Sometimes the direction you pursue in life is preparing you for something else entirely. You make plans working toward a certain result, all the while unwittingly laying the groundwork for a new chapter you can't yet see. Seth Horvitz's plan was to become a composer and sound artist. That journey ended in techno.

There's a full-circle element here, because techno was precisely where Horvitz came from. In fact, Horvitz had planned to leave techno behind. A decade making the music as Sutekh ended in boredom. Questing after a new stage of life, the decision was made to study first the techniques underpinning the Western canon—think counterpoint, harmony and the like—then music's most radical expressions and the underlying structure of sound itself.

Horvitz's ears were changed studying electronic music and recording media at Mills College. The Oakland school's music department reads like an honour role of avant-garde icons (Pauline Oliveros, Maggi Payne and Robert Ashley have all been faculty members). Never again would Horvitz be able to un-hear the quivering vibrations of beating frequencies, the atomic symmetries underlying rhythm and pitch, the spectral glitter of complex overtones and the brain fuck of psychoacoustics. Understanding and exploring these phenomena were keys to becoming the composer Horvitz envisioned. They ultimately became the calling card of a new artistic persona: Rrose.

When the first Rrose releases appeared on Sandwell District in 2011, they both crystallised the techno zeitgeist and felt immediately timeless. Here was the size and power of natural forces coaxed into a dance music framework, huge and imposing yet devoid of aggression or manipulative intent. As years passed and techno adopted a self-consciously masochistic stance, Rrose's music only increased its solemn power, largely by staying the same, or "exploring a narrow area," as Horvitz puts it.

This is because Horvitz uses simple means to create results that play with our perceptions in profound ways. It's also because the music just barely betrays its human origins, seeming to have spawned spontaneously in a prehistoric cave rather than a modern studio. This combination—using sound's inherent qualities to play tricks on our ears while reducing the imprint of the artist's taste and ego on the music—gives things a monolithic significance.

When I visited Horvitz's studio late last year, we spoke mostly as if Rrose had never happened, imagining instead that Horvitz's vision of composing came true. This isn't to spite the techno fans understandably curious about the grand master's sound. But as Horvitz says, if you're interested in understanding the artist, you'd best understand their influences.

You had been making music for quite some time before going to Mills College. Was attending Mills something you had in the back of your mind for a long time?

There's a whole story behind it. I made electronic music for a long time and learned to DJ. I was pretty much self-taught. I always considered myself a DJ and techno musician who was interested in avant-garde and experimental music. From the beginning, I was super into that type of music, but more as a listener.

At a certain point I felt like I missed out on a proper music education. I started taking piano lessons when I was 30. I did it for about five years. I took it very seriously and started studying harmony and counterpoint. I'd take my textbooks and score paper on trips so I could do harmony exercises on the way. I was like someone with their crossword puzzles.

In my head, I knew this was preparing me to go back to school. If I was going to go back into a music program, even if I was going to study experimental music, I wanted to have that groundwork and understand the traditional way of doing things. I actually love classical music. Not all of it, but there are classical pieces I really love. You know, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms—although he's not that popular among techno musicians.

My interest in dance music was getting diluted. I thought techno was getting boring. I was trying to make music that was super, quote-unquote, "musical." I was trying to use melodies and chords. Eventually this led to me going to this masters program at Mills studying avant-garde and electronic music. I also continued to study some classical theory there, although they don't do that much of it. I did what I could.

I went into the program thinking this would be the final step of leaving club music behind and moving on to become a sound artist or composer. But when I finished the program, I ended up going back to making techno in a way that didn't really use any chords or melodies anymore. I learned about all the harmony stuff and how it works in order to leave it behind, or rather, to know what to avoid. Of course, I was also mostly studying avant-garde composers and trying to understand how sound works as a phenomenon.

How long was the program?

Two years.

Is it mostly to do with composers and whatever concepts inform their pieces? Or is it more getting taught the concepts, and then the composer's work illustrates them?

Mills is pretty unique in that it's really about what you want. Of course, everyone who goes into that program has to have some interest in experimental music. You're not going to go there just to refine your baroque piano technique. But if you want to incorporate that somehow, it's fine.

They assemble a group of students that are intentionally diverse in their interests, almost like a social experiment where you throw a bunch of interesting kids together who are all into different weird things to see what they want to do and how they collaborate. The faculty tends to support them on whatever journey they want to take.

