What is music?

If I had to describe music in one word it would be love. It's a universal language everyone understands. When I play my music, people smile even if they don't normally like electronica. Music has universal meaning.

Hypothetical situation: You're in a large ballroom at the White House. Just as you're setting up to play at a Presidential Inauguration after-party where hundreds of world leaders will be present, an angel in a custom-tailored white suit flies through an upper window and lands beside you. Suave and re-assuring, the angel proceeds to tell you this is humanity's last chance. If you choose, it will shrink to tiny size, sit on your shoulder and instruct you exactly what and how to play to implant the funk of world peace and harmony in all the politicians in the room. If you choose to play your music without angelic intervention, creating exactly what is inside of you, the angel will leave and never return, and humanity will be on its own to find its own way forward. Which do you choose, and why?

I would choose to follow the angel's instructions, using its power through me to bring world peace and bring on the funk. The world is more important than my individual desires. Ultimately, my desires ARE for world peace, so the angel wouldn't be telling me to do anything I wouldn't do anyway. Love, harmony and world peace are why I play music in the first place.

Your tracks are very layered, with lots of detail going into the individual parts of a song. How do your create this detail? How do you start an idea and what do you do to take it to a finished track?

I usually start with the rhythm beds and the bass line. Once I develop the bass line into something that makes me want to get up and dance, I'll hear the melody weaving around the bass line. The bass drives the melody. Using Live, I'll play within the session view to develop how the music builds and how it drops off. Sometimes I won't even bring a melody in until I've created a skeletal structure in the session view with just the rhythm and bass. After that, it's all about the drops, the builds and the power.

For finishing, it has to be hardware. While I often use soft-synths in my MacBook Pro to create the rough basis of the track, I always come into my studio and use hardware to work the track into its real form.

Electronica as a genre has fractured, multiplied, re-fractured and merged back into itself. You integrate elements of techno, industrial, disco, ambient, downtempo, a touch of drum 'n' bass within a defining framework of 4 to the floor house. Is this House music for the new century?

It has taken House and moved on... the only way to describe it is to use something all-encompassing- electronic music for the new century. I recently had a discussion with Chevy and Ryan Stubbs about where electronic music is going. We talked about how music has converged- dance music and electronic music as we knew it had changed and evolved into so many different genres... what was going to be the next thing? How would you differentiate yourself as a musician when every inch of the terrain was already covered by a name. No matter what you sound like, someone will say you fit this type of genre, or this type of genre.. We decided the best path is simply to take the best of what we liked from everything. Bring it all together in a big melting pot and don't even think about genre. A specific tracks may have elements of the Amsterdam vibe just because of a specific synth sound, but nothing else in the track sounds like Amsterdam. If you put a track up with psy-trance elements next to one of mine, it won't sound like psy-trance, even though parts of my track, in isolation, may have a psy-trance flavor. My aim is to not sound like any particular genre.

You're playing a packed midnight Hallowe'en gig at a cemetery in Denver. For your 3rd encore, Rex Humphrey joins you on stage for a KISS cover song. If you play Detroit Rock City, all the dead will rise from the earth as zombies, take your gear and play KISS songs until dawn. This may freak out the crowd. If you play God Of Thunder, Gene Simmons himself will appear in a gigantic cloud of flame and leave with all the girls. This may also freak out the crowd. Which song do you play and why?

Detroit Rock City, because if there were any KISS song I would cover it would be Detroit Rock City and I would love to see zombies playing Detroit Rock City with our gear... that would truly be a show to remember.

There's an older sounding warmth beneath the digital shine of your music. Where does that come from? Is it something you create purposely or does it come from a love of a specific type of gear?

I work hard to keep the analog vibe in the music.

I went to a rave with some friends in 1991 in Los Angeles and was really influenced by people sitting inside the bass bins, running and jumping and climbing speaker stacks and hanging off the towers to get the direct, physical hit from the sound. You could see their bodies flapping with the bass. The phrase Bass Therapy was coined from this. I thought, "How cool would it be to do electronica really influenced by the bass tones that you would only feel, those fat sub frequencies?" Bass Therapy became a mantra for creating electronica that wasn't drum 'n' bass, but has that bass influence up front. You can always hear multiple bass sounds in my tracks, up to three or four to create one bassline. And analog, of course, gives the best bass. This lead me directly to analog and virtual analog synths like the Virus, the Juno 106 and Roland's V-Synth.

How do you use the Daevl.Plugs?

The Daevl.Plugs are great for adding seasoning to my tracks once I've developed the bass line and melody. I keep them on an effects send, stacking all of them up in a return track and then testing until I find just the right one on a synth sound. I'm not really a sound designer so I tend to rattle through presets until I get close. The Daevl.Plugs allow me to become a sound designer without having to spend a lot of time learning how to create a specific sound from the ground up. For me, that's their true calling.

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

In the next nine years I see us all using more interactive controllers. I think controllers are going to take on a new face. JazzMutant's Lemur is just the first wave of what's going to become available to us. I think people like Richie Hawtin and Monolake are pushing the envelope on what performance controllers currently are. We'll see controllers evolve to and beyond the CTRL, the Monodeck and the Lemur with things like the iPhone thrown in there. Look at what people are already doing with the Wii controllers. Convergence is where it's at.

In thirty-six years I think we'll be able to control computers with our minds. I'd like to be able to directly control and create music by doing nothing but dancing and thinking thoughts.

In 02006 you released a single, Superstars, and a white label remix of Yes' Roundabout. There was a lauded performance at Burning Man and you currently have a new disc in the works. You've also become a frequent performer at Backlit Lounge San Francisco, with a show coming up on March 21st. What else is in your master plan for 02007?

Burning Man is a go again, so is a performance at Lovefest SF. Putting the finishing touch on the album is a priority right now, then there will be singles spinning off in all directions. I'm actively stepping out of California boundaries this year, too, with some possibilities for shows in Japan on the table right now.

After the album hits the presses, I'm focusing on making the live performance something really unique, so when you come to see effect69 it's not just a laptop jam, it's a show, it's an experience.