We were there to announce a new technology that John Aquaviva and I are involved with called Final Scratch. A quick description… It enables you to play any digital music file, not just mp3s. It can be a whole wave file, a studio master – any kind of digital music file. You control it with a turntable; you can scratch it, you can pitch it, you can stop it, backspin it. If you see John and I using it, it's very 'un-groundbreaking' – it’s nearly boring, because it looks like we're doing exactly the same thing as we've done for twenty years. That's what's groundbreaking about it is it enables us to do everything we've done and it opens up the doorway to an immense amount of possibilities.

It's a special record, it's a piece of hardware, and it's software; it's a three-way system.

It will be this year. It's past its development. There's a couple of units made and John and I have been testing it for the last five months, on tour. Basically the whole Plus 8 tour was run on that along with the normal records, but we haven't really been able to talk about it until last Sunday when we announced it to the general public. There'll be more on the web over the next couple of weeks at www.finalscratch.com. John and I have never got up on a podium for anything, but for this, this is... it's unbelievable.

Nope, there's a bunch of people clamouring to use it now its all just freakin'. At least for the next four to six months it'll probably just be John and I. We've been using a shared system, John more so than I. I'll be on the road probably for the next six weeks with my own gig and after that we'll see how it goes.

Well, when I moved here I was like nine or ten years old, so it was years later that I started to get into... really to get into music on principle. Because once all my friends were getting into music in their early teens, you know eleven, twelve, thirteen – I wasn't really into it. Everyone was into rock music and the Rolling Stones. I don't know if I just wasn't into music or if I just hadn't heard what I wanted, you know. But I was definitely a lot more detached after coming here than I was in the UK — I was more outgoing, you know, your just a kid, you have tons of friends you, knew everyone… I was in a village of a couple of thousand people, then suddenly I was thrown into a very Americanised weird Canada culture. I think when I did find music and electronic music it did provide an outlet specifically that I could get into that everyone else wasn't. I was looking for something different, something a little bit more personal.

Then the other big thing was that my father was always into electronics. When I was a kid I always had little gizmos – connecting little wires up to the little radio and things. My dad in the mid-seventies was building a whole computer himself and he always had hi-tech hi-fis and reel-to-reels. I remember as a kid seven and eight years old, having my own reel-to-reel recording stuff, recording sounds and stuff like that. But there were always these weird little things that were happening, there was always that kind of stuff going on in my house.

I think so. I definitely was interested in all those electronic sides of things, so maybe I think I would have been involved in electronics somewhere, but maybe more like my dad, kind of an engineer or an electrician or something like that. In the UK at that point generally the future was kind of bleak, so I think my parents did a great thing coming over here — it just offered so much more potential. I guess of course we were lucky to move ten to fifteen minutes away from where it was all going to happen.

Yeah, I like England – I still feel like some type of grounding there. There's something that draws to it. It definitely has a brighter future and a brighter present than it did in the late seventies, but I don't think I could ever see myself living there. I definitely wouldn't have been the same person if I had never of left. England has always been an island — it will always be an island, it's got that mentality. It's still got that colonialism, kind of imperialism of being the centre of the world. That was a couple of hundred years ago – you know what I mean? It's time to reach out and to have a kind of global perspective. England didn't have that for a long time, again because they were by themselves, and typical British people – 'We'll do it our way'. Stiff upper lip…

Well, I used to go back and forth on it. I would gain popularity and then I would do some weird ass album and lose it and take a step back. I guess every time I get a little bit more publicity and popularity I get a little bit more used to it. It doesn't bother me as much any more. I've been able to strike a really interesting balance that not so many people have, having the public identity that's popularity but still kept a lot of my freedom to do what I want to do. I've been able to push things. With the new Plastikman albums, it wasn't what people expected. Lots of people said it wasn't what I should've done for my public career. Trying to push people when you're playing isn't going to win over a mass population.

I have this strange balance – people seem to be a little bit more open minded when they're coming to my shows, even if they're people who aren't necessarily trainspotting undergrounders. I want to strike the balance, I don't want to be Sasha & Digweed – no disrespect to those guys or whatever, everyone does their own thing. I also don't want to be the knob twiddler in his bedroom coming up with something that's so, so crazy that no one's gonna get, or no one's gonna get for 20 or 30 years. I want that balance, I want to introduce as many people to a kind of deeper side of electronics, the deeper side of techno than they regularly get exposed to, and do it in a really quality way, with as little compromise as possible.

