Yes, this has all my EQ controls and effects. I've actually programmed it so I know exactly what I'm in control of. I know what my movements will do, especially with the detail in the bass frequencies. I know how much effect on the sound moving it just slightly will have.Yes. So much of my DJing is about playing between kicks and bass, layering them. On one track, the kick might be resonating around 50Hz, and another might be higher at around 60Hz, so I could blend those kicks together and play between them, and have an effect on the dance floor. It's really subtle, but the crowd is getting constant movement—not just the same kick all the time. Using the K2, I can cut out the low-ends of two tracks, or cut one then the other, or play them both together as a blend. That kind of technique is really important to my style. I love to play with these different kicks.That's why it's really important to calibrate my hearing to every soundsystem I play on. I don't like to just turn up ten minutes before my set. I like to be there an hour or at least half an hour before, and then get a feel for what it sounds like on the dance floor and what the people in different spots are hearing. I check if it sounds the same in the booth, because the monitoring can often be so different from what's on the dance floor.You have to take into account all these differences. Sometimes I can be surprised, because the soundsystem will have been set up so that it's focusing on specific frequencies. When you're expecting to hear something and it's not there, it's like, "That's missing, I really wanted that—OK, forget it." But then sometimes other frequencies are really enhanced and surprise me in a good way.Yes. For example, when I first played at Tresor they'd just put the Void system in, and had tuned it in such a way where it was pointless playing anything melodic. It was just bass and hats. That's why it's a pleasure to be able to play at a club again and again, because you get to really know the soundsystem. You also, without even thinking about it, prepare tracks you know are going to work there. And you know to avoid some tracks, too. For example, I love to play more textural and detailed stuff in intimate clubs, but if the soundsystem won't handle the detail, I just need to have clear kicks and more stripped-down tracks.I'm paying attention to the detail of all the frequencies, and if the system is balanced or sounding harsh or lacking in some areas. A balanced soundsystem is the best. I'll pay a lot of attention to the detail in the low-end, too. This is key.There's a lot of pre-preparation. I enjoy it, though, because it gets me in the zone for what I'm about to do. But recently, so many DJs are moving to CDJs and saying stuff like, "I just turn up with my USBs—it's easy and convenient." Alarm bells are ringing in my head when I hear this, because they're actually being paid a decent amount of money, and they're saying they want ease and convenience? On the other hand, if you're touring a lot, ease and convenience actually does come into it—you can preserve your energy better.I've recently been asking myself if I should switch to CDJs, because it would save me a lot of time during the week. I need every spare moment to produce, so it would be nice to free up some time. But I would miss so much of what I can do in my current way. I really enjoy how I can perform the way I do, making the edits, doing remixes on the fly, slipping in some new tracks. I could do a lot of that with CDJs, but it would feel so removed.This is part of the reason I often have a vinyl deck included in my setup. It means I can layer stuff on top of the clips I'm playing. After DJing with vinyl for 20-odd years, you just want to be able to touch it. It's just the self-satisfaction, really. So sometimes I'll just switch to a deck and mix a track in and then go back to the Push 2.I'm just not that kind of person. The closest I've had to having a totally relaxing time was the last time I played at Berghain. I was so surprised, because I normally like to do shorter sets. I was worried and thinking, "Oh, I've gotta do a four-hour set at Berghain," but then I actually really enjoyed it, and I had my friends there in the booth, which I normally don't allow at all.I think with DJing you can be a marathon runner or sprinter, and I think I'm more of a sprinter. It's bizarre when people are like, "Oh, you should do long sets." You don't expect a sprinter to run a marathon, so you should respect all kinds of DJs, really.No, that's not what would make me feel disconnected. It would be something like tiredness, which only rarely happens because I can cut through that. It could also be the distance from the crowd—if the decks are raised and really far away, and there's a bunch of security people in the middle who keep interfering with the crowd and their enjoyment.Yeah, my gigs are really diverse. It can be festivals, it can be club nights, or it can be an arts event. That's why I have to judge it gig by gig. I generally start looking ahead to my next gig and preparing for it at the beginning