Twenty years after the Pharcyde's debut, Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde, it seems like that pack of self-deprecating MCs are finally getting the credit they've always deserved. You can spot their logo on T-shirts in stores like Urban Outfitters right next to Biggie and Tribe apparel, Booty Brown dropped a verse on Geoff Barrow's Quakers project, and last month, for Record Store Day, the ornate Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde: The Single Collection Music Box was released, complete with liner notes written by J-Sw!ft, the producer behind the Pharcyde's 1992 classic. On Wednesday, May 23, the Pharcyde reunite at the Roxy in West Hollywood.

When I got on the phone with Sw!ft, he ran through about five hilariously bad fake accents (Middle Eastern, French, Chinese, nerdy white guy, something just nebulously foreign) before admitting that yes indeed, this was him, and "How you doing, man?" Hanging in the background of our conversation was Sw!ft's recovery from a seven-year crack addiction, both the subject of a fascinating bummer of a documentary called 1 More Hit, which followed him around while he was using, and his upcoming solo album, The Adventures of Negro Knievel. We talked about his new projects, his classical musical training, and the sample source — or lack thereof — of Bizarre Ride II's "4 Better Or 4 Worse."

In addition to the reunion next week, you've got a new album coming out and a documentary. Yeah, the documentary is 1 More Hit. It's available on demand at AT&T U-Verse, Verizon Fios, and a few other places. And I have a single "High When I'm Sober" which is on iTunes and on Youtube. It's from my upcoming album The Adventures of Negro Knievel. "High When I'm Sober" goes with the movie 1 More Hit. We've been getting a lot of good responses from the film, but, here, let me rewind the clock because this relate to the new album too. I was homeless. I was on Sunset Blvd. VH1 had given me a show, and before filming we had a little dispute with one of the camera people. I was still on drugs, I wasn't moving fast enough, so I can't blame them for passing. But you can't compact a real problem into a six month show! They didn't understand that. I didn't get on drugs to try to get a reality show.

This was during the era when VH1 started giving rap figures in turmoil TV shows. But I don't give a damn about a show! I'm a b-boy, I make hip-hop. VH1 wants to know about my world and my world was really in turmoil, then. So, I'm living in the street and I got a girl and we're both on drugs, and she's doing illegal business and she left me in the cold for like two days. I was depending on her to be able to get money and drugs. So I just hung out on Sunset and I'm like "How did I even end up like this? I'm a musician." I left Inglewood on purpose because I didn't want to ever go back to how I had been brought up, so how did I end up here? That moment's when I thought of the character Negro Knievel. I thought, "I'm Negro Knievel, going back into the danger zone." 1 More Hit is pretty shocking to say the least. People who see this movie tell me it's a miracle I'm alive.

Were you making music during your addiction? The music was always calling me back. I remember one time I was on Hollywood Boulevard and I'm walking with my two hoes, and I couldn't believe I was a pimp. Me! Have you seen what I look like, dude? I grew up in Inglewood but like, I don't wear khakis, you know what I mean? I tried it when I was younger. It didn't work. I didn't feel comfortable. So, I'm on Hollywood Boulevard with these girls, and I look at this fucking TV store, and I'm looking at TVs and shit and I see Dr. Dre in a commercial. And this nigga Dr. Dre's sitting on a fucking plane and he's got a laptop on his lap and he's tapping, and I knew right there he was making fucking beats! And I was like, "I gotta get one of those motherfuckers." I couldn't believe it. You could actually squeeze a whole studio into a computer. It was mindblowing but it was a turning point for me. I was like, "I gotta get off these streets! It's going down! I can take my studio anywhere, now?"

And you started to return to music after that? Well, I wrote so many songs [while addicted] and fortunately, I loved hip-hop so much that even on drugs I would pay an engineer a couple of hundred dollars and I would record. I was documenting my addiction. Like street reporting. Like Ice Cube was South Central's street reporter for years and he was on the front line and then he'd write about it. I was on the front line of the underworld of the drug scene, reporting with songs.

You had the reality show for a second, then your friend shot the documentary while you were struggling, and the new album is a result of that time. Even the Pharcyde album has a documentary quality to it. How important is documenting your reality? When I was with the Pharcyde, as a producer, I tried to make it about more than just what you're hearing. It's the things that you're not hearing. The things that give you the atmosphere that makes you think you're in another world. And then you actually are in another world! So, you have to document everything. I did a lot of recording just talking with Pharcyde, ragging on each other. We grew up together, so that was nothing. I had all this wealth of recording and then it is like making a movie. You have to edit it down, and chop all this footage, but you have so much material that it works itself out, you know what I mean?

