Is the music scene changing for the better, for the individual musician?

J.G.: No, not for the better. For the worse, actually. It depends on how you view the death of copyright. I think that there is an upcoming generation that expects music for free. With the way music is disseminated and used even, is there even going to be a generation for whom music is the central core to their life? I think it has stopped. I think that music has become marginalized. It is just another commodity, sidestepped by the Internet and video games and stuff like that.

Is there too much of it?

J.G.: Too much music? Yeah, I think so. It has become devalued by its accessibility and the accessibility of the medium. There is too much crap out there and people's expectations have been greatly lowered. I think the media has really narrow-cast to people. No wonder everyone is losing interest because nothing seems to, you know, it is so hard for things to slip through the cracks. It is so true of anything you pick up, including publications. It is really hard to get any information out there. You might pick up any ten magazines and you know that this month that this person has a solo album coming out, this band has a new album out...blah, blah, blah. Where will you find out about other things? And these ten magazines are going to hammer you over the head with those two things, and next month it will be another three things. I mean, how much do you really need to know about the White Stripes?

You can only read the same recycled press release so many times.

J.G.: Yeah. And it is so frustrating to an artist like myself who is putting out quite a lot of stuff that I consider to be quite important -- of course, it is really important to me, it is my stuff -- and then you get written up like, uh... [laughs]: "J. G. Thirlwell has been quietly squirreled away, producing these albums." Yeah, I'm not quietly squirreled away by choice. It's because they deem not to fucking cover it.

How has Manorexia been doing?

J.G.: It does okay, considering it is just for the people who really want it.

When you first released it, I'm sure the core audience quickly snapped it up. Has it been selling well since then?

J.G.: Well, I don't really promote it or anything. It just trickles out there. I only did like a thousand of them. No, I did 1500. And there are only a few left. And for the next run, I'll do a 1000. When those are gone, it's gone. I'm doing another Manorexia record next -- I see it as a triumvirate -- and then I might do a limited edition boxed set which would actually go into retail.

Was the Baby Zizanie project with Jim Coleman always a live project or did it come out of a studio environment?

J.G.: No, it was always a live project.

Just you and him doing dueling laptops.

J.G.: Yes, just laptops and some other small pieces of machinery. But there is a third person who provides the visual element. The visuals are an integral component of the Zizanie experience. We did a small European tour earlier this year and we took another guy with us named Owen Bush. He had two other laptops with him that were running applications up on the big screen behind us. He also took an audio feed and manipulated that in real-time as well, the visuals reacting with what we were doing live.

The last few shows were with Vicki Bennett who has a project called People Like Us. She provided the visuals -- more of a video mixing kind of way, but with her source material. We're going to do a European tour in November with her doing the visuals as well as her own set of material as People Like Us.

How much of what you do is improvised and how much is planned in advance?

J.G.: We've got a loose framework in place. We know what applications we're going to be switching in and out of, a tempo map, and certain sounds that we are going to start with. Then, we go from there. [Laughs] Sometimes it is successful, sometimes it isn't. Usually if the spirit is right, it can be really magical. At the same time, you're leaving yourself wide open to it being not so magical. We're throwing that element of chance in there and we've surprised ourselves with some of the things which have come out of it -- from making up things on the spot. It's a real interesting way to work.

It evolves also along with whatever technology that you are using. If you take out four sounds, say, and put in five more, you totally change the whole thing. I like a lot of laptop music, but I always thought it suffered in the visual presentation, so we do provide that aspect for you as well.

[Laughs] So it is not just two guys on stage, hunched over their screens.

J.G.: Again, it is an atmospheric, cinematic thing. But it still grows in intensity. Sometimes it is beat-driven, sometimes it is not. It was essentially conceived as a performance piece so the recordings of it are going to be snapshots of time, as opposed to the other way round.

Is it loop driven?

J.G.: Sometimes it has loops in it, yeah. Sometimes it has programming in it. Sometimes it has stuff in it that has been snatched on the fly, manipulated and mixed in live. It's probably gone through its first version now which we'll document with this Italian vinyl release. We'll probably have a whole different sound the next time we do it.

Different software? Different sources?

J.G.: Different pieces of music. Maybe different pieces of software, too. I don't know. You know, I actually need to get my laptop stable. I've had it crash on stage, which is why we have these fall-back pieces on stage. "Yeah, keep it going while I reboot here." I have this sampler on-stage where I can create things on the fly -- segues -- while things on the laptop are opening and closing.

Right. You mentioned in the beginning of our conversation that you were adding sounds to this German project. Were you just adding textures? I'm not familiar with Rotoscope.

J.G.: Well, I don't really know much about them either. [Laughs] I got this rhythm track and on top of that they want me to do what I do. I'm putting a bunch of vocals on one of them with no extra sounds, one vocal on another one with a bunch of sounds. Then I'll send them off. "Here you go, here's the pile." I got the backing track as an MP3 -- I just downloaded it -- and put it into my Logic program and have been overdubbing into that. I'll burn my overdubs onto a CD and send them that -- so they have something with better sound quality -- and they can assemble it over there. It's kind of a quickie thing. It's kind of an interesting project. Caspar Brötzmann is supposed to be playing on it.

So it's not a remix then.

J.G.: Not that I know of. I think there is a full album, though I don't know how song based the rest of the stuff is. I'm not sure.

How different is this from process from an actual remix project?

J.G.: Well, the artist there has decided at that point and time what the definitive version of the song is going to sound like. That is your departure point. This was an unfinished song that I was finishing in any way that I see fit. In a remix, they've already made their choice. If I'm asked to remix something now, they'll ask me, "Okay, what parts of the song do you want?" Sometimes I only want the lead vocal, sometimes the lead vocal and drums, sometimes I don't want anything -- I'll just sample off the CD and fill it out from that. Sometimes I'll want the whole thing separated out into a Logic file or I'll have them transfer 24-track two inch multitrack to an ADAT. It really depends on the project.

Where it goes and where I take it, well, I'll play around with things and usually something will hit. It will be like the little "Eureka!" moment and then it becomes clear what direction I want to take it in. Really, the avenues you can take it are pretty limitless. The most recent remix I did was for this French guy Norscq and it ended up as sounding a bit like this big band acid jazz type of thing. But I could have made it into this stripped down minimal glitch thing or this ambient thing. Any number of directions.