Yeah, for sure. I think to me techno has always meant the essence of what's behind the music, the kind of the push forward to create something new, both musically and within the idea of what your trying to do. People ask me what I make or what I've been making and it's always been techno to me. I came out of the Detroit Techno school of thought but I never saw myself as traditional Detroit techno. I think traditional Detroit Techno is actually an oxymoron – you shouldn't be able to make techno that is traditional, it should be anything but traditional. When people ask me 'What do you do? How are you one of the Detroit guys' or anything like that, well, to me techno is about pushing forward, and I think with everything I try to do it's pushing forward in some way or another, trying to remodulate or re-expand an idea that wasn't maybe expanded to the fullest a couple of years ago.

Progression is synonymous with techno.

I don't know. I was just reading DJ Magazine, actually someone just put it on my desk, saying that I'm top 24 and it said age 30. I'm like 'Oh fuck, I gotta really push myself this year!' It's strange – I'm kind of in my development stage right now of where things are gonna go. I'm doing a lot of experimenting — that's why I haven't released a ton of stuff over the last couple of years, so we'll see. I have some ideas but I don't like to talk about theories and everything like that until it's starting to come out like musically.

We did this thing on the web at the end of last year for my diary and I was just finishing the last entry and it really struck me — when I was in Melbourne, Australia, New Years Eve, I had taken about four weeks off nearly from everything; I just disappeared onto an island. It was the longest time I had been away on vacation for about ten years, and the longest time I had probably been away from music and techno music for the same amount of time. When I came back, I was at soundcheck and there was this live act I don't even no the name of — two guys on stage doing soundcheck, there bobbing away — and it sounded amazing; they had everything souped-up, everything was live. It was amazing but I could've sold this same thing ten years ago or three years ago or five years ago. Yes it is amazing, it sounds great, they're making great music, but what's next…? Luckily that question keeps coming up in my head. There is always that unknown that I'm trying to search for and hopefully I never find. When I do, you know, that's probably the age for me to kind of retire.

I think it's more understood than it has been in a number of years, because a lot of people start dance music as their reference point. Some of them expand from that and some of them don't, but with the increasing exposure there's more people trying to find new ways of listening to this music. They don't want — especially in America — they don't want to be pushed into a club just to hear this performance.

So I think there is more critical listening of things going on now. I mean, imagine like when the first kind of ambient stuff came out... we were like `What's this garbage coming?', but then fully it took over and people really got into it. Then it kind of waned and died because it really didn't progress. I think part of that progression and part of that ambient kind of cross with the weirdness of minimal and beats and bits and bobs of rhythm has now formed itself into this flick, scratch and cuts kind of like dub stuff. So to me — and I think an increasing amount of people — dance music has less to do with the bass drum than it once did. There's this weirdo fucking crazy shit that has no bass drum, but it's still really really rhythmic, and its still very, very dance music, but just in a different way.

Yes, it's true, the technology is more accessible to people. It's allowing more people to try to innovate and just to try and test the waters, which tends to desensitise people to the sound of the 909 and the electronic kind of pilot. People are more susceptible to actually sit down and listen to a piece of music which is electronic without being in a club. And when you do that you start to maybe want something that isn't made just to mix into another record – something that develops without a DJ developing it for you.

I don't know if user friendly would be the correct word. Reason, I think is an amazing program – I love how the patch chords move, how you can turn it around – but computer technology is becoming very powerful, so it's becoming very convenient to do things on the computer. I think that's the right way to put it. A mouse and a keyboard, well it's not user friendly, so there still is a problem.