You produced Bizarre Ride II beyond just giving them beats. As a producer, not just a dude who makes beats, how important is capturing the energy of the room? I don't just make albums, I make experiences. I'm not trying to toot my own horn, I'm just telling you that. I feel like it was a privilege to be a member of this band and be at the helm of the music. Here's my approach: Get a group of people together, get to working on music and exploring ideas and enjoying it. Fun is the secret weapon. Having fun.

You mentioned seeing that Dr. Dre commercial as a turning point. So, you've moved over to using computers to make beats? Yes, and I love it. Programming on Reason is the shit. And anybody can do this! I got contemporaries that are like "These dudes try to do music too." I'm like, "So what? It's fun!" That's not stupid to me, dude. The whole point of music to me is to enjoy yourself. I'm making music and you see how much fun it is to groove to it. You can just get inspired by the keys or chord to create. "Oh, it's too easy now, anybody can do it." I don't give a fuck if seven billion people make beats, no one will make beats like me.

How did you get into music? My daddy was a musician, so we had a piano, and then, I started collecting gear. I met this guy who became my manager and the Pharcyde's manager — that's a whole other story — but he had all this old equipment that he didn't like anymore. But we took that shit and we would create what we thought was the greatest shit on earth. I'm sure it was garbage but we learned our craft on that stuff. What I learned is it doesn't matter what you use, if you're dope you're dope. Laptop or MP.

Are you still sampling? I gotta stick to what I'm doing. In the '90s, me and my contemporaries were having the time of our lives: Pete Rock, DJ Premier, LA Jay, Diamond D, Showbiz. We were so ahead of the curve with sampling. All of a sudden we got these machines that had a lot more memory and we felt like just losing our minds! But when the lawyers caught up, the lawyers, were like "They need permission to use this stuff!” So when that whole shit, people started — it was like gas prices. Like OPEC can just speculate, like "We're gonna charge this much," and it happens. Now all these lawyers are charging like $50,000 for one sample. So what happened is people started playing keyboards. I'm not mad at that. I'm a classical pianist. I dig what they're doing. But I gotta stick to what I'm doing which is beat breaking.

Do you think about sample clearances more now? With samples, it's like catch me if you can nigga! Because I chop the shit up. I sampled almost 70 records on the first Pharcyde album. I only got caught for 16.

You mentioned you were a trained pianist. What's your musical background? I was trained as a classical musician. My father was a musician. He played the flute, the stand-up bass, the guitar, he sang, he made arrangements, he fully knew how to read music. He had a 13 piece band and they cut a few albums in France, they toured Europe.

So, he taught you? Me and my sister and brother would see him practice every day and he started teaching my brother and sister how to read music and I started, and I would know the notes. He told me, "I'll teach you how to play the piano, if you learn to read music." So, we all had to learn to read music, and once we learned how to read it, he put us in the piano conservatory, so then I studied piano. I went five out of the seven years.

Why didn't you finish? I ended up feeling like I knew enough and I told my dad, "Look, I'm cool, I'm not gonna go the whole course." Plus like, the rules of hip-hop breaks those rules of piano. It's like physics. Like things a pianist thinks cannot happen do happen in hip-hop. I started having conflicts. Like, "I can't go to this key even though I'm in this key? Why not?" But you can do that when you're layering sounds and samples. Because you got two different keys going on. I remember my teacher would be like, "Why you like that? It's off key." And I'd tell him, "It just fits right! That's what makes it dope!" It's not about the key, it's about the feeling.

There's so much live playing on the Pharcyde album. Or what sounds like live playing. See, when I sample something, the reason people can't tell if it's a sample or if I played it is because I try to get inside the sample. I play the sample and I'll EQ it and match it so that I'm literally like traveling through time and joining the artist in that session and playing those notes with them, you know what I mean? People always ask me about the sample from "4 Better Or 4 Worse." But there is no record for "4 Better Or 4 Worse"! I made up those chords. I took a cheap-ass tape recorder, you know, those rectangle ones you put a cassette in and hit the red button?

Yeah — Yeah. I took one of those. And I put at the foot of my Rhodes and played these chords. I took that tape and I uploaded it in the studio and I put that in my drum machine. So, the low-grade sound, because it's analog made it sound like an old album! All that came from that classical upbringing. I played the first skit on the Pharcyde album on piano. My training has proven so beneficial because that's how I was able to do those skits on Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde. I was able to play whatever I heard.

