Music to me is a way to express the dreaming tendencies of our lives, those tendencies that are not expressible as words yet, that have not fully manifested as concrete reality and thus cannot be verbalized. Music and Sound are the pre-verbal and the pre-visual sensations. As un-manifested reality, as tendencies, they are the raw material of what will be, of what may be. Malleable and a guide at the same time....

Hypothetical situation: A listener sets a playlist of your music on random repeat every night while sleeping. Unbeknownst to her, the shifting realms exposed by your songs infiltrate and break apart her normal barriers of space, psychic separation and wake/dream states. Your mental world extends into hers now, and you find yourself with a direct connection to her dreaming life. You can tell her anything, give her anything, know anything while walking nightly through her mind. What would you say to her? Why?

A plain of waist-high, yellowed grass. She stands at a babbling creek, looking toward the blue, ice-capped mountains. A large bird the size and general form of a raven lands on a fallen tree next to her. It has a bright red swoop of feathers at the back of its head.
"Hello?" she asks, "Can you tell me where I am?"
"These are the plains of Agrophilia. A beautiful and - for now - very peaceful place," speaks the bird in a peculiar, deep and rolling voice. "I would advise we move on before the storm breaks if you are not into warfare and darkness, though."
"Can I - can we - do that?" she asks timidly.
"You can go wherever you want. This is your dream after all. I am here to... uhm... keep you safe. I almost said 'guide' you, but I'd rather like you to be the guide. I'd love to see this dream through your eyes. May I sit on your shoulder?"
The bird is a little big for that, but this being a dream it doesn't matter too much. They do end up staying some more on the plains to watch the lightning play out its portents over the mountains. She quite enjoys the buildup of suspense, but they leave before darkness finally falls and the war machines roll over the plains.

Your sound pieces evoke inner states of being as physical landscape: the inside becomes an outside. What's the inspiration for your wicked environments? How do you find these sonic terrains?

I Ride On Dragons. Although, there is talk that I Be Dragon...

Frankly, I have no clue of how I do it, but finding describes it well. I tweak and I listen. I use what I like and what evokes pictures in me. There are, of course, certain techniques I use, a combination of effects, sounds and rhythm that I know is to my liking or can produce soundscapes I might like. From there I am very much a tweaker, and I strongly believe in Bob Ross' approach to painting: "We do not make mistakes, we have happy accidents."

Happy little noises live here!

How do you use the Daevl.Plugs?

Initially, I was very much overwhelmed by the sheer possibilities of the Daevl.Plugs and their interface. I started out by applying each and every preset to a base sound I wanted to use. Only recently have I started to customize the various Plugs to my needs. I especially love the fact that most LFO-esque settings take Hz as a value, so I can set the variations to specific frequencies similar to binaural beats, as used in brainwave entrainment. Another use of this is to sync or de-sync the effects with the beat of the track, thereby producing rhythmic or even polyrhythmic variations. As the Daevl.Plugs lend themselves very well to a dark environmental sound, my next challenge is to use them for a very peaceful, harmonic and meditative piece.

Our leap-frogging technology makes it possible to swap out parts of your brain for electronic subsystems specializing in the same tasks your grey matter does, but with tremendous increases in speed and processing power. Super cerebellum, triple thickness 18 layer neocortex, Broca's area version 2.0... the swaps are carried out one at a time, taking the existing configuration of the area to be replaced and duplicating it within the new electronic part before removing the organic matter and snapping its replacement into your head. After a long series of swaps, every part of a brain may be silicon rather than organic. Would you decide to undergo this process and do you believe it would it change the music you make?

First you need to realize that this a very brain/body centric way of seeing things. It is about pushing back outside, physical limitations. I believe in limitation as a creative tool. Limitation is what drives creativity.

The one part of my cerebral setup I would gladly upgrade are my eyes. I have stretched the limits of my impaired vision so far that it would be fun to see what happens if those limits were removed now.

The strongest influence enhancement could have for me is better, more direct access and control over the creation process. As things stand now, making music is often limited on the visual side for me. Screens full of controls, small type to get it all in one screen, etc. MacOS X's built-in fluid zoom leapfrogged my work, for example.

Our daily life is science fiction to people born a mere century ago. The power of an individual to create is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate. As this power grows, entire worlds may spring from your fingers. What kind of world will you create?

That is a very interesting question. My creations seem to share a certain feel of darkness and SciFi. My sounds are often creepy, but actually I am a cheerful and positive person. And for all the darkness I create it never seems evil, depraved or depressing. Someone once coined the term 'Innocent Darkness' for what I do. Warm, fuzzy horror. I like to take my audience to dark places, but I want there to be an underlying feeling of safety and trust, too. A world of my creation would be a place to safely explore the dark sides of oneself. A world to go dark places and come back a healthier and happier person.

And as always, darkness can only ever live where there is light.

Speaking of science fiction, all of your work seems laden with science-fiction, horror or fantastical themes: void-dwelling babes traveling other dimensions, minds downloaded into fighting machines, sonic miasmas of non-earthly origin, tales of the inner thoughts of madmen. How did you acquire this particular focus?

Not sure who acquired whom here. Maybe it is just something inside me that is searching for ways to express itself. I see all my creative outputs more as symptoms, as hints at what lies below. For instance, I have long wondered about the peculiar rift I have with the fantasy genre. Given the themes and imagery I put out one might assume I was an avid reader and fan of fantasy. I am not. It doesn't work for me. I need it to be SciFi. Maybe it's the difference between a setting that feels like 'past' and thereby basically unchangeable, and one that has potential.

In your professional Science Fictioneer's opinion, what will music be like in the next nine years? The next thirty-six?

Music - in its base nature - will not change so much. What changes is how it is made, and by whom. The amount of effort and equipment one needs to make music will become even less. More people will have the potential to express themselves. Brilliant ideas will be more likely to be manifested in actual media, but in the end it is still about the humans making it. So it will be moving ever closer to the actual personality of artists, and ever farther away from technical and financial abilities.

You've been "being very busy" of late with creative projects covering the entire spectrum: music, visual art, written works. What's next on the five-point compass?

If ever I knew. One thing seems certain: I am predictably unpredictable, even for myself.

A facet I haven't explored yet is video. Technically I now have everything I'd need for that at my fingertips. There are a lot of ideas and projects I have planned out in great detail. All that detail sometimes creates the "I should do this, I really should" effect. That little word "should" is a serious flow stopper. I should avoid it more.

I am an explorer, and I invite others to share what I find. If I knew beforehand, why would I go exploring? The last year of increased creative output has been an exploration of the fifth direction: inwards. All these facets are as new to me as they are to the world. I am discovering the artist Martin Spernau. He's been around earlier, but had disappeared from the world for some years. He came back a different and even deeper creator.