I wonder how they would react to something like Symbiotics.

Justin: God, it would probably just send them to sleep. "Ah, this is boring..." People are looking for quick thrills and I don't think any of my music gives that sort of quick thrill.

The Symbiotics release was a full-on collaboration between Techno Animal and Porter Ricks. How did that come about?

Justin: Initially we were going to make all these tunes together but we ended up doing them separately. We did each have the samples [from the other band]. We exchanged a lot of samples and hard disk stuff and consequently each built X number of tunes, really. Even with the very few samples that we exchanged I still think it sounds quite collaborative -- a whole instead of two artists. People who hear it say that it sounds more conceptual than just two bands putting tunes together.

If you're familiar with the other works, you can definitely hear where Porter Ricks overlays Techno Animal and vice versa.

Justin: Exactly.

I notice that the instrumental tracks on The Brotherhood of the Bomb very clearly fall into the category of "this is what we did after that collaborative album." That same sense of dub, that same sense of space, water, that kind of...

Justin: Deepness. Exactly. That's what we call those tunes actually: deep. And the whole of Symbiotics is all about being humongously deep. It sounds submerged with huge waves. Again, though, very transcendental. Very high as well. But it is so fucking deep. That stuff really works on a dance floor with a huge sound system where it is so fat that you get lost in the frequencies. Symbiotics is a record I'm really proud of, actually. It does fail in some places, but I think generally the whole vibe off it is fantastic. Some of the tracks on the latest Techno Animal album are all about furthering that sort of sound. Making Symbiotics was really inspirational and me and Kevin realized that we wanted to do more stuff in that vein. It was just a matter of figuring out how to get it into the more normal Techno Animal sort of sound. At the moment, we talking about how to separate some of these sorts out.

I was thinking now that you've got hip-hop vocals in Techno Animal, where does that leave Ice?

Justin: Ice, now, is virtually folded because, well, actually there isn't a label out there that wants to do Ice, really. [Laughs] That is a problem a lot of the time, actually, with our music: finding someone who wants to release it. People at labels know there isn't going to be a lot of sales from our stuff and, at that point, it is just a matter of having a lot of passion for our music. Which is great, because it is outside any commercial bullshit then. You know that these people recognize the fact that they aren't going to be selling millions of copies, and it's all about the music then. Which is all we're about, obviously.

Is Avalanche Inc. then the medium through which you can bring about these sorts of releases yourself?

Justin: To some extent. But that's been sort of a failure as well. [Laughs] We have an online shop where we were selling copies of Godflesh's Messiah and the Zonal record as well. But it's just become too much work for us basically; we were literally trying to run it out of my house with my friends. Between trying to do it all ourselves and getting people to do things on a personal level like pressing CD-Rs as opposed to getting a proper pressing done, it's just too much of a struggle. It's just turned into a bit of a nightmare. We're trying to take it to the next level and having this label a bit more professionally run where we can properly distribute them outside the Internet. It was just a cozy little idea in the beginning. We thought it was quite punk, you know, we could do it on our own terms without using anything really. This was still quite anarchistic. But then you realize you are just playing the game again, really, and you might as well just get in there and let people buy it normally.

This leads into your relationship with Manifold Records. They're obviously very small and very specialized. They have notes on their website that you have several projects in the pipeline with them. A Final album with their Desolat label. Cylon stuff with the Economy sublabel.

Justin: The great thing about doing stuff like that with tiny labels is actually what it is all about for me. It's just about honesty and music. The underground obviously holds that true spirit of independence. And that's where I come from, really, and that's what I set about to do: to selfishly make music that I enjoy. The whole careerist aspect was just something that... I mean, even the Napalm Death album was purely an accident. I never expected that record to sell any copies. I never expected a Godflesh record to sell. I never thought any of these things would ever be what they have become. It was all a bit of a surprise, actually. And, when these things get out of your hands a bit, you are constantly looking to be grounded again, or constantly looking to have that same control that you had when you were selling a couple thousand records. It's much more personal then.

It's not like I want to stay rigidly underground. I want my music to be exposed to everyone in the world. But there is something a lot more honest about the way things work on this level, really. And labels like Manifold are all run by very honest individuals who are doing this for the right reasons. That's something that I have much more respect for than most out there at the end of the day. It's just necessary for me to keep working with labels like that. It really is. That's the sort of label that I would like to see more of: independent, outside the whole game, and they don't play by those same rules.

How do you decide when you are working on something which project it belongs to? Looking at the wide variety of music that you've produced over the years and discounting the basic business of selling the stuff, how do you decide what you are working on day-to-day? Do you work on a single project until it is done, or do you do things piecemeal?

Justin: I do things in pockets of time, actually. I'll have two to four works and I think, "Alright, I'm doing this during that period." And I need to be done for this label at this time. Sometimes it is good to have some -- even though I despise pressure in any kind of musical context -- it's good to have some deadlines. Obviously, with Godflesh, this is not hard because Godflesh is the most pressurized thing that I do since it is the largest selling thing. That has actual pressure. You know exactly when you're doing it. You know exactly what you are doing. You have a routine. Everything else I choose when I do it, and I set about it in a very precise way.

Kevin and I live about 150 miles apart -- he lives in London, I live in the Midlands -- and he'll travel up to my studio and we know exactly what we're doing. The label has said we can do this or that, and we say, "Okay, we can allocate this much time to that project." We'll do that for three weeks or something. Once he's gone, I kick straight into something else.

I pretty much work, well, it's more than my life, if you know what I mean. Sometimes I feel like I do things in my fucking sleep because the music is in every living, breathing moment.

Looking back to the years between 1996 and 1999 -- the period between Songs of Love and Hate and Us and Them -- looking at your discography, you can kind of see that was the period of the side projects. Was the fact that Us and Them wasn't coming out push you in other directions? You've said in the past that there were some difficulties with your label, Earache, at that time.

Justin: A lot of stuff went on in during that period, a lot of strange stuff. I had quite an identity crisis with Godflesh during that period. Definitely. I think that was because I had become so absorbed with electronic music during that time that rock -- guitar music -- just wasn't exciting me. It still doesn't that much now, but at least now I think there are some people doing things that are interesting. All I was drawn to then was electronic music, whether it be minimal or minimal techno or jungle or hip-hop. That's where I was getting all my energies from, all my inspirations. I wasn't hearing anything done with a guitar that was exciting me in any respect. Besides some of the very minimalist things like the Red House Painters. Stuff like that. It's totally out of the realm of what people think I would listen to. People think I must listen to headbanging music all day. [Laughs] Which I quite obviously don't.

It seems that Us and Them wasn't so much a Godflesh album as a Godflesh album influenced by all the other things that you had been working on.

Justin: Yeah. That's absolutely true. Us and Them was made over a two year period, and obviously I wasn't working on it solid through that time. I was doing so many other things in between that it was quite exciting to do that album. I think that album is a failure -- well, I think most of the music I make is a failure [laughs] -- it is a quite a failure, but it was an interesting experiment. I would be making all this other stuff and then going into the studio and doing Godflesh. Then I'd leave Godflesh and go do other things again. A lot of Godflesh records are recorded and mixed in one big block and you very much focus on the task at hand. Whereas with Us and Them, it was really done as I fucking felt like it. Consequently, it sounds like that: it sounds like it never really focuses. I think it is an interesting album because of that, but it is so unfocused that you can tell that it was made in really mad sort of periods. It's a really fascinating way of making a record, actually. I always think that I'm going to come up with the best way of making an album and I never do. [Laughs] I'm always searching for it. "This'll really set me up." And then: no.