Thirty-two years ago today, I sat on the roof of our house and watched a plume of ash rise 80,000 feet in the air above Mount St. Helens, whose newly reduced dome, some 70 miles away, peeked above the trees at the end of our street.

The volcano had been simmering for months, but this was the Big One: a 24-megaton explosion that obliterated nearly a sixth of the mountain's volume, vaporized Spirit Lake and reduced 230 square miles of forest to rubble. Naturally, being 9 years old, I was over the moon. Of course, I sympathized with the victims and their families. But that didn't stand in the way of finding the eruption thrilling: this was history happening — geological history — practically right in my backyard. Which, pretty soon, took on a literal truth as well, as ash began drifting down like a lackluster snowfall, carpeting the grass with a thin, grey film. In the coming weeks, I'd be tasked with cleaning ash mud out of our gutters, and my father would wear a surgical mask as he mowed the lawn, just as the nightly news recommended; it felt like I'd been given a walk-on role in a real-life thriller. We packed up the ash in plastic medicine bottles, which I distributed to my cabin-mates at a California summer camp as a memento of my homeland; it was probably my parents' idea, but to me, those vials had the mystical properties of sacred relics. There were bottles to spare, eventually relegated to a dusty shelf in my father's workshop. They're gone now, and so is he. I wish I had kept one.

In honor of that fateful blast, then, five new records that touch upon mountains, molten rock, and memory.

Shackleton, Music for the Quiet Hour / The Drawbar EPs (Woe to the Septic Heart) All manner of volcanological metaphors could surely be applied to the music of Shackleton, whether we're talking about his seismic bass rumble or his music's bleak, sooty affect. (Hell, he's even recorded a song called "Mountains of Ashes.") And with this epic new release, he draws the blast zone extra wide, across two CDs (or, if you're lucky enough to find it, a 3x12"-and-CD boxset) and two hours and 22 minutes of music. Ambient drone and radiophonic gurgle collide with the Berlin producer's Fourth World futurist beats, and classical choir samples are interleaved with leathery hand drums and Eastern scales. It sounds very much like Shackleton — there's really no one else making music like this right now — and, in terms of its sheer sonics, it might be his most engrossing record yet.

San Gabriel, VOLFE (Time No Place) San Gabriel is the solo alias of Los Angeles' Butchy Fuego, a member of the Thrill Jockey group Pit Er Pat as well as one of the Boredoms' touring musicians and a collaborator with the likes of Julia Holter and Sun Araw. From the sound of this eight-track mini album, he's been listening to plenty of Shackleton himself: Fuego's music is rougher and less refined than Shackleton's, but it incorporates similar world-music timbres and, at times, a comparable sense of dread. Stylistically, the record runs the gamut from spindly, Casio-tone hip-hop to uptempo bass mutations. "Club Mate," presumably a tribute to the German energy drink, marries Nintendo melodies and elephant cries to speedy, fractured breakbeat techno; "Can't Work" sounds like a woozy, kaleidoscopic fusion of juke and dancehall reggae. There's a distinctly globalist perspective at work, roping in elements of cumbia, moombahton and South African house; "Montaña de Tormenta" (which translates, coincidentally, as "Mountain of Torment") is a kind of super-charged, kuduro-inflected U.K. funky that reminds me a little of Portugal's DJ Marfox. All in all, it's a smart, inspired record that blazes its own trail.

Rene Bandaly Family, "Tanki Tanki" (Lebanon) Originally released in 2009 as a single-sided 12-inch, this devastating bootleg finally gets a limited reissue, this time with a slightly different mix on the flip. Rene Bandali was a popular Lebanese singer in the 1970s and 1980s; his daughter Remi, a child singer, apparently became known as a symbol of Lebanon's yearning for peace. "Tanki Tanki" wraps melancholy vocals and string instruments around a shuddering, lo-fi techno dirge, with 808 handclaps tearing holes through the warbling analog tape. It sounds like the holy grail of flea-market cassettes, some long-lost Rosetta Stone of Middle Eastern disco; it's music for sitting on a rooftop, watching the world burn.

