BT has been described as the prototype of the twenty-first-century musician. While he’s at the vanguard of music makers harnessing the power of synthesizers and computers, he began his musical odyssey as a classical pianist. BT came to Berklee as a vocal performance major and added jazz sounds to his vocabulary. After leaving Berklee, he pioneered the trance electronica style (also called “dream house") and took dance clubs in England by storm in the nineties with his songs “A Moment of Truth” and “Relativity.” His trademark stutter edit, a rapid-fire rhythmic repetition of a short sample, distinguished his songs and remixes from those of other electronica artists.

While in England, BT met Tori Amos. The two collaborated on the song “Blue Skies,” which landed in the number one spot of Billboard magazine’s Hot Dance Club Play chart in January 1997. The track fueled the success of BT’s debut album, Ima, expanding the artist’s reach from Europe to America and bringing BT to the attention of other superstars. His technological wizardry and skills as a songwriter, guitarist, keyboardist, and producer paved the way for collaborations with such pop icons as Sting, Madonna, Seal, Sarah McLachlan, *NSYNC, Britney Spears, and others.

In his early days, BT performed his brand of electronic music live with synths, sequencers, and drum machines. These days, you’ll find him onstage playing guitar and keyboards as well as a laptop and an array of “bent instruments” that he has modified. Late last year, BT took his This Binary Universe multimedia production on the road, sharing the roster with Thomas Dolby for a tour billed as a “sonic duel for virtual supremacy.”

In addition to his live performances and studio work, BT has composed scores that seamlessly blend electronic and orchestral instruments for numerous film and television productions and video games. As if that’s not enough to keep a guy occupied, he recently established Sonik Architects, a software company that he operates with the help of several Berklee alumni. So far, they have developed two programs, Break Tweaker and Stutter Edit, tools that will enable DJs and electronic musicians to replicate and modify BT’s innovative stutter effect in live performances.

BT has an insatiable appetite for composing and diving ever deeper into music technology. His expertise and many accomplishments notwithstanding, he still knows that there is much to learn. While his career demands prevent him from returning to Berklee for full-time study, he has struck up a fortuitous friendship with Professor Richard Boulanger. Studying Csound computer programming language and modern composition techniques with Boulanger has opened up new musical vistas for BT (see the sidebar “Laptop Virtuoso"). The combination of natural talent, intellectual curiosity, humility, and boundless energy have heightened expectations that BT will continue to lead as we approach the music of second decade of the twenty-first century.

Did you have to learn about synthesizers and computers on your own when you were starting out?

I had been experimenting with synthesis since I was a kid. I took a synthesis class at Berklee, but back then, there was nothing presented that I hadn’t already checked out on my own. When I was at Berklee, I was by far the geekiest kid there. I was really interested in programming and electronics. I’d be in my room in the Hemenway Street dorm using a tiny screwdriver to take apart my Roland TB 303 [a synthesizer/sequencer] to make the resonance self-oscillate, or I’d be line editing autoexec.bat files on my PC for automatic sound creation. Everyone else was ripping through the modes on their instruments at 208 beats a minute. The kids in my dorm didn’t know what I was doing. I think I missed my peer group by about five years. Now when I stop by Berklee, I see students engaged in the things I’ve been interested in since I was a kid. That inspires me.

How did you get interested in creating dance music?

