I feel somewhat privileged because I often feel very sorry for kids. I often feel very sorry for 20-year-olds and teens who grew up with the internet and have grown up completely connected because, for me, people like me know what it was to struggle, but it wasn't a struggle. It was great! It was fantastic. The thrill of the hunt.
Inspiration has to be natural for me, not so considered, I am not saying that is right or wrong, it's simply what works for me.
I'm always interested in very, very futuristic music and bridging the gap between the physicality of organic guitar music and trying to translate that into something electronic is really fascinating.
Cultures have gone down and rebuilt again and I'm sure we're all facing the same level of extinction.
I've never been a huge prog fan. My background is punk. My background is learning how to play a bar chord and listen to Discharge records when I was a kid.
I always fear dogma. I don't like anything that's dogmatic because it becomes purely religious again and I despise any form of organized religion.
I think when you can be supremely self-indulgent sometimes it's easy to get up one's own asshole. I need parameters. I need discipline.
I do consider myself a very spiritual being. I fear being seen as political in any context because it's so limiting, but I do feel Godflesh is a protest music of sorts. That was the background that I came from.
I can't even listen to Swans anymore. It doesn't do it for me at all, but I absolutely adore the early records and, on that same token, I wouldn't in any way wish for them to come back and repeat themselves.
I always felt at odds, politically, with people, and with any group of people that congregate and declare themselves as some sort of movement. It's usually motivated by wishing to dominate other people.
As a label I don't care about piracy. I want the music that we [my band] love to be heard by as many people as possible. The more people like the music we put out, the better the label and artists will do. If anyone genuinely likes what we do they will find us, buy our vinyl or come to see the artists play live.
Electronic music, for me, has been the only real pioneering music that actually does push boundaries and is constantly futuristic.
I simply remix an artist accommodating the way I wish to see this track. Remixing is entirely personal for me, music is entirely personal for me, and it has to be a natural process.
There's always gonna be people saying they were so much better back in the day.
Justin Broadrick has stated that the drum machine sound was heavily influenced by hip hop artists in the late 80s, particularly the beat on “Christbait Rising” which Broadrick was quoted as saying, “It was my attempt at copying the rhythm sample on 'Microphone Fiend' by Eric B & Rakim”.
I know a lot of mainstream hip-hop people, have been listening to things like Aphex Twin for years. When somebody first played me some of that album, I was just like, "Woah!"
I do feel as if my own music as quite flawed, and it's that frailty or lack of technical proficiency that goes hand-in-hand with some sort of professionalism.
When I first started making music, for about the first 10 years, I was always the young kid. Everyone referred to me as such in any band.
Rhythms, beats, etc., are fundamentally central to my creative drive: my first instrument was the drums, nearly every band I have been involved in or at the helm of, is driven by rhythm, my band is driven entirely by rhythm, machine rhythm, and the purpose of the rock instrumentation is literally to speak the beats, to emulate the rhythms with guitars and bass, with very little articulation, and without being 'progressive'.
Ultimately I live in the now with artistic creation, not what could or could not be in the future, if a creation appears timeless in somebody's opinion, it won't in others, that's not for me to guess.
What I like about electronic music is you don't really need to be that learned or educated in any particular context. You can just make sound, noise even, whatever it may be.
I'd always loved hip-hop.
What modern technology has done has afforded us the luxury of abbreviation and being concise with time, I think. Things that it would take you a week to do can now be done in a day, which is absolutely awesome because you can concentrate on the bigger picture.