Kuedo, "Work, Live & Sleep in Collapsing Space" (Planet Mu) From early singles grounded in dubstep's "purple" fringes, Kuedo (Jamie Teasdale, aka Jamie Vex'd) is turning into one of Planet Mu's most psychedelically inclined artists. Tracks like "Reality Drift," on his 2011 album Severant, found him becoming increasingly untethered from the rhythmic grid, and "Work, Live & Sleep in Collapsing Space" accelerates his offworld trajectory with pinwheeling trap hi-hats and endlessly cycling arpeggios. Claude Speeed's "Infinity Ultra Rework," featuring the drummer Jivraj Singh, sounds like Chris Corsano jamming with Oneohtrix Point Never, while Laurel Halo folds up her remix like wrinkled paper, layering scraps of string tremolo over brushed metal in a way that suggests an origami river.

Jacob Stoy, "S51" (Uncanny Valley) Any design-conscious visitor to Berlin will have noticed the Simson S51, a sporty moped that was popular with East German youth in the 1980s. The Dresden-area producer Jacob Stoy pays tribute to the bike with "S51," a melancholic sunrise house jam for Dresden's Uncanny Valley label. With its sullen bass arpeggio, downcast pads and uneasy murmurs ("I'm afraid of the dark…"), the track luxuriates in the dark side of nostalgia, while the hill-climbing, road-tripping video puts a hallucinogenic spin on retrospection. A phrase comes to mind: "She's my Rushmore, Max."

The road to Max Payne 3's release earlier this week for Xbox 360 and PS3 (the PC version releases May 29) has been a long one, both for fans of the titular badass and the world-weary character himself. For the uninitiated, Rockstar Games, of Grand Theft Auto fame, first introduced Max Payne in 2001. He's a hard-boiled New York City cop seeking answers for his wife and child's untimely demise at the hands of junkies addicted to a designer drug. Max's Mickey Spillane-esque story leaves him framed for murder and embroiled in a grand conspiracy involving a secret society called the Inner Circle, the game's version of the Illuminati.

A 2003 sequel followed, wherein Max battled Russian mobsters with ties to the Inner Circle who are bent on silencing him. Despite his survival at the end of Max Payne 2, Max is left a broken man. Now a full-blown alcoholic addicted to painkillers, Max, continues a downward spiral that leads him to Brazil, where he works security for a wealthy family in the grimy streets of Sao Paolo, searching for a new life — or at least a fitting end to his current one. And as those who have followed his story over the last 11 years can attest, the perpetually bedeviled Max once again ends up with more questions, and dead bodies than he does answers.

A dark and brutal story set in a vibrant, stylish world, Max Payne 3 is far and away one of the most enthralling action games ever made. And like all of Rockstar's titles, the music is integral to the overall experience. But how do you convey the tragic, über-noir nature of Max Payne while ensuring the player feels like a cinematic action hero painting Sao Paolo's favelas with the brains of a thousand thugs?

Enter HEALTH. Rockstar called on the experimental L.A. band to create a dynamic score for Max Payne 3 that would ebb and flow along with whatever was happening on screen, a method Rockstar successfully incorporated into 2010's critically acclaimed western Red Dead Redemption. SPIN spoke with HEALTH's John Famiglietti on what is was like scoring a Max Payne game 7.5 million copies, countless ersatz bullets, and one Mark Wahlberg movie after the last one.

How did you get involved with Max Payne 3? Rockstar kind of cold-called us. We heard that they wanted to talk to us and then they came to our show in New York.

Were you familiar with Max Payne or Rockstar before? Yeah, totally. I play video games, I know all that stuff!

Do you have any favorites now? I like Dark Souls. It's super-hard. That's why it's so cool.

Max Payne 3 is also quite challenging itself. It is. I'm really stoked on the difficulty. It's really satisfying.

Game development is often quite secretive. Did you see much of the game before starting on any music? Yeah all the music we did was to video captures of someone playing the level or, like, a game tester playing through it really fast. Anything we'd record, we'd play to the video to see if it sounded good.

The music is very dynamic with various bits coming in and dropping out depending on the action. Is that your doing or is that something they wanted? We tried our hardest just to do our thing. If they wanted something specific they would reference other songs we had that might be a good idea. We tried to have each area sound different. There are sounds that don't come up until certain parts of the game that then continue through later levels. Creating music for each area was a lengthy process and we'd have to revisit and revise constantly when stuff in the game would change during development. But there's six stems and they can be combined in different combinations to make up the music in the level with varying intensities. We'd just start using that as a guide, like there's always a "suspense one" or a "shoot out one" and of course they move around, but that's where we'd start: with six pieces of music and then write down the combinations that we thought were good with the gameplay.

Had you ever done any scores or soundtracks before? No. Never.

How would you compare scoring a game compared to making a record? It's not even related almost. It's really different. You're making it to work to support the action. And it's got to loop because its video game music. Combining all your stuff… I mean, you wouldn't want to write a song like that for any reason.