I had come from a classical music background. At eight, I was at the Washington Conservatory of Music doing harmonic analysis of Debussy’s piano music. It was great for my ears, and I learned a ton. My introduction to electronics came via break-dancing culture. When I discovered Afrika Bambaataa, Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, Cabaret Voltaire, and others, I thought that music represented the infinite sonic palette that the composers I’d studied as a child would have wanted to explore. Hearing these sounds and seeing a group like the Human League and Ian Stanley, who did their programming, fascinated me. He’d use a wall of modular synths to create a kick drum. I thought, “I have to learn to do this!” That was my introduction to electronic music. I became a dance music artist in a roundabout way. When I first moved to Los Angeles in the early nineties, the electronic music I was making was beat driven but also had a sense of harmony and melody that was unlike other dance music out there. I’d just come from Berklee after studying harmony and theory and performance ear training with Walter Beasley. When I got to Los Angeles, I was playing guitar and keyboards and singing. I wanted to get a record deal as a singer/songwriter, but I was also quietly writing harmonically dense electronic music just for myself. When I went around to different labels, I had many doors shut in my face. I finally got an appointment with a well-known A&R guy at Sony who listened to my demo with me in his office. He’d play 10 seconds of each tune and then skip to the next one. Afterward, he looked up and told me I’d never have a career in music. I was devastated and walked around in my bathrobe and slippers for about a month until I figured out that there was a lesson in this for me. I realized that to a degree, I was inauthentic in the songs I’d been writing. The music I was really passionate about was the electronic music I’d been working on. So I left Los Angeles and moved back home to Maryland. Together with two friends, I started Deep Dish Records. We sold our cars and pooled our money. We hired recording engineer Stephen Barkin to come down from New York to work with us for the weekend in the studio. We literally stayed up the entire weekend recording my first record. After it came out, Larry Flick from Billboard magazine wrote a little piece about the record that was very encouraging. He really understood my music. I faxed the article to everyone I knew, including the A&R guy at Sony. To finish that story, I need to skip forward in time. When the movie The Fast and the Furious came out [in 2001], I went to the premiere since I’d written the score. There was a lot of red carpet stuff with directors introducing me to different people. A guy came up to me and said, “BT, I love your work, it’s so amazing! I’ve followed your music from the beginning.” I recognized him as the A&R guy I’d met at Sony, but he didn’t remember that we’d met before. I never said anything about our meeting. It made me think of the power an accomplished A&R person wields when speaking to young people. Some would have folded after hearing what I heard.

Has that experience affected how you interact with young, aspiring musicians?

When I meet kids who want to do something creative, I want to be the opposite of that guy. After my gigs, when I’m exhausted and I’ve signed 200 CD jackets, I’ll see this one kid who just has to talk to me. I feel a responsibility to engage with that person and give encouragement. I’ve seen some kids over and over at my gigs, and then later I see that they release records. Mike Truman from Hybrid gave me a copy of “Finished Symphony” at a club. He was an eager kid who wanted to talk to me. Often those kids are the ones who are going to do something, and I want to encourage them.

How did you break out in Britain?

After the article came out in Billboard, I made my second record with the money we’d earned from “A Moment of Truth.” We did the second one in my room at my parents’ house. I had a Boss 8-channel mixer with no midrange EQ, a Voyetra Sequencer Plus Gold, and an IBM PS/2 model 70 computer with 16K of RAM. We made the track “Embracing the Future” and printed 300 copies. Guy Oldhams, who worked at a cool record store called Black Market Records in Manchester, England, got ahold of a copy. He played it for Sasha, who I didn’t know at the time was a very famous DJ. Sasha called me and said, “The music you’re making is important, and the people in this country are going to get it. I want to bring you here.” Sasha brought me to England when I couldn’t have afforded to go, nor would I have known who to play my music for if I could have gone. I was in the studio with Sasha when Spencer Baldwin, who later became my A&R guy at Warner Bros., came in with Paul Oakenfold to see Sasha. They listened to what we were working on and asked if I had any other songs. I played them some of the tracks that eventually became my first album. They invited me to stop by the Warner Bros. offices the next day. I went with my guitar, figuring they’d want to hear something different than what they’d heard the day before. I played them about eight songs, and then Paul said, “I have no idea what you are doing, but we want to be involved.” Spencer, Paul, and Max Hole signed me to a subsidiary of Warner Bros.

Did your success in England open doors for you to work with Tori Amos on the tune “Blue Skies”?

