BT: Interview with a Dance Music Pioneer

BT has been a major force in electronic music since the early 90s, when he began creating the wildly innovative sounds that have since become known as trance music. His debut album on the Perfecto Label, "Ima," impressed audiences with its fusion of New Age mood music and the hypnotic pulse of the dance floor. BT (a.k.a. Brian Transeau) moved on to create dazzling remixes of tracks by Seal, Madonna, Sarah McLachlan, and DJ Sasha. These early works quickly established him as the progenitor of an entirely new type of dance music.

BT’s later works, "ESCM" and "Movement in Still Life," reveal further development of his signature celestial style of progressive house. Straddling the line between mainstream and underground cultures, he continues to build his legacy by creating exciting new sounds and plunging into new musical territory. In September of this year, BT released "Rare and Remixed," a retrospective of the first ten years of his career. He has since been touring throughout Europe and the United States.

Chris Gill, former editor of "Remix" magazine, had the pleasure of sitting down to talk with BT in the M-Audio booth at a recent NAMM show. We’re pleased to share the results with you.

GILL: So, what have you been up to lately?

BT: Last year was an absolutely insane year for me. I did three films in a span of ten months. We added it up, and in a ten-month period we’ve done 293 finished pieces of music. I've been doing a lot of film stuff over the last year and it's a really rewarding thing. It's different to working on songs for an album. Working to picture requires a certain kind of thing; you're complimenting someone else's thing as opposed to creating something from scratch. I wrote 80 and 90 piece sections for "The Fast and The Furious," "Driven," and "Zoolander." I did some songs for "Rollerball" and I've been working on a track with Peter Gabriel.

GILL: Looking forward, where are you headed musically?

BT: I’ve been listening to a lot of the nu skool R&B stuff—guys like The Neptunes and Timberland, and some of the things that feature really prominent double-time, half-time sort of rhythms reminiscent of drum and bass, but different at the same time. The American thing is a very specific sound and there's going to be a lot of influence of that sort of rhythm programming on this record.

GILL: You’ve also done two titles for the EastWest sample CD library.

BT: When I was working on those three films and the ones that I did before those like "Under Suspicion" and "Go," I built these massive sound libraries. I figured that I'm only going to use these sounds once, so why not take them, chuck them in Infinity, do nice cross loops on them and give them to other people so they could use them in a different context.

"Breakz from the Nu Skool" is literally 80 percent Reason breaks. The coolest thing is that it's sample accurate. So if you want to take two breakbeats, line them up and they're at the same tempo or even if they're not, all you have to do is put them in any audio program and cut them and it’s flawless.

GILL: I understand that Reason is turning your computer into your primary instrument?

BT: I am a huge user of this program. I was one of the people waiting, sending e-mails: ‘I want a Beta please, I'm dying,’ you know. It’s just such an exciting program and it's unique on so many different levels. I treat it as an incredible writing template. I've built this massive sound library from all the different beat-box machines and samples that I've collected over the years. I’ve got almost a 30GB library for Reason now. When I was working on "The Fast and the Furious," I can think of probably 30 film cues where Reason was the basic rhythmic force. I'd sit down and say, ‘we need something that feels this way, a nu skool breakbeat track that's driving and compliments what's happening here! Five minutes with ReDrum, a couple compressor modules, some ReCycle files and you're good. It’s great—I love it!

GILL: How are you using Reason’s sequencer?

BT: I’ve figured out some really cool things. I've been using the Matrix step sequencers on really high resolution and I’ve been automating the resolution and doing things like gating the samplers. You can get stuttering effects almost like real-time granular synthesis because it goes up to 128th note resolution. So you double the tempo—say you're working on a track that's 100 bpm—if you program it at 200 and then put the resolution of one of those matrix sequencers up to 128, you're actually getting 256 worth. You can make things that sound like rain clouds. I'm doing some pretty tweaked out stuff with it too—I'm definitely hitting tab a lot and patching stuff on the back of the Reason rack.

It's just amazing, and I love using it with the Oxygen8 too. My new favorite thing in the world is busting out my titanium laptop and my Oxygen8 on a plane. I sit there and I get thirty Reason files rendered. I just go for it.

GILL: Would we have heard any of that yet?

BT: At least some of the beats on everything I work on have come from Reason—usually all of them. I just use it constantly. My friends will see me using the compressors and they're like, ‘why don't you render them and pull it in’ and I'm like ‘no, but these sound ghetto in a good way.’ They remind me of 160 compressors, and I think it's a real specialty thing. I think it signifies an ushering in of a new era of looking at software as a means to an end. There comes a lot of responsibility with that too. I see kids just learning programs like Reason, but it's important to balance that with having some aptitude and breadth of musical knowledge beyond just programming beats. But I love it—it's a phenomenal tool.

GILL: Have you heard anything on the street that's been really cool?

BT: Absolutely. There's this kid that posts on one of our web sites named Danny Patterson. He's 15. He sent me a CD and sent a CD to my managers. I listened to it, and I thought it was absolutely incredible, like it should be out. He's a walking ad, you know what I mean? Here's a kid that lives in his parents' bedroom and he's making rocking progressive awesome new breakbeat tracks with Reason. I listened to it and I didn't know at first that he doesn’t have any keyboards. I think that things like this are so important for the development of music and keeping things moving forward. It's cool to see people using tools like that responsibly.

GILL: How do you make the transition from doing so much behind-the-scenes work to performing live with a band?

BT: Well, I'm kind of an anomaly amongst people that do electronic music in that I've been playing in bands since I was a kid. Performing is something I really enjoy doing and playing with a band is just an extension of that. You get a vibe off other people and there's room for error. That's what I love about playing with a band because when it goes well, it goes really well. And when it doesn't, you teeter the line at all times. It keeps it scary in a good way because I've been doing shows so long now. 10,000 people is like ‘whatever, let's go,’ so it keeps it scary in a good way.

I want to try running some Reason stuff live. I've gotten really good at muting and unmuting and doing stuff on the fly, especially with the controllers on the Oxygen8. I think it would be a lot of fun to have that live on stage. Being able to screw up is a luxury, and I really enjoy that. The possibility of sucking makes you think about where you are and what you’re doing.

GILL: I heard that you did an unusual test on the Oxygen8?

BT: Ha! It was really cold when we were working in Bristol and I was freezing to death. We had one of those space heaters and I kind of used it as workspace to set the Oxy on. The Oxy held up well, but the heater totally melted it! I didn't realize it because I wasn't looking at it from the underside. The entire back of it was melted and it still worked!