There's a curriculum. You have to take certain courses. But even within those courses, there's a lot of freedom as far as what you want to pursue. You might have a whole course on a single composer. But a lot of them are based in composition, too, so you're working on your own music, getting feedback on it and collaborating with other students. There's a heavy focus on improvisation, too. Fred Frith was there for a very long time.

Amazing getting first-hand tutelage from someone like that.

Also Roscoe Mitchell from the Art Ensemble Of Chicago.

Mental. Name a more iconic duo.

It attracts a lot of students from the free improv world. But there are also a lot of people connected to early computer music. Chris Brown and John Bischoff were there. They were both some of the first composers to use networked systems in computer music.

Maggi Payne was there, too, right?

Yep, Maggi Payne, she was there. She's kind of semi-retiring now but she's super inspiring. She'd be teaching kids how to splice tape and how to understand the roots of how musique concréte was made, using microphones and studio techniques, stuff like that.

So there's a large degree of self-determination. What did you do with that freedom?

When I got there I wasn't sure exactly what I'd focus on. But I came across this James Tenney piece called "Spectral Canon For Conlon Nancarrow." It gave me a spark.

I was thinking, "OK, I've been studying piano for five years but I'm still not that good at playing it. What if I made music for computer controlled piano?" I saw a lot of potential in the simple idea of applying the harmonic series to player piano. I managed to contact Yamaha and got them to loan a Disklavier to Mills while I was there. The school was pretty happy that I arranged that. So they gave me a classroom-slash-studio for the Disklavier because it's a very expensive instrument. I had access to go in and work with it almost anytime I wanted to. So I decided to make that my main project. Another important early piece for me was was Ligeti's "Continuum." Do you know it?

That's the super-fast harpsichord piece? It's the B2 on a WERGO issue of "Requiem."

Yeah well I wrote a whole paper on it, analysing it measure by measure. I don't know how deep you want to go into this kind of thing.

We want to go all the way.

I did other courses where I had to compose electronic music and improvise and all that but my thesis ended up being these studies for automatic piano. So I developed all this work at Mills and my thesis compositions became the album on Richard Chartier's label Line. That's all from the thesis project.

When you explained before what interested you about the Tenney piano piece, you mentioned the harmonic series. For someone who's never heard of it, could you explain what it is and how it can be applied to music?

The harmonic series is just about the simplest thing that every two-year-old learns about. It's the sequence of numbers: one, two, three, four, five, six and so on. That's the harmonic series. But when you apply it to other things, you can generate all this complexity. When you think of it in the realm of sound, the way the harmonic series is usually described is by using the example of a vibrating string. If you have a string pulled tight between two points and then you pluck it, it will vibrate along its entire length. That's number one. This is definitely good to show with a diagram.

It will also vibrate with a division in the middle at double the speed of the first vibration. It will also vibrate at three times that base rate and four times and five times and so on. The loudness of those different vibrations will determine the quality of the sound.

So now we're getting to harmonics and overtones.

Right. Overtones and harmonics are related. Harmonics are kinds of overtones but overtones don't have to be harmonically related so they don't have to be whole number multiples. Another instrument I should mention that inspired me is called the Rhythmicon. Do you know it?

I think it's a primitive drum machine but I don't remember anything specific.

It's sometimes called the first drum machine, yes. It was invented by Leon Theremin. It was a little keyboard that had this ingenious mechanism of optical discs inside. The idea was to connect pitch and rhythm in an instrument. The lowest note will pulse at a certain rate, it's just a regular blip. If you play the next note up, it will pulse at twice that initial rate but also twice the frequency. The third note is blipping at three times the initial frequency and also three times the rate. If you hold them all down at the same time, you get this cascading effect. It doesn't sound very interesting but the idea behind it is really profound.

So you can hear how the pitches of the blips are related directly to the rhythms. The relationship between the pitches is the same as the relationship between the rhythms.

It's a big one—that pitch and rhythm are a continuum. If you slow down a pitch enough it becomes a pulse. If you speed up a rhythm enough it becomes a pitch.

Right, and I guess we'll get to that more directly if we talk about Stockhausen stuff. But the way the Rhythmicon works is fascinating, too. It shoots light through these discs with holes punched in them. I don't grasp how it works really but it's genius. But that concept, as you say, when it's applied to other things, it has so much potential for generating material.