of the week.I always have some clusters of tracks that I know work super tightly, and that when I play them in a certain way they'll have an impact. So I know that there's this selection I can choose from, and I don't always go for everything—it all depends how things are going that night. My biggest stress is planning how to open the set. I usually have an idea about where I'd like to end, but I'm not yet sure of the flow or how I'm going to get there. The way I start is really important because it helps me get in the mood for the journey I'm going to take people on.I'm at a stage right now where people know what I play and have expectations, so I'm not going to bend and deviate so far away from that. And if it turns out that the lineup has been programmed so someone is playing music totally different to mine before me, I didn't program it [].They can be snippets or they can be specific phrases on their own without much going on. But once you start layering them and have two melodies counteracting—or two types of rhythm—it adds this intensity. That's what I'm always listening out for and why I spend a lot of time pre-listening to stuff figuring outworks amazingly with, and then I can addkind of pad fromtrack, orending from another track that people would've dismissed or never even considered, but actually could make an amazing middle part or breakdown.Yeah, I'm constantly producing. And that's why I love the flexibility of this digital setup—I'd find it super frustrating just sticking with vinyl.Around 2000, I started getting to know Gerard Campbell, an inventor. He was introduced to me by Claude Young, the Detroit producer. We'd met at The Orbit in Leeds. At that time, Gerard had this other invention called the Notron out. It was a four-channel hardware sequencer that every creative producer wanted. The Orb was crazy about it, The Prodigy, Björk—it was just insane. I got one of these Notrons and then Gerard and me became really good friends. He would come to all my gigs.Gerard had this idea to somehow blur the line between how producers are in the studio and how DJs perform, and he wanted to create this kind of controller. So he had the idea, he's the inventor, but he asked me if I could co-develop it with him. We started on the basics of it in 2000, but we really got into it in 2001. MXF8 stands for MIDI-crossfade, eight channels.There was nothing else quite like it at the time. You could have up to eight channels, and it had a crossfader with four channels on each side. So you could effectively transform Ableton into eight virtual decks if you wanted to. And then, as a MIDI controller as well, you can assign any MIDI control to any other machine, but it was designed in such a way that it made you feel like you were bringing your productions to an audience live, being able to perform your productions like a DJ.Yes, it blurred the boundary between producer and DJ—you could be both. I was gigging with the MXF8 between 2002 and 2006, and my performance setup was two vinyl decks and Ableton Live with the MXF8. It sounds a bit crazy, because it was basically ten decks in total. I started calling them hybrid DJ sets quite early on, but I don't think anyone understood what that meant.Sometimes, because I would sample tiny bits of tracks that I loved. I could take a loop from, for example, Carl Craig's "Jam The Box," then take a tiny riff from a DBX track, a kick from another track, a hi-hat loop from something else, and then have my own stuff in there, too. As long as I didn't do too much, which is tempting to do with this kind of setup, it worked.This technology enabled you tothe music, which was much more enjoyable than being stuck rigid on a grid. It was a perfect combination with Ableton's Session View, which is all about jamming and coming up with ideas on the fly. But I didn't want to lose the physicality of vinyl, so I kept the decks in the setup.That doesn't really happen, maybe because I've always played sober. I can imagine that after having a few drinks I'd be looking at the MFX8 and not being able to see which channels are on and off, and then make mistakes.Yeah, I'd decided to give the hybrid setup a rest for a moment, and then went back to just pure vinyl. But the airport kept losing my records, and I just took that as a sign. I was already starting to lose motivation with techno anyway, because it had lost something.No. I stopped listening to nearly everything, especially techno. It just felt too painful. I had a vinyl collection, something like 12,000 records—four times what I have now.I think that's the true techno spirit. You're there because you're really into the music and the scene that comes with it. But then when people you really respect start to step away and so many other factors are against you, you just think, "OK, it's time to stop." Some other DJs morphed into a different sound, maybe because they loved the DJing aspect more than the actual content. They were shape shifters, so they could keep doing their profession. But I think a whole bunch of us didn't see techno as a profession—it was our life.