Neil Landstrumm

I moved from Inverness to near Edinburgh when I was twelve so it was after that. I got into electronic music because I was really bored with all the music in the charts and what everybody else liked. A friend of mine had this acid house album with all the Chicago acid cuts and I remember listening to that and thinking it was the maddest thing I had ever heard. I became interested in getting more of that music and working out how they made it.

Yeah, definitely. That was a big thing in Britain, the whole acid house thing, because it was so abstract... really the first taste of things that were going to come after that, bass and bleep, the British rave scene. It was very influential.

It was really interesting because it was a mixture of creative people. We had a few of probably the best clubs in Britain or even Europe. We had Pure in Edinburgh and Wave, and Sativa later on which spawned the record label. These clubs were instrumental because they brought in a lot of the pioneers of the music like Fuse, Derrick May, LFO, all the Americans – we saw these people very early on. Sativa brought in a lot of the Europeans like Hell, Dave Clarke, Cristian [Vogel]… Tobias Schmidt lived there, me, Dave Tarrida, and there was a real melting pot of talent and equipment. We built our own scene and our own way to distribute the music.

Absolutely. They were a regular thing to do on a Friday night. You went in and heard these people and you immediately went out on a Saturday morning to find the records they had played. It's also where we got our first opportunities to play.

Pretty much straight away. I played the drums so I was always interested in rhythm. When I saw how relatively easy it was to make the music – apart from acquiring the equipment, which is the difficult bit — it was just a case of 'oh, what does this do' and 'let's put this together with that' etc. Toby had some bits and pieces so we used to record together. I've always been interested in disassembling something to see how it has been made and then putting it back together.

Chicago! Completely Chicago-based, Cajmere, Daniel Bell, all the Traxx records, a lot of the Dance Mania like Armani — I really liked Robert Armani. People never copied that in Europe, they all did acid stuff. We got bored of that quite quickly in Edinburgh. The next thing was this party disco music and minimal, stripped down stuff.

I just fell in love with the place. I think it's very inspiring. And I met a girl here as well which always helps… For me, music has always been important, but I always wanted to do other things as well. New York has so much opportunity, much more than Edinburgh, for doing other things.

I don't really notice it because it's me. I think you get stuck in a rut if you stay in the same place too long. Being somewhere else immediately opens you up to new influences and people's ideas. I really like hip hop and the way that sounded and I wanted to explore that more, which I wasn't going to do in Britain. I always wanted to change what I do every year so it's like a natural thing. If you keep doing the same thing it's boring.

Yeah, very much so, that's absolutely true. To me techno got very stale and it bothered me for a while, enough for me to get sick of it and not wanting to do it anymore. I always listened to old records and thought 'this was fucking wicked when it came out'. And then you hear new stuff and it's so much crap. Scandinavia started as a techno thing, but the music my ears pricked up to was always so mad, like, eg, Bill Youngman's stuff, or the new Shit And Cheap stuff. It was deliberately trying to be as different as possible, because I think that's what early techno was, it was deliberately trying to come up with something that was abstract. Now it's too easy to settle for something that sounds like something else. It's not killing the music, but it's definitely making it tedious.

There is definitely a sound. I really like Djax-Up-Beats when they first came out because every record sounded different. That is what I'm trying to do. I've never put out a record for the sake of putting them out. The label has veered towards more experimental breakbeats, bass-heavy, noisy, bleepy stuff, quite sonic. It's quite 'love it or hate it' and it's defenitely not pigeonholed. There's hip hop, there's trash breaks, techno stuff... it jumps around. That is probably why people don't follow it all the time, but it has got an interesting worldwide following judging by the emails and the prices the old records go for on eBay. They are definitely a collector's thing, which is something I wanted to do. Some people will never get some of the limited stuff like the 7-inches or the CDs. It's supply and demand, but it has never been about the money — it's more like a sort of art thing.