I mean, the Rhythmicon touches on a blueprint we hear in a lot of the so-called minimal compositions coming from the States in the late '60s.

Minimal music often uses these simple polyrhythmic relationships. The Rhythmicon is a very strict demonstration of it.

Should we talk more specifically about the piano pieces now?

This feature could just be "Rrose presents player piano."

We'll get to techno eventually.

Here's one of the piano pieces I made, "Study No.4." This is probably the simplest of the pieces. It was one of the first ones I came up with. The original idea was to apply the harmonic series in the simplest way possible. But I was so blown away by these emergent cascading shapes that you hear when you have these harmonic polyrhythms playing against each other.

That whole concept of shapes emerging from the combination of other elements—that's something that comes up a lot in my techno work, too. I put a bunch of elements together, and if I hear something emerging out of those combinations of elements, that's where I try and investigate further. Instead of getting an idea and thinking, "I want to make something that sounds like this" and then figuring out how to make it, I'm putting a bunch of things in a pot and looking for some weird chemical reaction to follow. I'll use that as a guide for what I want to do with the sound rather than deciding where it should go from the beginning.

This piece demonstrates an emergent pattern very clearly. A lot of the piano pieces were based around one simple shape that was then modified in a very systematic step-wise way. The basic shape of this piece was a slow moving glissando starting from the top white note down to the bottom white note. Just each white key from top to bottom moving at a very steady rate. When the first glissando starts, another one also begins but moves twice as fast. Another one also starts at the same time moving three times as fast, and four times and five times all the way up to sixteen. When they start together, they're all beginning from the top white key. Then as they start to move down the keyboard they drift out of phase because one is moving at a certain rate, another is going twice as fast and so on. The slower one is going to take much longer to get to the bottom of the piano whereas the faster ones are going to go quickly.

When all 16 start at the same time, it's very dense because you hear all these notes at once. So I start everything very slow. As the faster glissandos fade away, everything speeds up. As it gets more sparse, it speeds up. In the second half of the piece, I do everything upside down and reversed. Everything converges and ends on the lowest end of the piano.

When I had the idea to do this, I had no idea what it was going to look like on the piano keys themselves. So when I watched the automatic piano playing it for the first time, I was amazed to see these cascading patterns forming on the keys. It looks like the notes are sweeping up and sweeping down when actually what you're seeing is just the interaction between all those shapes.

The thing I can compare it to is an LED sign. When you see an LED sign with scrolling text from a distance, you just see these words moving. But if you get up close to it, you see each light is just flashing off and on at a certain rate. Nothing's moving, it's just a bunch of lights flashing. When you step away, you have this illusion of movement.

There's something similar happening here and that's something that I also try and achieve in techno—finding those interactions where you step back and you're hearing something that's not really there. You brain is making connections to things that are emerging from the culmination of other elements.

For me, that's a very interesting philosophical question about existence. If you hear something as the result of the combination of things, is that something that really exists or is that an illusion? Maybe everything we experience in the world is somehow a culmination of elements that emerge from other things. That's a really profound area to explore for me.

We'll talk more specifically about this stuff in relation to techno later. Final question on this, and I'm deliberately asking this in a dumb way, but what underlying factors make those scores look beautiful to us? It looks like a Xenakis architecture drawing.

I have a little experience in graphic design. I tend to do all my own artwork and design and always have. For me, the visual element of this was pretty important from the beginning. The scores are really pretty but I created them in the dumbest way possible. I made the piano pieces in Logic using the MIDI piano roll view. I don't really know about advanced technical processes of visualising data. So I went into the piano roll and took screenshot after screenshot of the MIDI notes. Then I loaded those into Photoshop and made it high contrast so I could end up with dots on a black background.

As I was working on the pieces, I'd zoom in and out of those images—I was partly informed by how the score looked. But I actually made a couple piano pieces that were beautiful to look at but sounded not at all interesting. I was trying to find pieces where you saw something emerge in the visual display of the notes and you also heard it. And you also saw it as the piano keys moved, too. When all those three things converged, I felt like it was a good piece.

What I meant was that the underlying patterns and mathematics have a symmetry and pattern to them that we find attractive.

