind of synaesthesia, creating a ‘can people see what they’re hearing?’ situation at the concerts. Before we went into the studio we were gathering images that would be put into the machine – whether they be abstract, whether they be influenced by existing artworks, or pornography, depictions of terror, atrocity, everything.”

It’s quite formalist, your work with UPIC, in that it’s tied to a very specific system and process. Are your other projects similarly constrained?

“Not at all, I’m trying to do completely the opposite with my other work. Performance-wise, I do different things depending on the situation, the invitation, the context – it’s quite site-specific. I have to be quite aware of where I’m being invited to, what’s going on, what they can get in terms of equipment and production-set up, and whether, fundamentally, they can really front it. A lot of the time, you have to ask yourself: ‘Is this is a bullshit request?’ Once you have a MySpace page you get everyone and his dog going, ‘Yeah, I’ve got this big space,’ and you have to go, ‘Yeah, but mate, it costs this much just to put it on, never mind pay anyone to do it.’

“So it really does depend on the place, who’s going to be attending, what’s the demographic is. Are they a bunch of mutants? Is it a load of monging kids? Is it a bunch of old people? When Florian and I did a UPIC Diffusion in Switzerland we got Dieter Meier from Yello to come, and it was great, we all had champagne with him before the show, I think you can find the photographs on Flickr of him with his fingers in his ears going ‘Arrrrrgh!!!!’ [laughs]. That was a great gig actually, fond memories.

“My performances are also site-specific in the sense that I’m going to take advantage, if there’s an adequate surround-sound set-up, to work with surround. That’s really my focal interest at present, and actually it has been for quite a few years. I’m intrigued about surround recording, surround playback, representation, perception, I’m totally interested in all the surround mixes on DVDs, whether it be an album – when it’s usually total crap – or a movie. I like to know what’s really going on there in Hollywood surround sound. So I’m always attending conferences to do with that if I’m able to be involved.”

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