They say that overnight success takes 10 years. After my album Ima came out, I went from living in my old bedroom at my parents’ house to flying to England every three weeks to be on Top of the Pops on TV and doing my own live shows. It was crazy. I met Tori in England around 1997 through mutual friends. We got together at a recording studio and just clicked instantly. She’s an amazing pianist. She asked me to help on her music, and I began doing some synth stuff and programming beats. Tori wanted to sing a song for my record. She took the song “Divinity” from Ima and improvised a vocal line over it and sent it to me. The song is about 11 minutes long. I took her vocal track off and cut it up into a million pieces and started making different words out of the syllables. I did some pitch shifting and created an a cappella song from her vocal, making words from the sibilance, implosives, and phonemes that she sang. She never sang the words “blue” and “skies” consecutively in her original vocal. I spent two weeks working on the vocals. Then I took out a guitar and wrote a chord progression for it and made a track around it. I played it for her over the phone, and she loved it.

Did the success of this tune put you on the radar for other pop musicians like Sting, Sarah McLachlan, and Seal?

I think it did. It made people in America become aware of what I was doing. I had been traveling around Europe, doing live electronic music shows with synths, drum machines, and small sequencers for years at that point. Eventually, I started migrating back to America. I signed with a manager here and then started scoring films.

Your ambient music and groove-oriented material are perfectly suited to soundtracks. Did your film work start when directors and producers heard these qualities in your music?

It actually started another way. I’d had an interest in film scoring since I was a kid after I saw the movie Blade Runner with music by Vangelis. Knowing that he played that music live-99 percent of it wasn’t sequenced-sealed the deal for me. From then on, I wanted to get into electronics and write for picture. Even when I was at Berklee, I’d turn down the volume while watching the Nature Channel on TV and noodle with my synths and delay pedals. I got to do my first film when director Doug Liman came to me while he was working on his second movie, Go [circa 1999]. He just showed up at my door in Maryland-I still don’t know how he found me. He asked if he could show me his film. We watched some of it, and then I started showing him musical ideas that I thought would go with it. Next, he brought me out to Los Angeles to meet with all of these scary studio people, and they signed off on me doing the score. The film is about dance music culture, and Doug really wanted somebody immersed in that culture to do the music rather than a Hollywood film composer. That movie fell out of the sky for me. I really enjoyed doing it and decided to move out to Los Angeles to do more film scores in addition to my artist work. Once I got here, the problem I had was that people were pitching films to me, saying, “It’s about dance culture, but it’s on roller blades or Jet Skis.” I realized instantly that if I did anything related to Go, I’d be pigeonholed as the “dance music guy,” and I wouldn’t get to do anything else. It took a year and a half before I got hired to score another film. During the time in between, I wrote string quartets and got some students to record them. I played them for music supervisors and told them I could write for brass, woodwinds, strings, orchestral percussion, and conduct and that I wanted a chance to write for a large group. Most still wanted to think of me as a dance music guy. Finally, director Stephen Hopkins hired me to score Under Suspicion [in 2000] with a 40-piece string section. After that, other people were willing to give me a shot.

Your 2006 release, This Binary Universe, is a multimedia project made in reverse. The images were created to your music.

That’s true; it’s almost the complete opposite of film scoring. For a composer, this is a dream. Usually our job is to suit the vision of the director and the actors and to complement the concept of the film. The ideology behind This Binary Universe was that the music would drive the visuals. I finished the music and then found teams of people that represent communities of artists that I really like. I tried to find the best people who really got the music and were passionate about it. Scott Pagano is an artist who has done visual effects for X-Men and Spider-Man. I played him some of the music, and he said he’d love to do a piece for it. He ended up doing this for very little money. I did this project without a label and never could have afforded him otherwise. I feel so lucky to have been able to do this project. For the track “The Internal Locus,” I spent two days making the composition up of fractals. It alternates between three bars of 13, a bar of 15, and a bar of 13. I took all of the song’s rhythms and compacted them into a micro-rhythm and placed it about two-thirds of the way into the piece. Every rhythm that occurs in the piece is expressed as a micro-rhythm using 512th notes, 1,024th notes, and 2,048th notes, all packed into this very dense two-bar passage. It sounds like granular synthesis. I was able to spend more time doing things like that for this album than I have on other projects. One of the most special things was that I had orchestral parts. When I recorded the Stealth soundtrack with [Director] Rob Cohen, we hired a 110-piece orchestra for six days. On the sixth day, after the first cue, we were totally done, and there were two brass and strings sessions and a percussion session scheduled. The first-chair violinist asked if I had anything else for them to play, and I did. We took a break, and the copyist and I made parts for three tracks of This Binary Universe. This was on the studio’s dime. I never would have had access to these musicians for a typical album project.