I wanted to design the scores so that they didn't have any embellishment. The beauty of the patterns themselves is what's important. I tried to find a way to represent those dots on the grid in a way that showed how beautiful the shapes were without interpreting them.

I've seen lot of audio visual performances where there's a really complex relationship between the music and how it's turned into visual data. It loses something when it's too complex. What I love is when you feel there's this really essential, one-to-one relationship between different senses, where they feel inseparable, where it doesn't feel like someone added their style to it. That stuff really bugs me.

This almost reminds me of the Charlemagne Palestine ethos, which is another thing we need to get to—you're more reporting phenomenon you've observed rather than trying express an internal quality of your own. Maths didn't decide to be beautiful, it just is.

In a way, I don't feel like I can totally take credit for this stuff because it's a process of discovery. In that James Tenney piece, I think it was described by someone else as more like a fact of nature than a piece of music, and I love that idea. You're demonstrating something that was already there. Of course, when you present it as a piece of music you inevitably have artistic decisions to make. But really putting the music before your own emotions or feelings… there's always going to be some part of yourself that you can't separate from it. So there's a tension there but I like this idea of trying to put the music before the person who makes it. The music is kind of its own thing.

I guess if you ever needed a sense of justification to warrant making music, revealing nature's underlying structures with sound is right up there.

But that's what we're all doing anyway. Where do you want to pull back and where do you want to put that line? I like to think of the music as a kind of living entity itself that I can observe and communicate with instead of an expression of my own creative impulses. You always admit that you can't get rid of creative impulses being part of it, but that attempt to distance yourself, that's the approach I try and use.

Lets talk about Strumming Music and Charlemagne Palestine. This is another piece and composer whose work you studied closely and performed.

That piece was originally performed on two pianos in the '70s. He would do it with a piano on each side, one hand on each piano. This festival asked him if he wanted to try and do a version for two pianists with four hands instead of two. I don't know if you know the story of when I first met him. You know Strumming Music?

Yeah.

I decided I wanted to play it when I was at Mills. There's a really beautiful wooden student union type building there with high ceilings and nice acoustics. There's a piano that sits in the corner and hardly anyone ever touches it. I used to go and play it and I thought Strumming Music would sound so good in here.

Charlemagne sent me this really long email after I first contacted him about it. It was really emphatic and he'd say things like, "Come to Brussels and I will initiate you into the Strumming tradition!" with a million exclamation points. He doesn't take himself too seriously. He understands that he's being kind of ridiculous. But he also understands that what he's doing is truly profound at the same time.

What makes it profound? Or maybe describing what Strumming is would be a better place to start.

It's about really getting inside of the sound in a way that's not intellectual, that's purely physical. His method of playing the piano, which he calls Strumming, is just alternating notes between two hands. That's all you do. And choosing which combinations of notes you want to play. So it can be seen as sort of primitive, you're just banging on the piano in a sense. But it's about discovering what happens when all the frequencies and overtones are interacting. And treating each interval as a universe to occupy and explore.

We later kept in contact over email but not very much. Then a couple years ago, someone asked if I'd want to perform something for piano as Rrose at this festival in Milan. I thought it'd be great to do Strumming Music again. They knew about my past with the piano. So I contacted Charlemagne about that, and this festival had also asked if he'd want to do one of his old pieces. So he asked if I'd do it with him. That's how the album came to being.

You said it seems primitive, the Strumming technique. But what are you listening out for when you're performing a piece like that? Despite its apparent simplicity, there'd be ways of playing that Charlemagne would say are incorrect. I imagine the best Strummers are those who are listening out for the right things.

Right. I think one of the keys is to not listen to the note you're playing. If you're playing E and B together, don't listen for the E and the B. Those are the base frequencies. When you hit a note on the piano, you hear a note that's associated with a specific root frequency, but there's all this other complex frequency content above the fundamental note that reinforces our perception of a piano note playing a specific given note. So when you play two notes together repeatedly back and forth, all that complex frequency content above the fundamental and the overtones are sort of bouncing off each other. They're interacting.

Because the piano is tuned in a way that isn't pure, because it's equal tempered, you hear these beating patterns that I demonstrate in the video below, especially in the upper overtones. So listening to all that stuff that's happening in a vertical sense more than a horizontal sense, that's part of the key to Strumming. Listening vertically, listening to the whole spectrum and almost forgetting about the note that's at the base of it.

