What is music?

Yang: Humans perceive and process sound waves through a unique nervous system. The way we perceive sound is tied to wavelength, frequency, amplitude but most importantly emotion. All human emotions eventually lead back to feelings of loss and renewal, which are communicated through audible vibrations.

Yin: Lullabies for fallen angels growing diamonds inside... making audible the fragile symphonies of plants, trees, animals and spirits... translating into sound everything important I want to say... about the fleeting nature of human construct and our mortality that cuts to the heart... and the sadness felt for the passing of things... the magical interlocking of seemingly separate sounds into something new.

Hypothetical situation: You're standing in front of your gear, ready to play an invite-only, packed gig for friends and loved ones, when you hear and feel a scrabbling beneath the hardwood flooring under your feet. A tiny, wizened gnome digs itself out of the ground, tossing out a shovel as it knocks bits of wood planking aside. The gnome proceeds to pull small, vibrating geodes out of a black sack, placing them in a star-like pattern around you. "If you play the right notes, and you, of all people, do know which notes I mean, you'll alter the physical universe in your vicinity to that of permanence rather than transience. As is the nature of permanence, it will ripple outwards from you, eventually turning the whole of existence from a perpetual passing away to a changeless state." The gnome fixes a raised brow eye on you. "Ever hear that old gnome expression, 'The more things change the more they stay the same?' That's exactly what will happen. People won't change, you won't change, everything will roll on just as it is now. Forever. You'll never age, never die... but children will stay children, the elderly will stay old, those on their death beds will not get up, but also never move on." Your audience of those you care for is looking at you expectantly, assuming this is part of the show about to begin. Which notes do you play, and why?

After a beautiful moment of silence, I smile and say: "Form is emptiness...emptiness is form...all is impermanent." Then, suddenly, I play the notes E, F, A and B, the broken chord of E Phrygian, and the geodes start to glow and hover, circling around me. The gnome nods solemnly, and disappears in a blinding speck of blue/white light. Knowing that the gnome was a manifestation of the subconscious and realising that transience and permanence are illusionary, the music begins. Transience and selflessness are necessary for life, change, growth and beauty.

Your music is extremely spatial, surface detail and edges both permeated by and embedded within places large and small: a special series of spaces, all containing cool, clean, highly oxygenated air. There is always a feeling of clarity and lift. It fits perfectly with the commitment on your website: "All music is dedicated to the unbearable lightness of being and the beauty hidden everywhere." Is this something you consciously create or is it just where your mind goes when you write? How do you accomplish this?

The strange thing is that the song title is usually the first thing that I come up with, though the title is never random or without meaning. A lot of tracks are based on my own poems (see Devils And Daffodils below), others are based on images, words or thoughts that somehow inspire me. Sometimes I hear someone saying "A sparkling waterfall..." and the associations just come flooding in. From then on, I just let things happen and start shaping sounds, which call for other sounds, trying to capture the essence of what stirred my imagination in the first place. I guess it's a sort of intuitive process, but I do make conscious choices in trying to evoke a specific mood or place and in choosing the right sounds and effects. When I first started making music, I tried too hard to sound like artists I admired at the time. Then I just started letting go and followed my intuition.

Speaking of air, do you have a special relationship with Sair'iss - the Dragon of the East - and air elements in general, or were you forced to name a track after her at very sharp tooth-point?

I have always had a special relationship with all things air-related. As an Aquarian child (the sign Aquarius being an element of air) and my Chinese zodiac sign being Dragon, I feel Sair'iss is a guardian dragon guiding me, although she cannot be tamed. Besides that, I am an asthmatic since childhood, so air (or the lack of it) has always played an important role in my life. Just breathing in and out is a wonderful thing.

What is your earliest memory of music?

My earliest memory must be me sitting in front of the home stereo, listening to my father's record collection, sporting HUGE white headphones. I guess the crackle, static, clicks and pops of vinyl influenced me, as I use those a lot in my music. I still have those headphones, as a token of those wonderful childhood memories.

You receive a package in the post, unmarked save for "From A Fan." Inside is an ancient device, created by Roman mages in 360 BCE: a collection of gears, sliders, levers and dials similar to the Greek Antikythera Mechanism. It bears a Latin inscription - "Mutatis Mutandis" - meaning "With the Necessary Changes." Rather than act as an astronomical computer, this machine takes what is within you and turns it into living, audible form... with teeth. As you use the device, the sound will flow and act upon the world within its audible range, transforming it as you desire. What is this transformed world like?

As the gears and dials turn, a ripple of pure, unvisible energy emanates from the center of the Mechanism. The transformation is from within, not affecting the physical world.

Suddenly, people get out of their cars and offices and start walking home.
Tibetan monks silently weep tears of joy as people across the globe awaken.
Political leaders stand up from behind their desks and walk away to watch the sunset.
All religious leaders kneel, not in worship, but in reverence of the little insects that crawl and buzz in the grass outside, displaying a supreme love for all life.
Once cynical and bitter people marvel at the beauty of the morning fog and lay on their backs in the grass, realizing their interconnectedness and regarding ALL organisms as an important part of the whole.

This is home, where people don't need to agonize over how they need to live their lives, as there is enough for everyone.

Where perfection is not pursued in vain, for everything passes away. Where the damaged are cared for and the frightened and the lost consoled.

A refuge.

How do you use the Daevl.Plugs?

I use the Daevl.Plugs in Live on strings, rhythms, voices, anything really. Daevl.cerberus is excellent for alienating string textures and I use daevl.triptych on spoken word samples and other snippets. They bring out the grit in sounds, quite rewarding when you're willing to experiment. I use them in effect chains or in sends and the results can be stunning because of the random/chaotic elements they introduce, while still being musical and user-friendly.

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

Our notion of the fine line between noise and music will definitely change.

Maybe after thirty-six years, we will find ways to link instruments and our brain through BrainPorts, translating brain-waves to audible vibrations, maybe we will have dream-to-sound plugins, but we will always follow the eternal cycle of of loss and renewal, the fundamental principles of everything that surrounds and pervades us. Attraction-repulsion, light-dark, satyr-nymph and the urge to translate thought and emotion to colour, sound, shape and so on.

As above, so below.

Last year saw the release of Zero Point Field on Databloem, you've just finished up your next release, Autumn Perdue... and 02007 is only getting started. What's on the upcoming Beta Two Agonist agenda?

The next year I'd really like to focus more on collaboration and interaction. The downside of being a sort of sound design hermit is solipsism and that eventually leads to stagnation, so I'm thinking about the possibilities of working with video artists, classical musicians, poets. I have always been interested in music for film too, so who knows...

Before making music as Beta Two Agonist, I did a lot of live shows but I realised that taking your gear and laptop on stage and tweaking parameters is not interesting to look at, so I eventually stopped doing that. Not that I won't do live sets ever again, but I just think this kind of music needs a different approach.

After my upcoming album Autumn Perdue, which has some minimal classical influences, my next project will be based on a story by Roald Dahl and will be more microsound/static/glitch-based and definately darker than what I've done so far. This project's still in an embryonic phase, but it's already haunting me...I guess that's one of the reasons why the moniker ends with "Agonist."