Tell me about your software company Sonik Architects.

Two years ago, inspired by what Dr. B. [Professor Richard Boulanger] has introduced me to-especially Csound-I started a small software company. I learned how great Csound is as a compositional tool for sound design, and for doing things like writing 270 controllers for one event. It enabled me to make these dense, controller-oriented movements that I struggled to do previously in my compositions. It’s amazing technology. Our company has actually built the drum machine that is responsible for all of the beats, micro-rhythms, isorhythms, and all of the asymmetrical meter used on This Binary Universe. It’s the first surround-sound drum machine, and it enables you to have 1,024th notes splining down [smoothly interpolating or ritarding] to an eighth-note triplet over a dotted quarter note exponentially or logarithmically. Plus, every time one of those micro-rhythmic notes plays, you can have the sound jump to different speakers. I used to have to do all of the mathematical computations to get these effects. It’s insane what this drum machine is capable of. We are also making a line of studio tools. The first is called Break Tweaker, a sequencer for very experimental music projects. It’s the first sequencer where you can compose different time lines for packets in any meter you want. You can put 4/4 against 7/8 against 6/4, and the packet will always turn around isorhythmically. There is a void in the electronic music performance area, so we are creating software to enable people to create my stutter technique live. We have a cool thing going and are very excited about it.

You’ve been called a prototype for the twenty-first-century musician, using your laptop as your instrument. What are your hopes for the future?

When I was at Berklee, I learned a lot, but I didn’t have a peer group. I was an anomalous event there back then. When I go to the college now, I am excited to see that there are more people who think like I do. They are not satisfied with the software tools that are available commercially. They want to build something to help them realize ideas that available tools won’t let them do, so they are learning Max or Csound. In the future, I hope to introduce kids who are interested in video games and electronic music to traditional instrumentation and make that exciting to them. Having the opportunity to perform for the Video Games Live Concert at the Hollywood Bowl last summer made me realize that you can show 14-year-olds an orchestra with a conductor and some visuals, and they will dig it. There were 11,000 kids in the audience. It made me feel that this is a direction I’d like to go toward. I want to produce music that uses orchestra and have it be an introduction for kids who generally don’t get exposed to those sounds. I’m really interested in live orchestral music. That’s a future frontier for me.

Laptop Virtuoso

“BT is a humble Leonardo,” says Berklee Professor Richard Boulanger. “In addition to being a performer, he’s a composer who has done academic, Hollywood, and popular music projects and [who] founded a software company.”

When BT was a Berklee student, he never took a class with Boulanger; but in recent years the two have struck up a mentor-student relationship and become fast friends. BT credits Boulanger for showing him the limitless possibilities of Csound programming language. The two have worked together on many projects, including the score for the film Stealth. For that project, Boulanger collaborated with BT to craft the chorus of “She Can Do That,” sung by David Bowie.

Boulanger has also become a friend to BT’s extended family. “His mother once said she wished BT had met me sooner,” Boulanger says. “But I told her that I’m glad he didn’t and created all of these possibilities before realizing that there was more to learn. If he had met me when he first came to Berklee, he’d probably be a professor of electronic music at some college and have a much smaller audience. Instead, he’s playing his music with an orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl for 11,000 people. I think he’s having an incredible impact and getting lots of people to think about electronic music more seriously.”

BT and his staff have received personal tutoring in Csound programming from Boulanger. For one notable session, BT took his whole crew and Boulanger to a beach in Thailand for some learning and R&R. After scuba diving all day, the laptops came out and Boulanger schooled everyone into the night.