It's interesting you mention that the upper harmonics are where the action is. Imagine all the weird shit happening above our hearing threshold. We're probably missing the best bit.

There's all kinds of weird stuff up there. Playing a single a piano note, you have a physical medium, a string with metal wrapped around it. When it's hit by a hammer, all types of complex stuff happens. There's an element of noise in there, there's all sorts of unpredictable behaviour happening, just from playing one note on the piano. I could play one note on the piano for an hour repeatedly and hear different things in it.

That's what I love about Charlemagne's approach. It's about the sound of the piano but it's also about this physical engagement with the instrument, which is something that I miss in my piano music because it's just about listening. This piece and the Tenney piece are about a direct physical connection with an instrument. The instrument becomes a real extension of your physical body.

The Tenney piece you're referring to here is Having Never Written A Note For Percussion. I was going to mention this next because I imagine the performance technique and what you're listening or feeling for a probably pretty similar to the Charlemagne piece. That you're concerned primarily with overtone content.

In the Tenney piece, you're just letting the gong speak. The gong kind of plays itself. A gong is way more complex frequency-wise than a piano. On a piano, you hear a note very clearly when you press a key, whereas a gong is inharmonic like a bell. It's very hard to hear a note, to pick out a pitch. Have you seen the score to the piece?

It's a roll going from pppp to ffff and back again I think.

Right, so there's very little specified. The way I interpret it is, the performer shouldn't be improvising or trying to make any specific sound. It's just about going from the most quiet to the loudest point in the most gradual way you can. The instrument itself will start to do crazy things. You don't need to make any decisions except to play as gradually as you can.

I guess Bob Ostertag is the last piece of the pre-Rrose puzzle.

That's a good story, too. Bob Ostertag is kind of the reason I started the Rrose project. He came to Mills while I was there to do a workshop. I knew of his work and liked his music and I'd seen him play before so I was really interested. The workshop was talking a lot about the influence of technology on people's listening habits and how our preferences have developed, he would say, to conform to our exposure to technology.

The example he referred to a lot was how young people seem to prefer a precise, computer-timed pulse over a more human type of pulse created by a drummer for example. I think there's some truth to what he said, but I sensed this very thinly veiled criticism of electronic dance music in what he was saying. He said things like, "I don't know anybody under 40 who likes electronic dance music." Well, there are DJs who started this music who are well over 40 now that are still super into it.

I felt like I needed to challenge him on that. We ended up sort of becoming friends and talking a lot about this stuff. I challenged him on what techno is and what it could be. He was intrigued enough, or challenged in a way that made him want to try to make music with a rigid pulse that he thought was actually good. Or to make something that would maybe count as techno. He was working with a big Buchla 200e system at the time. He started making material and he'd send me examples of what he was working on and ask, "Does this sound like techno? Would people dance to this?"

This was after I'd finished Mills and I was trying to be a composer, just figuring out what I was going to do next. When I heard the stuff he sent me I was like, "It's not really techno but I could probably do a little bit to it to turn it into techno." He liked the idea of me kind of remixing it. So I started working with the audio he'd sent me and that inspired me to make techno again. I wasn't really making techno at the time, I was busy trying to be a sound artist or something.

That material became the Motormouth Variations. Also one of the tracks off my first Sandwell District release was made with his sounds, too. He didn't like that track though so I didn't include it on the album. But when I'd made all that material, that's when I realised I needed a new artist name. I knew this was the beginning of a new project.

I sent the music to Juan Mendez (Silent Servant), who was an old friend of mine. I knew that he was still really heavily involved in the techno scene whereas I had drifted away from it. I sent him the stuff, not asking him to release it, just asking what I should do with it. He played it for Regis and they were like, "We want to release it." That was before I even came up with the name Rrose. So it all came to be around the Bob Ostertag collaboration.

It's funny how these things work themselves out. You were going along doing your own thing without a specific goal and then the next decade of your life randomly opened up in front of you.

Yes, exactly.

A link we're trying to make here is that some of the concepts you learned at Mills can be put to good use in techno. Do you think Ostertag likes your techno because he recognises underlying auditory phenomena from experimental music?