Definitely one of my goals is to be able to do, not all my stuff, or not entirely on the computer, but to be able to do more and more stuff on the computer over the next year, to be able to test my ideas more roundly. But the big problem is, there is this gap — humans live in the animal world and there's this digital world. For the last 30 or 40 [years] we've been using a lot of mechanical apparatus to go in between those two worlds — knobs, sliders, blah blah blah. That's why this Final Scratch thing is going to be an important thing, because it's an analogue interface to the digital world. That's what we need more of. If someone wants to come up with a fucking load of money they'll come up with something that's going to innovate and change the world. You know, it's not the software, it's not fucking redoing what you've done before, it's the innovation. If I were starting right now as like a 16, 17-year-old kid, I would start attempting to go about human interface design and try to create the optimal analogue to digital interface for the creative person. Even a keyboard is not very creative – that's based on a piano, which is hundreds of years old. There has to be a better way to get musical and creative ideas from ourselves, out of ourselves and into the digital world.

Well, I could foresee everything powered by a computer and with software emulation getting really interesting kind of weird analogue hybrids – with one computer yet but with maybe three or four interfaces to give it the different feeling. It's no fun watching and I don't think even listening to things that have all been created by one thing, all with one mouse. All the movements, there are only so many movements you can do with that. We need to capture the human spirit when we make electronic music, that's where good electronic music stands out. I think part of that is how we interact with the machines.

I think that at this point the products are more important, because the method, everyone's using the same now, you know what I'm saying? We're on this weird cusp where there needs to be some kind of change, but these products like Reason are extremely important. You know, A friend of mine called me up, only about a week ago; 'Have you seen Reason?' This guy lives in down town London, tiny appartment, he has records and no equipment, a kitchen and a bed and no room for anything else. He goes 'Do you realise that I have a whole studio in my house now?' Two weeks ago that was impossible, now it is. Now it's like 'Jesus, this kind of change over is unbelievable'. So I'm sure there is gonna be innovation with things like Reason and stuff like that, people using the mouse and the keyboard, but I think that the one step will be interfacing with a human, and using this new technology for the second step to really push it forward, we'll be finding the right energies.

I'm in the studio, that's what I'm back for, for the next couple of months. Not travelling as much, I'm just working and attempting some new things.

Well, not until the middle of the year. The first couple of months of the year I'm usually home recording and testing new ideas. Last year I didn't do too much because my studio was in a bit of disarray, but it's all put together and ready to rock. All I need to do is turn it on. No, it is actually on! Towards the later end of the year I'll probably be back on my crazy schedule. Again it's still good to tour, and the travelling and my production. I enjoy all of them.

There are a lot of advances starting to happen over in Asia. You've started to see America finally also come up, and you know kind of a micro scene [is] start[ing] to happen like the San Francisco/LA scene with all the click clacks coming to them... and you know Asia... could be China, you know, Malaysia and all these weird little places over there? You forget that there's like over a billion people who have just started to get into it. What the hell kind of electronic shit are they gonna come up with? It's great there's so much more potential. As the rest of the world catches up to Western technology and Western conveniences like cell phones, pagers and internet, people like that will turn to a soundtrack that works within that technology, that is music created by the big technology they're getting used to... and that's what we've been involved in for the last ten years.

Yeah. Well, the web is the key to the kind of the development of what we've been doing the last six years. It was online at the end of 1995 and very early on we were seeing, like, feedback. We were doing events as early as 1996 and only inviting people on the website – posting it on Thursday to our mailbox and having a thousand people on Friday. So it's a great interaction of information dispersal, getting feedback and bringing people kind of closer into our world, you know what I mean? I think one of the best things — no, the best thing we've ever done — was this online tour diary, which if you haven't heard about it…

Yeah, you should check it. It was four months of daily updates of what was going on, of where we were going, and what was going on in our heads. It was really, really interesting. We had so much feedback, and I like that. You always want to keep something away from the public, some kind of secrecy, some kind of mystery, but it's interesting that now you have more of a direct possibility to choose what you want to release and what you don't, and I'm not just talking about music; information, photos, pictures, leaks of what's happening – again, it really just brings the scene closer together, and that's, well…

What you have to remember is that the electronic scene is kind of a cottage industry that has been built upon that kind of general idea of how the internet is now. Before the internet really was in everybody's homes it was a scene created on handing out flyers, getting feedback... real street level, you know? You had a DJ and he's maybe he's popular but he's approachable, he's one of us, he's not like this pop star, travelling around on private, you know, a private jet and with bodyguards, you know what I mean? Some of them are maybe a bit like that now, but even the upper echelon of DJ stardom, or whatever you want to call it, are still a lot closer to the general public or the fan, or the music listener or the music appreciator than any other forms of music or any other scenes. There's this great kind of support structure that's been built, and if you had looked at that ten years ago and said how would we be doing this electronically, then its very similar to how the internet kind of works. I'd say that's why you saw so many electronic labels jump on it so quickly. It was like `this is exactly what we've been doing', that's what so many larger labels and some of the conglomerates took a couple of years to figure out. It was totally alien to them.

