Do you make all your gear yourself or do you have people helping you?

Up until last year, I built everything myself – I still build everything myself, all the masks, all the electronics, I do all of it. All the Max MSP stuff, I build everything. The only thing, recently, I had some help from an electronic engineer, Seb Madgwick, who is in the UK, he supplied me with his IMU units, which are kind of the hub for the wireless stuff on my microphone suit, and he also helped me with some C+ coding, wrote me a library and showed me how the library works, then I do the coding. So he really helped me, it’s the first time I’ve had an engineer give me some guidance with coding. In the end, I do it all myself, but he provided a framework. I post and talk about him whenever I can because he’s a guy that’s building things that get used in a lot of industries, with sensors. The IMU units have an accelerometer, a barometer, a gyroscope, they have all these sensors on-board, and they are used in many industries, they are like a wireless transmitter/receiver. He also is building other electronic instrument interfaces for other artists, like Imogen Heap. She uses input control stuff and those guys build all of her stuff. She’s a really famous performer, and she does very different stuff than me, but at at the same time, there’s really no one in the world in his realm that’s like a doctor of engineering that’s putting the effort in music input control. He’s been so helpful to me, just to have an engineer there that I can ask questions, something that would normally take me a month to work out by myself, I can ask him and solve the issue much quicker.

Have you been doing the same set all through your U.S. tour? How much of your set was improvised?

I’ve only done two shows on this tour so far and both shows have been different. Some parts change and some parts I’ll leave the same. As for improvised sections, I can manipulate the track quite a bit, it’s not in total multi-track, I can really chop the track up pretty savagely and I can sample bits of it and I can sample my voice. So I can kind of turn tracks into something pretty different. Most of the improvising I do is in the vocals, and just between the vocals and the amount of manipulation I can do to the track, it’s enough to turn the track into something pretty different. There are some tracks that have certain vocals, but the rest of the time I am improvising all of the vocals, so it’s always different. Between shows, I’ll change the set quite substantially, it depends on how long the set is, what kind of show it is. A show like [Even Furthur], I tried to make some of the straighter sections a bit longer. It was only an hour to work with so it was a bit tricky, but at the same time I want to play as much different music as I can, and sometimes I have to sacrifice the flow, it ends up more like a band where they play a song and then they stop. There’s quite a lot of tempo changes, a lot of endings and introductions of songs. It’s different every time, no matter what, even if I play all the same songs it’s going to be completely different. I was always into stuff that was all over the place and I like a lot of different genres all together, and I think that influence has rubbed off on me.