The sharing of valuable information flows both ways according to Boulanger. “I’ve learned a lot from him that I bring back to my students,” he says. “I can tell them how things are done in Hollywood, about the role of the director or the producer, and how fast you have to turn your work around. The street knowledge I’ve picked up from being with BT is something practical that I bring that back to my classes.

Boulanger is not just a mentor to BT; he’s also a fan of his work. “His latest album, This Binary Universe, is a crossover from groove-based electronica and songwriting toward electronic symphonic composition,” Boulanger says. “He’s pushing toward the academic. The first track, ‘All That Makes Us Human Continues,’ would be at home at the International Computer Music Conference. It features abstract video with sound triggering the video spectrum. It’s a masterpiece of audio art.”

To Boulanger, BT is a great role model for a new generation of laptop musicians. “The computer is his violin, and he’s a virtuoso at playing and programming it.”

The filmmaker and the musician have merged their separate but surprisingly similar talents into a synthesis of audio and video. They’ve slammed music and motion together to create “Umfeld,” a surround-sound DVD that remixes the very notion of digital art. And they’ve made the new medium mobile, storming dance clubs and multimedia laboratories worldwide with a live version of their creation, fusing sight and sound on the fly.

What instruments do the radical artists turn to when they conduct their audio-visual experiments? “It’s a no-brainer for me to pick the Mac,” says Pagano. “Production has to be transparent. It is critical that I have as few technical problems as possible. On the Mac, technical problems have been stripped away.”

“I’m addicted to the Mac because it’s transparent,” says Paap. “I’m a musician. I want to get my idea across and I want the line between the thought and the result to be as short as possible. And there’s only one computer that allows me to do that and it’s the Mac.”

Perfection Meshed

The line that wired Paap and Pagano’s thoughts together was, in actuality, a world-spanning filament of optical and copper cable that ran from California to the Netherlands. The two connected via email and created their first music-motion chimera by exchanging information through the electronic ether. “I got an email from Jochem, asking if I would be interested in working on a new project with him,” says Pagano. “I have been a big fan of his music for a long time and I had thought about working with him.”

“I wanted to accompany my music with visuals and I knew Scott from looking at his website,” adds Paap. “After seeing his work I thought that his style would match mine.”

To comprehend why Pagano and Paap experienced this mutual artistic magnetism, it helps to understand their work. Stripped bare, Pagano’s work reveals a fine-art aesthetic that was cultivated in galleries, museums, and photography exhibits. He was reared on art as a kid and dabbled in photography, painting, music, and ultimately video. At Brown University he deconstructed the art of signs and symbols, a field known as art semiotics. “It was basically the department at Brown that had all the good video equipment,” he says. “So I did some abstract video work with all these new and exotic tools like non-linear editors and computer graphics programs.”

As Pagano’s multimedia lab evolved, so did his artwork. He later put out a few DVDs and crafted motion graphics for commercial customers. The artist worked with international design firm AKQA to craft a Nike ad campaign featuring basketball legend Lebron James and built motion graphics for yU+Co, an effects and graphics house known for its stunning movie title sequences, visual effects, and innovative network branding campaigns. “I’ve learned a lot from the commercial environment,” he says. “There’s a certain level of polish and refinement that are pervasive in the industry and it’s important to know how to produce it.” Major studios also guide the filmmaker in his quest to create a more efficient studio. “I can see the workflow of the big studios and apply that to my small studio and my own projects,” he says. “That really helps me work faster and better.”

Most recently, Pagano wove two stunning cinematic pieces for “This Binary Universe,” an epic DVD-surround sound project by electronic music maestro BT. His work was, and is, precise, exacting, and cutting-edge.

Paap is one of Europe’s most venerated electronic musicians. On vinyl and in clubs he’s known as Speedy J, a wickedly precise and mechanically driven DJ. “Rotterdam is a very industrial city, a pretty rough place,” he says. “And the environment always has a big influence on the artistic product.” In Speedy J’s workshop, Rotterdam’s factories, refineries, machine shops, and all things mechanized get quantized into meticulous beats. The musician also tinkers with popular musical releases, tuning them to create unique Speedy J remixes. His audio workshop also cranks out handcrafted sounds for Native Instruments Reaktor and other sound studios worldwide. “I consider working with programmers and instrument manufacturers equally important as putting out material,” he says. “I feel this is necessary and will contribute to sound design in an important way.” Paap is a meticulous sonic craftsman, one who only settles for the best.

