The intersection of space and time as experienced through the body---a complex set of filters, systems of belief, ideas, thoughts and wars of faith and truth. It is essential to experience music physically, to relinquish ownership of one's thoughts to a collective secret song. Good music is like staring into the sun and not going blind, but discovering it instead to be a mirror of your own direct and unmitigated intent and talents.

Hypothetical situation: You are standing in a field of deep, verdant grass. It reaches to your knees, speaking with the patterns of wind coursing across and through it. The voice of its blades leads you onwards to a small clearing. There, a faerie ring of ashes and stone is before you, and the wind whispers instructions. Step into the ring from the right side: you will be transported backwards in time, hearing all the music created since the rise of music-making creatures, the foundations of everything musical. Step into the ring from the left side: you will journey forward, hearing all the music from now to the end of music-making in our multiverse. Which journey do you take, and why?

As it was painted on Genesis P-Orridge's art-school bus: "EVEN FURTHUR" (sic). So, always forward. I want to know if our ears are going to evolve or devolve and how that will affect the instruments that we create. Or if we eventually find a way to circumvent acoustics entirely and can sing directly into each other's brains.

Much of your music holds a texture of loss or, more precisely, greater loss as a result of losing control, being broken or alone. It creates an emotional place with definite boundaries of time and situation that hold a listener in place and space. How do you do that?

That initial wound of separation haunts us all, and for a long time this was the resonance I was most susceptible to. It is/was red and vibrant and woven into everything we do--into heartbreak, into prematurely cold coffee, into the beauty of cobblestones eroding. I couldn't stop it from coming out of my hands; I needed the piano to be the container of All Things Lost. I'm discovering now that I need something new to contain The Found---or rather, I'm finding life to, ironically, have less containers and much more fluid, which is causing an overwhelming creative evolution.

Your visual art parallels the feelings evoked by your music, implying similar creative processes in both forms. Your images look like your music. There's a synaesthetic quality that merges sight and sound. What is the well-spring of your creative urge?

Beauty. I wanted a point of reference for beauty that was fixed and unchanging and that included me, as I have always felt so outside of everything that is beautiful. Part of my previous loss was experiencing the trauma of the fixed and unchanging and beauty is currently being revolutionized, ergo so is my creative process.

It is less an urge and more of a constant longing for a horizon that I eventually arrive at. It is now a multidimensional experience instead of a two-dimensional cage.
It is less about loss and the echoes of the void and more about filling up the gaps.
It is the pursuit of form and simultaneous flexibility.

Stepping out of your studio, you realize your entire abode smells strongly of sulfur. You track the source of the scent to the two cats you share your space with, then shrug it off as remnants of an anti-flea dip treatment. In the deepest moments of the night, you awaken to hear your cats speaking to each other in a rich, musical language you can understand, a language you have only just remembered. These two cats are, in fact, Demon Lords of the Abyss, and you are their musical Opener Of The Way, sent here centuries ago for the culmination of their plans. You were trained to perfection in the Cat Kingdom for this task: to play a song which will resonate with the very fabric of space-time, ripping wide a portal for their screaming minions to journey through, bringing destruction to our realm. If you don't play, they will eat you. What will you do, and why?

Ah! What they don't know is that I have perfected a synthetic drum kit that is like a lullaby, reminiscent of the womb-purr rumblings of MamaCat. They cannot resist the Sleep of the 00ntz. I will play for them my lullaby and in their dreams will open a portal. This portal will be so contrary to their Abyss that they will be seduced and fall into a Void of Light and will be blinded and lost. This void will have a secret doorway into my coat-pocket and I will carry them with me, everywhere that I go; dreamcats and lullabies, the Sulphur Princess and her little friends with yellow eyes.

Describe your perfect synthesizer, built using any technology, ancient, extant, or yet to arrive.

I would win the lottery and commission a ludicrously intuitive interface for Max/MSP and Jitter, not unlike the light and glass in the movie Minority Report. I want to beam color out of my eyes onto a photocell and make oscillators and filters react to the spectrums of my brain. My perfect synthesizer would be 3 dimensional so that various functions could be on various planes and not just on one flat surface. This would be visually stimulating for user and audience alike.

What will music and individual creation be like in the next nine years? The next thirty-six?

I'm concerned for the welfare of individuality in this culture---it seems to erupt in violence, banal sexual exploitation (instead of expression), undeserving celebrity and not much else. Pop music has turned a corner into near-minimalism, which is simultaneously interesting and a reflection of fear and this is creating a vacuum that I see persisting for at least another decade. Academic music has become increasingly esoteric and claustrophobic and will eventually implode in something scandalous. People will continue to grow their own studios and little underground genres will continue to liquify---this is what will be waiting when the vast and vacuous empire crumbles and falls and will effortlessly step in to rise out of the basement, but not much farther than that. There will be balance. The concept of Reinvention will be replaced with the concept of Forwarding Unique Processes. Right now, Reinvention, as it stands in popular culture, is little more than a curious subroutine of what's been recently forgotten by the mainstream. We will go beyond HyperReality and invent a new language and the mainstream will still exist, but there will be no word for it.

I hope that when I'm 66 that I have a wicked collection of drum machines, effects units and weird keyboards and that I'm still a current listener. I also hope that I will still be able to HEAR.

How do you use the Daevl.Plugs?

I really like to use them for mangling. My favorite thing to do is sing through them, but I tend to keep those files to myself. I also LOVE to play junker keyboards from thrift stores through them---I really love the whole hi-fi/lo-fi thing. They are an overwhelming experience---they open doors of possibility that were previously unconsidered. Actually--they are really a very close match to my dream of having a more intuitive Max/MSP interface. I feel like I'm getting in on the awesomeness of Max/MSP without the flailing patches that I used to make. I've barely scratched the surface of these beautiful dreams.

Solo work, more shows with CTRLSHFT, photo-manipulations marching on the world... what's in store from the Aesthetic Empire's Leader Of The Revolution in 02007?

I have thrown many chips, dice, feathers, bones, sticks, cards and ideas up into the air and they are drifting back down, one by one and I'm kind of waiting to see where they will land.

Actually, I'm not---I'm reaching upwards with my hands and feet and mouth and nets and cups and all kinds of things to try and catch a glimpse of chance, patterned against the sky. Wait or lunge? Wait or dive to catch?----> Stop thinking about it and just DO IT.

I'm working on a new reality, one that includes but extends far beyond just beauty. All that work will be of myself, but in keeping with the aforementioned, will extend outward for inclusion and embrace. CTRLSHFT is working on a new album and I am torn between getting a decent digital camera and a crusty old 4x5 view camera. 02007 will be the year of the Great Unfolding.

EVEN.

FURTHER.