It got started when I moved to New York in order to spread the business. I've always been interested in how sound and vision come together and at that time desktop computers were getting powerful enough to do your animations and 3D modelling and basically do special effects. So I thought why not branch in television, advertising and pop videos and somehow combine it with the music. Now I'm doing various art-based projects with Jeremy Blake. We are doing pieces for MTV, which is kind of a natural place, however commercial it may be. I'm just interested in how sound and vision combine together to create something more.

Yeah, that was a bit of a non-starter, but it's still something I intend to pursue. I did some work for a company called Rock Star Games. We worked on some titles and video wall sequences and that interested me in the process of how to make a game. The massive amount of money to get something like that off the ground is just too big to get at the moment without some sort of serious investment. I think video games are an interesting place though because there is so much scope for putting good music and sound effects and creating a much more massive experience, but unfortunately it's kinda low down on the list of things to do.

At the moment I've just been concentrating on the music and getting the new album out, doing some techno records again. I'm just to embark upon a new video thing. It's another art project together with Jeremy Blake – and hopefully another MTV thing.

It's because it's an incredibly powerful tool that is cheap. I just love that you can store things and come back to them two years later and it's exactly the same. You can work on music, graphics or whatever and come back to it and it's exactly the same since the day you left it. It just puts the power of what was a very expensive studio ten years ago in your bedroom, and that's where it's at.

It's going to go completely into computer, but not killing off the individual boxes because they will always sound better. Now you can emulate and simulate. While ten years ago it was an impossible task to get all the equipment, you now can download it in half an hour. The other side is it's so easy to get that people don't try anything with it when they have it. It's too easy. I think it's going to be a few years before the next generation gets into these tools. Things like Napster, which is basically a jukebox to the world, we never had that. You still need to know what it is to go find it, but you have immediately access to it. I think there is going to be a whole fusion and infusion of music to create a new sort of sound.

Just dirtying things up, making them less nice and sugary and clean, breaking them down to something that is harder, more abrasive... which is not to everyone's taste. I haven't done that for the new album though — it's cleaner, a bit more synthy. The problem with computer processing is that it all ends up in the same bandwidth, it doesn't have dynamics to it. It doesn't have the warmth that analogue gear has.

Having a studio that looks like a total pigpen... broken machines, old cables… I don't have any clean or surgical techniques. Cristian [Vogel] is very proper and everything is in its place whereas I am not like that.

I think it's going to be a lot easier to work with somebody who lives on the other side of the world. I think you'll be able to have virtual sessions. I think the internet is going to provide the people with a vast resource of music because you are not restricted by your friends who listen to a certain type of music, you can listen to anything you want. That also means that people will have to think more for themselves, which I'm not sure people do anymore. Also the fact that you can get software so easily — the whole illegal side to it.

Everything has got the potential to be good or bad. You've got really shitty things about the internet, like child porn, etc. You hope most people will use it creatively. It's sort of a cliché that people don't think for themselves anymore, because television, especially in America, is mindless crap.

Well, it's not going to go away is it? I'm not a big fan to be honest. I've always preferred stuff that was more song-structured or that at least had a structure. It's kinda dull and I think a lot of people who are doing it are just perpetuating it. It's so easy to understand — quick fix... What I hear most from people is that it drives girls out of clubs because they don't like it. Once you get girls leaving clubs that ain't a good thing really. I'd rather be in a club with girls than with guys with their tops off buzzing and gurning. It is kinda sad. It's like industrial trance, isn't it?

I don't know what you are going to make of this, but I would quite like to see some of it going pop. It think bands like Depeche Mode and a lot of that early eighties electronic stuff was really cool and I think the next thing for techno and electronic music would be to get back to bands again. A problem with a lot of techno, and particularly that loop stuff, is that you've got one producer making records and there's always so many ideas that somebody can have on their own. When you have two, three or even four people concentrating on different parts of it you are going to get a more interesting bit of music. I'm definitely going to try to do some more broader appeal, but still cool, not shit. It's going to be a bit more pop, mainstreamy, but still with its roots in quality electronic music. Just think how popular Kraftwerk were and it's still fucking good music, but it had that popular touch to it.