Pagano and Paap’s exacting styles meshed and together they created “Umfeld.”

Creative Collaboration

Pagano and Paap zapped their ideas back and forth using iChat,email, and good old telephone lines. Paap had cut most of the surround-sound tracks for the DVD, but was still formulating the last few when Pagano got onboard. “I thought, we can take this to the next level and come up with new ways to work with pixels and sound,” says Pagano. That meant gleaning inspiration from Paap’s tracks, constructing 2D and 3D imagery using Adobe After Effects and Photoshop, Shake, Maya, and Max/MSP/Jitter. The artist drew all his pieces together in Final Cut Pro.

“Final Cut is indifferent to formats and resolutions,” says Pagano. “It can handle anything I can throw at it. That is incredibly important for what I do.”

Paap plotted the music for the project using Max/MSP, Native Instruments Traktor and Kontakt, and Logic Pro — the trusted tools for nearly every one of his musical projects. All the tracks for the DVD were composed in 5.1 surround, an exciting new medium for Paap. “It was inspiring to think about composing for a multiple-speaker setup,” he says. “It’s been done before, but not really in the kind of music I produce.” The producer plugged his sounds into Logic Pro, where he massaged them with filters and effects. Using Logic Pro’s native surround sound capabilities, he mixed his music for six audio channels. “I assemble and treat everything with Logic,” he says. “It’s the end stage for any piece of music I create.”

To find better synergy between music and motion, Pagano flew to Rotterdam to work with Paap in person. There, amid the inner workings of the industrial city, the artist found inspiration. He and Paap explored Rotterdam, equipped with an HD camcorder and still photography equipment. He shot the city’s grit and grime, its industrial structure.

The artists built on those rough foundations together. “Jochem’s music is almost abstract,” says Pagano. “It’s in the realm of sound design and creating narrative or story was not going to be appropriate. But the music got me very excited about audio-visual synchronization. I pulled the energy and the movement out of the music and mapped it to 2D and 3D graphics. Then we developed the concept of moving through a series of environments with each track.”

For example: Some of Pagano’s abstract artistic environments are filled with 3D metallic flora that grows over serene stills of the city, every motion precisely synced to Paap’s sonic salvo. “My understanding of music and sound really helps in a project like this,” says Pagano. “The connection allows me to work with musicians in a very subtle way.”

Subtle Improvisation

That fine interplay between music and motion graphics is easily channeled into an intriguing live reinterpretation of “Umfeld.” The two artists jam together, feeding off their common creative energy to create new material. “In a band, you gain an understanding of your bandmates,” says Pagano. “You become a team because you inherently develop a sensitivity to what they’re going to do.” Pagano and Paap share that nearly psychic connection, weaving their two mediums together like improvising musicians.

The live show requires an array of portable audio-video tech. Pagano employs a MacBook Pro, a Mac mini, an iPod, a DVD player, and a video mixer. He pulls clips — virtually everything he’s ever created — from the various storage devices and routes them through the mixer. He previews those clips using a custom browser-player application he created using Max/MSP. The browser allows him to sort his clips on the fly and nab whatever he needs to accompany Paap’s music.

Paap packs two Mac laptops, one running Native Instruments Traktor and the other running Ableton Live. He controls both with an Allen & Heath Xone 3D mixing desk. The mixer flawlessly interfaces with Paap’s Macs, allowing him to throw faders and tweak knobs in each application without touching a mouse. “It enables me to control every aspect of the software,” he says. “To me, it’s a much more human interface than a keyboard and mouse.” The DJ sends MIDI timing info to Pagano, who uses it to precisely sync his visuals with each audio track.

The performance can be customized for any space. “It’s totally scalable,” says Pagano. “We can do it with one screen, two screens, surround speakers or stereo speakers. The venue dictates how the performance will go and it’ll be different every time.”

