...You receive e-mails from all around the world. Enough, not enough?

It is something I never expected. It never stops being cool to me, opening an e-mail and saying “Oh, I never got an e-mail from there!” and thinking that somewhere in a place I have never been in someone is listening to my music. That is the power that music has, it can reach all sorts of boundaries, giving credence to whole idea that it is a universal language. People from very different cultures can still appreciate it.

In the past, I read somewhere, it was all electronic music for you, since day one? How did it affect you?

Even though it might not influence me in a way that it’s apparent, there might be something that I listen to and liking how it’s bass-line for instance is produced.
Even programming-wise and rhythms I notice. I listen to a lot of hip-hop, and my favourite producer is Timberland. He uses a lot of counter-rhythms that almost border on d/n/b done at half speed. That occasionally pops-up in rhythms in my music, but I don’t think that anyone goes:” Oh, he listens to hip-hop in his spare time!” I think that everything you hear influences you. Even the things you completely hate it’s still influenced you since you’ve heard it.

“Tabula Rasa” psychological stance?

For me, yes. Not necessarily for everyone though, but a lot of musicians are like a clean slate, picking up what’s out there, learning from it and using it…

Essentially, picking your music out of everything?

Well, not with deliberate intent to cross over. People who do one kind of music and never listen to other genres, that style will never change.
You can go back and draw a line from Einsturzende Neubauten to VNV Nation and they sound nothing alike, but how we got from point A to point B is by some people in industrial music listening to different kinds of stuff and incorporating bits of them into their own music thus creating these various styles, which is healthy and good.

Where do we go from here? By my opinion, this scene is moving towards techno music.

Yeah, I think there are so many off-shoots, and people are ready to accept them being incorporated in this genre. I remember when X Marks The Pedwalk’s “Meshwork” came out. I may be wrong, but I credit that as being the first really noticeable example of mashed electro EBM and techno styles. When it came out, lot of people said:” Oh, man, this is techno, this is horrible!” But now, people are very accepting of that. So, in a way, they were way ahead of their time. If they released that album now, they would have reached much wider audience.

Do you think that our scene of people wearing black will eventually become ‘mainstream’?

I don’t see it happening. One of the reasons is that our scene is so small, smaller then many other independent scenes. And there’s also too much negativity, holding it back... (continues on page 4)