I think he likes the fact that there are subtle changes in the sound. I don't think he likes loopy techno. He's not into this incessant loop thing. He thinks that's pretty boring. But I think he can hear that sonic complexity in what I'm doing. Also one of the things that he understands now is the kind of sexual energy created by this music.

Recently, Bob told me he helped organise a gay sex party and there was an "Rrose room" that just had a playlist of my tracks on loop. And he said it was the room everyone wanted to be in. He called me after that and was like, "OK, I want to figure out how to make music like this, let's do another project together."

How did your approach to making techno change following the Mills experience?

There's one aspect I mentioned before, which is that I learned what I needed to leave behind. I didn't need this reliance on naive, melodic content, or to refer to song structure. Of course, you can make great techno that is based around song form, chords and melodies. But I realised that's not what I wanted out of it. So the first thing was figuring out what I needed to leave out of it.

For me, the Mills experience was about refining my direction. I didn't know it was going to lead to techno. I always admired composers and artists who could find a really narrow area to work in but I always felt that wasn't my personality. I felt like I needed the freedom to experiment, to try out all kinds of things stylistically. I felt like the Sutekh project had branched out in too many directions.

So I found a narrower place to focus my attention. There was also this profound realisation that you can find all kinds of diversity and complexity in a narrow area. I also have these competing aesthetic views. One is like, I love when DJs play whatever they want and clear a dance floor and really mix it up. I totally appreciate that. Or I can criticise a DJ who's super monotonous and narrow. But there's also a way to approach a narrow area and find something interesting in it.

Studying things like James Tenney's music and Charlemagne Palestine, Stockhausen, working with the faculty at Mills, I think it was more about training as a listener than as a composer. I don't necessarily apply so many compositional techniques in the Rrose stuff, but the way I hear music and sound is much deeper after going through that program. So the way I can evaluate my own music when I'm making it goes much deeper.

There are certain things I learned about sound and things like overtones and the harmonic series that I do incorporate in techno. But the more important thing I took from the program was this refined ear of hearing the subtleties in sound. The more complex music you can dive into and listen to and experience and understand, then the more refined your ear becomes and the more subtlety you're in tune with when you're listening.

The next question then needs to be: what is your narrow area?

The narrow field is putting sound first. Then there's the thing I talked about before about creating music that is its own entity, that exists outside of myself to some extent. It's like putting a chemical reaction in motion and watching what takes place. So the approach changed from putting personal expression first to discovering things about sound. Now I consciously work with very basic building blocks of sound.

If I'm working with a synthesiser, for example, the sort of thing I do now is turn up an oscillator and listen to it and then do something really simple or subtle to it. I try to avoid building complex systems and instead try and get complex results from simple systems.

I might have arrangements that are very detailed, but not in the sense of editing the rhythms and cutting bars out here and there and creating complex song forms. The complexity instead is in the individual sounds and how they develop. But rhythmically, I went from doing a lot of editing and being associated with things like microhouse. Now I use really simple building blocks for rhythm that interact with the body, that lend themselves more to this hypnotic, meditative experience rather than an intellectual experience.

I don't want people to listen to the music and think, "I don't get it." I want them to get it but maybe not understand how to explain why they get it. Confusion that doesn't seem out of your grasp. I don't want it to go over your head. It's something you feel that you get on this primal level that you just might not be able to put words to.

I take it you're working in an intuitive mindset rather than being like, "A bit more of the fourth harmonic here is going to create this type of auditory effect."

Definitely. It's very intuitive but informed by knowledge of complex things. Are you familiar with spectralist composers?

Mostly the Romanians rather than the French.

I'm really fascinated by that whole area but it's not the way I compose at all. That's a very scientific way of composing where you take, say, an acoustic recording and then you create all these analyses of the frequencies and then recompose based on those frequencies. You're really precisely composing with those frequency components.

I said this before, but it's like creating a magic potion where I'm putting a bunch of simple stuff in a pot, then watching a reaction take place and observing and reacting to it. I'm heavily informed by my knowledge of all this stuff but I don't apply it in a strict scientific sense.

When you're making your potion, what are some of the ingredients that set off the reaction?

Some of the concepts we mentioned before: microtones, overtones, these elements of sound that aren't part of the base pitches that you hear. I'm also interested in slow and patient changes. Thinking about time and how our perception of something changes if it's happening slowly versus quickly and exploring where those thresholds of perception lie. I change a setting a little bit and find that something has taken on a new identity or something emerges from that that I didn't expect. We're trying to coax out emergent shapes. If I get a few elements together and something emerges, that's what I latch on to.