Refining Imagery and Sound

“Different” is essentially at the core of Pagano and Paap’s work. Both artists continue to strive to create new art forms and media for expression. “I’m very excited about all the things that could be done with sound-image relationships,” says Pagano. “There are a lot of creative and technical avenues to go down.”

High-definition video is one such avenue for Pagano. He’s worked with HD extensively, but he plans to push his art even further into the realm of high-resolution video. “Coming from a photography and cinema background, I really love beautiful, refined images,” he says. “As video artists, we didn’t have access to that kind of quality until recently. We were stuck with a format (television) that was basically defined in the ‘30s. Now, with HD video and Final Cut Pro, we can produce much cleaner and refined work. And with the Mac, we have the computing horsepower to do it all.”

Paap plans to explore the emerging realm of multi-channel sound design. “Surround sound and the surround-sound design domain is a very Wild West area at the moment and working in a new medium like multi-channel surround forces you to find creative solutions to new problems,” he says. “That’s when amazing things happen. That’s when new and exciting music emerges.”

“So much about the experience of music is not just the actual composition itself, but how things transition…It’s a bit of a magical thing,” BT explains. “The thing is, you have to sell those transitions to your audience…most of the time is spent working on those transitions.”

With BT’s previous albums all directed more towards the dance floors, ‘This Binary Universe’ is going to feel more comfortable in the headphones. It’s a separation from what he’s provided punters for many years and a shift towards what you’d expect in the background of his soundtracks for films such as ‘GO’. But friends thought it was a step in the wrong direction.

“It [the new album] was, more than anything, like letting my guard down. So many people around me were like ‘Oh, you can’t do this…nobody is going to care’, thinking that the music was too personal.

“I was just able to shut that out and dig in and make the…mandate that was given to me. It’s weird – you don’t choose these things, it’s whether you choose to listen to them. You have to allow it to happen.”

Re-wiring circuits from the backs of toys and even the dreaded furby was a major part of making the new album evolve. BT explains that the process was really rewarding in that it allowed him to push some major boundaries in helping to define the word ‘electronic’ in electronic music. “What I really love about circuit-bending is that you can really apply an ethos to electronic music.

“Circuit-bending actually makes random instruments. You make things that are completely unpredictable. You’re using these things in a way that was never intended by the manufacturers. I love that kind of idea.”

BT found the need to use his own software when it came to designing the beats for the new album, as he felt trapped by the “software programmer’s will”. “Break Tweaker was about making a drum machine in surround sound. There hasn’t been one – it’s the first ever drum machine built for surround sound. All the beats on This Binary Universe were created with Break Tweaker.”

The album isn’t only a record – it features a DVD of animation composed around the music. BT ensures “it’s the first of three for the series”. “It doesn’t mean I will stop writing music for the dance floors, which is what my next record is more about.”

He was also positive that this was going to be a way for him to start separating projects. “I think ‘This Binary Universe’ really is its own thing now. It’s not…mine. I like the idea of sitting down and listening to a record where it has a consistent emotional through-line. This is the first record since ‘Ima’ that has that. It’s very diverse and it expands, but it has an emotional through-line.”

You’d think the interview was, in many respects, being held with a +8 wizard from some crafted war world. BT’s a geek – but in a way all producers would like to be. The first track on the record, All That Makes Us Human Continues, was coded in CSound and took six months to complete.

Having such a raw angle on a tune that sounds as though it was written on expensive equipment is, BT says, “the greatest thing in the world”.

“I talk to kids at speaking engagements and they’re always like ‘Oh, what keyboard should I get?’ and ‘what audio interface?’ and so on…I’m always like ‘First, go and study Jazz or Classical before you pick up a copy of Reason,’ that’s a good start.

“Go to fucking Target and pick up a nine-dollar keyboard. Get a soldering iron and wires and just go tear it up. That’s how you’re gonna find a new music vocabulary. It’s not from the pre-packaged commercial things.”

Says it all, really. The album speaks for itself and is a must for any fan of the previous albums

This Binary Universe is out now on Central / MRA