Yeah, I just did some work with Tobias Schmidt again – we always got on quite well. We always end up moving in roughly the same direction. I would like to do as many different things as possible. I don't even want to stay into electronic music. I could take what I've learned from that and apply it to guitar-based music, or indie bands. The thing for this year is I'm going to start a hip hop label. I haven't got a name for it yet, but I'm comfortable enough with my beats now and my production of that style. I think I've got my own sound now so I'm going to start a label that is going to be mainstream because hip hop is. It's just a matter of finding good lyricists and rappers. Si Begg is going to be involved, Matt Consume, myself… That's the thing for this year, probably coming out late summer I think.

It's a real soundclash. I think it has enough to satisfy the people who followed the techno style I've developed, I suppose. It has that sub-bass feel to it and it definitely has some elements from Bedrooms And Cities and Pro Audio. And then it has lots of other tracks which are quite Scandinavia. And then there are a few things that are quite popular sounding. I'm pretty pleased with it. It took me a while to want to put out something that was relevant again. I'm quite happy with it. It doesn't go too far into the hip hop and the crazier stuff because it's on Tresor, and Tresor is known for dark techno. It's a soundclash though, that's the point of it. It has hip hop, trash, techno, house, some electro leanings… So far the response of people whose opinion I bother about is fine.

I kinda like the New Wave, New Romantic tragic drama feel. I wanted to use that. It was actually a sample that I used for a couple of tracks. It's a sample of a television broadcast which said 'She took a bullet meant for me'. There is a horrible incident in Brazil where some nutter gunmen took a bus hostage. He had a woman he took hostage. I had these photographs of him through the bus windows, with the gun in her mouth. He made her write on the window with her lipstick. You couldn't create something like that — that was reality. I've always been interested in dark things like that. Eventually she got shot and it was really horrible.

It doesn't work like that. The music came first and I had a definite way the music was going. And then the way the sample built into it. Once you listen to it you'll see that. The image just ties it together. When I work with Matt Consume, who does the graphics, we have a rough idea and then he builds something out of it and then it always falls into place. It's just a creative process I suppose.

The image was always there, but the music comes out anyway. It's like you said, it's always in that particular mood. The whole point of an album is to have the whole and something to talk about and something for people to think about and interpret it their own way. It's like writing — what you get out of it is not what I get out of it. I like to give it a bit more thought that way.

Yeah, it always has. I've always worked on having cool graphics and always spending the time to do that. I think people will appreciate that and it makes it less throwaway. I think if the cover is good and the theme is good, people will remember it and talk about it. We are probably going to do a video for it so the image is going to be linked to what happens in the video. It's more like a story.

Erm, yeah, I'm interested in military stuff I suppose. I've tried to put that one down a bit because you can become to obsessed with it. I really like vehicles and jeeps and things like that. I restored an old military landcruiser – that was cool... it's 18 years old and came from California. I like travelling and hanging out with my friends. Film. I like meeting people. You know, stimulating things.

The hip hop label, although that may not appeal to the techno people. The idea behind it however is that it's going to be very techno-sounding hip hop. It takes elements from techno and puts it into mainstream hip hop. I'm not going for the aggressive style, it's more going to be like Tribe Called Quest, Q-Tip, a bit more intelligent. I haven't got a name for it yet, but its definitely targeting Germany I guess because hip hop is blowing up there. I think with the techno feel it could really appeal to people. Some more video stuff, probably one for She took a bullet… I've got some new music in the pipeline. The thing with Scandinavia that annoys me is that people keep putting it in a pigeonhole; it just isn't that. It's my own fault because I've always said it was techno, but it isn't.

The attitude. I think Europe has got a very cool attitude where it's not all about money. New York is not America though — it's its own thing. I'm here for business and contacts and getting into different things, but I do miss that European laid-back attitude. But you can't have everything.

Yeah, I'm not going to settle here. I'm just here to get things going, but I love Scotland and I really like Denmark and Holland. People are much more easy-going there and enjoy life more.