Live performance has been my primary focus for the last four or five years. There were quite a few times that I tried playing live in the past but it honestly took me 20 years to find an approach I was happy with. I think the mistake I made initially was that I was always too cautious about the way I approached it. I see this very, very often with other techno artists.When you do a live show, obviously you want it to be good. You don't want to look like an idiot and fall on your face. Problem is, that makes you approach it with too much caution and that in itself takes away the power of what a live improvised performance can be. The power is in the danger and risk. That's where the real excitement and energy comes from, so when you're too cautious it quickly makes it kind of impotent.There's the simple fact that most producers just aren't used to it. Then there's this pervasive idea people have of trying to achieve the perfect set. But what they're doing by aiming at that is smoothing off all the edges. Perfection unfortunately is often pretty boring.Yeah, that's a common one. This makes me think of a recent interview I read with Francis Coppola where he was talking about that latest rerelease of. There was a quote right at the end that I think is very valid and important in this context. He said something like, "I never let not knowing how to do something stop me from trying it." That's really powerful. It's easy to say, but you've got to get out there and try it. You have to stand up and fail because otherwise you're just going to be stuck in your bedroom. You'll never get out if you only want the perfect set. It's important to point out that developing yourself as a live performer is an ongoing practice. There's never an end point.Yeah, I know what you're saying. The last few releases I've done have been very rapid time-wise. It's something that gets said a lot about improvisation but, for me, it's real-time composition. There's always multiple layers going on at the same time in my head. I'm concentrating on really feeling the music, allowing it to flow through me. I'm a conduit. In the ideal state, I feel like a pipe that the music is flowing through. I'm very gently directing it a little bit. Then I'm also aware that there's an audience and I'm sensitive of their perception, so I'm not totally lost.The last release I did was these two 12-inches called Raw Tracks . That was made with a live-style setup—a 909 with a Synthi clone called the Pin Electronics Portabella. It was basically just those two pieces of gear and a simple sequencer. This was almost exactly how I made my first tracks. You start the recorder, do a take and go, "Yeah that sounded good," then, boom, onto next one. You bang out the whole record in 20 or 30 minutes. There might be one reverse edit onbut there's no post-processing or anything like that. It's clearly imperfect but I think it better captures a moment in time than when I do a more involved production style.Of course there are advantages to detailed production and it suits certain people, like Trevor Horn or someone like that. They do fantastic work and I really admire that. But I've generally been more effective when I just get it down fast.I think it also has to do with impatience. I like things to happen now. But what's fun in a studio project is that it's almost like breathing life into something. These flat sounds and the way you work them and put them together and put other things with them, suddenly it's like it's taking on life somehow. At the same time, it's easy to squeeze the life out of something by going too far.I see and recognise that different people work in such different ways. I've read the other pieces you've done and think, "Woah, these people work in such a different way to what I do but it's really working for them." Like Autechre, they're programming, programming, programming. They're genius with that but I'm rubbish at it. I don't have the patience for it. I need to bang it out and have it feel good.This is a roundabout way of answering but there were two books that had a big impact on me when I was at school. The first was Composing With Tape Recorders: Musique Concrete For Beginners . It caught my attention because even though I always knew I was interested in music, I was terrible at learning instruments. I wanted to make sound with them rather than learn scales. In contrast to that, this book was primarily about sound and collage. It got me into the processes and ideas behind musique concrete without having actually having heard any of the music.One Christmas I got another book,. It's full of studio notes for every session they ever did. I read all that but it was their psychedelic period that ignited my imagination. The sheer degree of experimentation was and still is amazing. Thanks to these two books, I had this idea that I was going to work for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.I've mentioned this elsewhere but I remember reading about how they made "Tomorrow Never Knows" and trying to make my own recreation of it. I managed to borrow a reel-to-reel tape recorder and had the razor blade out cutting up the tape to make loops. That was my earliest music-making experience.So here's the point of this tangent. It talked about details in the book but it didn't specifically say how they did things technically. So I had to think, OK, there's this weird backwards-sounding seagull loop: How am I going to make that? And I experimented until I found a way to recreate it. That's how I learnt. All of my engineering sound work has been about figuring out a way to do something because there were no lessons, no YouTube tutorials or anything like that back then. There weren't books out for making techno. So it's sort of like feeling your way around a dark room. Maybe that's why I don't feel so technically confident about a lot of aspects of production because the whole journey has been like this.It's fundamentally different. Of course, it's amazing what you can learn on YouTube but there is something in having to figure it out yourself. I think that's a key in my production evolution.The biggest and most obvious difference is—well, one of the last times I did this set, someone came up to me while I was setting up and asked, "What are you using for your drums?" And I had to be like, "Sorry mate, no drums tonight." Another huge factor is to do with the audience. With techno, the invisible script is much more defined, these unwritten, unconscious rules shaping what people are expecting.That determines the range of what you can do without totally losing people. Within those confines, you can still test and tease and provoke and make it a little uncomfortable before bringing it back. But with the abstract setup, people have much less of an idea what to expect. But that's great because it makes the boundaries so much wider.There's this idea of ambient, and these sets are often labelled that way. But I would say that's not a useful term for it. To me the original definition of ambient is this Brian Eno idea of background music. That's totally fine but that's definitely not what this is. Hopefully this is engaging and it becomes quite physical and parts of it are uncomfortable. It goes almost into pure noise at times. Simply put, it's a balance of harshness and melody. I'm playing with those two forces, like good and evil.There's a very strong element of trance, too. Not as in the genre obviously but the state. It's about drawing people into a sound story. It puts people into a very unfamiliar place. That's a really powerful feeling, taking people out into space, mentally speaking.With a techno performance, I'm in a much more technical mindset. Basically, there's more admin to think about. To be techno, it has to be structured in a particular way. I'm arranging things live so I have to be conscious about structure whereas these abstract sets are much looser. When I perform with other people, like Paddy Shine from Gnod, and Dan Bean when we do The Transcendence Orchestra, it makes it even more powerful. I feel like I experience it along with the audience much more than I do with the techno set where I'm more analytical and detached, even though I'm feeling it. But with this, I'm out of my mind at the end of it. Dan always has to lie on the floor.The Transcendence Orchestra sets have developed into something quite theatrical. We use a lot of ritualistic ideas. We've got these robes that we wear, we burn loads of frankincense, it becomes a total sensory experience. When we turn up wearing the robes people wonder what the hell is going on. Already you're setting something in their mind. We're using all these different elements to bring people right inside sound. It sounds strange but I think even people who are music fans quite often have never really been brought deeply into abstract sound. For us performing it, we really become part of that, that kind of mind state.