Sometimes I did. But no, not as much as in the past – I feel quite free again now. With the decks and effects I seem to be able to take harder things and soften them up, but also take softer things and harden them up and go all over the place. The only thing I feel penned in a little bit about is still there's not enough places where you can go and play a real nice long set. You really need more than a couple of hours.

Well, I'm extremely happy with that set out. It took me a long time to kind of develop it and actually do it because it was based upon a number of ideas I'd had in the late 80s when I was doing big shows and things like that. I had also been inspired by some of Jeff's [Mills] early big shows and stuff, and those sympathies had kind of been lost; no one was really doing anything like that and I really wanted to update that and take the whole next album and do something different. I'm really happy with it — it's, like, a year later and I don't think there's that much still out there like that.

Originally Decks, FX… was going to be more like the end of Decks, FX... – where it was a lot dubbier and weirder, but it just went the other way. I have had some ideas to back and do a follow up, which would be dubbier. I guess in a marketing way it would probably be a great thing to do, but it's like 'ahh, well, I kind of did that and I'd much rather go into something different'. You know, if I find a bit of free time maybe I will, but at the moment I just find it hard to focus on something I've already done. Whether slower or faster, it's relatively the same thing.

Not as much as we used to. With the higher profile publicity, it must be difficult from a legality point of view… Well, round here for sure, because we had a big party week planned for the end of 1999 and we got totally busted, like the day before, with the Windsor authorities. So it is. The high profile does bring with it a couple of other problems, but again its nothing that can't be taken care of if you have the time, but because of the higher profile I don't have so much time to take care of it. So we're balancing things. We were lucky to do two amazing parties in Detroit – one in September, one in November last year. So that's two within four months, so I didn't want to have another one. The next one will be Windsor in the middle of February, so we're getting back on track.

Yeah, and because of the profile sometimes it can be a blessing if the authorities want to work with you – because they know you're an artist, you're also a businessman, you're respected within the scene you come from. But at the same time, if they want to make an example of you, you're the perfect person to make an example of. You have to watch that. You don't know exactly where it's gonna go sometimes with the authorities, and you only know once it's gone the wrong way or once it's gone the right way. I'm not a big gambler when it comes to getting thrown in jail. I don't think we even have a laptop with Reason in jail!

Well, I won't go too much into that. There's not really anything to say except that if you look historically at kind of musical culture within America there's been a lot of times when black musicians have been, for lack of a better word, raped or ripped off by white musicians coming in and stealing their ideas. So because of that history, because of that kind of overhanging cloud over America, that comes into play even when people are coming in with a lot more of the right intentions.

Picture Detroit, late eighties – things are starting to take off musically for the first time since Detroit had Motown, and there was a couple of white Americans and people who came in and were kind of taking advantage of some of the artists there. Unlucky for me I came in shortly after that and I was just, you know, a naïve little white kid who'd been hanging out in Detroit for a couple of years, who was going there because he loved music. Everything was fine really in the beginning. My brother and I were one of a handful of white kids down at the Music Institute on the weekend. Everything was fine until we started to have a little bit of success, and there was really just some animosity, and 'Why are these guys getting some...' – you know John and I – `why are we getting some of the popularity? The exposure we were getting...', and maybe from the rest of the world, because we were white... I'm not going to comment on that, but throughout the years people saw that both John and I stood up to what we believed in and stood up for electronic music, techno in general and the Detroit scene, and put a lot of time and effort back into it. So you know, we did have some hard times in the beginning, and now unfortunately, which isn't going to be very interesting to report as a lot of us get along now.

It is a good thing. You know we're all in this together. You know it really doesn't matter where you've come from or what colour you are, it's just what you believe in and why you are there. I think most of us, people who get along in Detroit, you know, like Carl and Kenny and everyone else, we're all just people, but we all have a very deep rooted love for this music.