I do achieve those things with some similar techniques. I'm kind of addicted to notch filters. That's a personal aesthetic thing. I love the way a dense sound changes when you have a notch filter moving through it and carving out frequencies. It reminds me of the feeling of when an airplane passes. It almost makes you feel like the sound is in your head. I also like achieving a sense of spatialisation without using any spatialisation tools. So it feels like sounds are occurring in a geometric, three-dimensional space without artificially creating one.

Overall it's about generating a perception that the things you hear are not necessarily the sources that were creating them. I also play with very close phase relationships a lot, especially working with lots of sounds that are similar but slightly out of phase with one another. I do a lot of things like copy and paste the same sound many times and make subtle changes to each one of those copies to see how they interact.

The idea of feedback is really important, too. Creating a chain of effects where they're feeding back into each other in a way that's kind of unpredictable. Certain sounds are going into one effect that's going to another effect that's going back into another channel through another chain and so on. I made a whole track recently that was basically just a bass pulse triggering all these feedback effects chains.

I also try and avoid the "here's my drum machine, here's my drum loop with my kick and hi-hat and here's my synth sound, and here's my atmospheric pad sound, and now I'm arranging my song" type of approach. I try to really steer clear of that way of producing dance music. I start with very simple components and the structure is all about how they can morph over time in this gradual sense.

Depending on how the track comes out, sometimes I might listen to it and feel like it needs some break or change that's planned out for a certain point. Then I'll go and tweak the structure and plan it out. So it's not like I never do that. But I feel really satisfied when I can make a track that has almost none of that planning of arrangement, where the emotional weight of it and feeling of tension comes from the sound and material itself. Again, I like this term "fact of nature," where you don't feel like you're hearing a track somebody made. You feel like you're looking at a waterfall or something.

You said the magic word, so it would be remiss of me not to ask about the "Waterfall" synth sound. I know it was a long time ago.

That was made with Razor. You know the one?

Yeah, Errorsmith's synth.

It's an amazing synth because it has this insane spectrum of overtones. It sounds sort of digital in a way and people like to use it for these big dubstep sounds because it's such a huge sound. I recorded a half-bar loop from Razor when I was working on another idea. It was a really good little half-bar loop. That's the entire basis of "Waterfall." I wanted to go back and turn that loop into a track so ideally you'd load the patch up in Razor again rather than being stuck with an audio clip. But I couldn't get it quite right in the synth again so I made the whole track using just the half-bar loop with an additional filter to it. I didn't use the built-in stuff in Razor.

Turning to the new album, the opening sounds of "Bandage" stood out to me as a sort of typical Rrose audio illusion that seems simple enough to deconstruct.

I made that track a while ago and was never really happy with how it started. It originally began with these piercing high frequency sounds slowly fading in. I worked a long time trying to figure out a better way to do it. One day that idea you mention came out. It was something pretty simple though, just two tracks auto panning and slightly detuned.

Like I've mentioned, a lot of these techniques are pretty simple but it's about finding just the right place for a given parameter. When that panning and phasing relationship started emerging, I knew that was the right spot. It was doing something to me, the way it was oscillating. But if I turn one of the parameters a tiny bit, it might not have that feeling at all. It's not always obvious where the right setting lies. Sometimes I spend hours trying to decide if that's really the right spot for a parameter. But in that case, I remember once that started happening that I knew that's what was right for the beginning of that track. It was doing something that was interesting psychoacoustically but I didn't conceive it in a technical way so much as an experiential way.

What if you're interested in creating psychoacoustic effects in your music but you don't have knowledge of the physical components that generate them? On second thought, that sounds like a Trojan horse wording of a "how to sound like Rrose"-style question. There are hordes of techno producers who'd like that shortcut. They've probably already busted out the notch filter.

I think I would tell them not to listen to my music. Instead, listen to the music that I have been inspired by. I think it's always great when you want to make music that sounds like someone you admire, and I've experienced this, too. But it's good to see what inspired them because nobody comes out of the blue. If you just emulate what they've done you'll end up with something more like a copy. But if you actually make an attempt to understand what inspired them, then you can take the foundation of that and move it into another direction.