Did you go back and listen to music from the previous Max Payne games? We wanted to be true to game and especially the fans that have been super fans of the game. Obviously our sound is really different, but we kind of justified where Max is in his life and his mental state, being in Brazil. We would associate those things with our sound. Certain levels we would reference the older Max Payne music, or stuff inspired by those sounds. Like we have cellos in there for some things, and melodically — even with our weird sounds — we would reference stuff in the Max Payne theme.

Have you been to Brazil? Right when they were talking about hiring us we had just booked a tour to Brazil so we got to go right as we were starting the process.

Did you know what you wanted to use going in or did you discover new instruments? No, we had no idea. We just sort of went through a process of finding out what we felt worked with the game. A lot of Brazilian percussion doesn't sound really threatening – it's really fun, you know. So it was about finding a way to make it work both with our stuff and with the game.

How many pieces would you say you came up with? I don't know… hours! I think it was up to nine hours and they asked us to do six but so much of it is not used or you change it totally because the level changes or there would be a different decision made on how the level should play out.

There's been a couple games that also have evolving, dynamic soundtracks. But it's still kind of a pioneering sound for games. That's how Rockstar did Red Dead Redemption. It wasn't the same configuration, but it was the same idea.

What do you see as the future of game soundtracks? I think actually they will probably end up getting even more tailored to the action or even more tied into the scripting. The thing is, because the length of time it takes to get through a level fluctuates, they've got to loop and they've got too change a lot. We'd love to work really hard with the scripter and come up with a really intensely related cue system of how the game goes – that would be great. But that is also an ass pain. It takes so long to make the game that there's usually a lot of issues along the way.

Are Rockstar putting out the Max Payne 3 soundtrack? Totally, yeah. It's coming out digitally May 23. It's pretty much just us but there will be one bonus track by Emicida, who is a big Brazilian rapper.

What will HEALTH fans think of your Max Payne 3 score? There's a lot of things we wouldn't normally do — but it's still guided by the aesthetic rules of the band. It still sounds like HEALTH. But it's not like movie music. Our music is not like that at all.

What's next for HEALTH? New record. That's what we're doing. Once this thing is fully in the clear, we're starting a new record immediately. It's half done and we had to stop working on it to do Max Payne. We're trying to get it to come out this year. Max Payne took so much longer than we ever knew it would go. It was a rough one but it was a great experience and we're super stoked.

One of my favorite songs by the late Chuck Brown is 1988's "That'll Work (2001)," a go-go version of Richard Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra." The credits on the 12-inch read like this: Written by Richard Strauss, arrangement by Deodato, additional arrangement by Chuck Brown. So specifically, "That’ll Work" references Eumir Deodato’s take on "Also Sprach Zarathustra" from 1972’s Prelude. Deodato’s "Also Sprach Zarathustra" is used to hilarious, deadpan effect in Hal Ashby’s 1979 movie Being There. It plays when Peter Sellers’ character, Chance the Gardener (or Chauncey Gardiner), leaves his caretaker’s home for the very first time and sees the outside world. In Being There, that outside world is Washington, DC, the birthplace of go-go. You can watch that scene from Being There here. Could be a stretch, but I gotta think Chuck Brown’s referencing this scene with "That’ll Work."

Even if it isn't a reference, there's a cool weird history going on here. It begins with an 1896 Richard Strauss composition that references Nietzsche’s 1885 seminal work of philosophy. Flash-forward to 1968. Stanley Kubrick’s heady, art-film blockbuster 2001: A Space Odyssey also wrestles with Nietzschean ideals and makes that connection apparent via Strauss' Nietzsche-referencing composition. The scenes it accompanies becomes so iconic that the Strauss composition becomes known by most as "the theme from 2001." Four years later, a Brazilian composer creates a zeitgeist-grabbing, goofball-serious funk version of "the theme from 2001." Seven years later, Hal Ashby uses Deodato’s groovin' cover to reference 2001 and bring all that Kubrickian seriousness back down-to-earth. Nine years after, a DC artist bases a go-go song around that version, famously used in an iconic DC movie! Also, rest in peace to Donna Summer. This weekend I will wear down the other side of the single-sided 12-inch version of Summer's "MacArthur Park Suite."

Ab-Soul ft. Jhene Aiko and Danny Brown, "Terrorist Threats" You know you've made an out-there song when Danny Brown is the guy who steps up and brings it back down to earth: "Ain't got shit but an EBT card from a fiend / That owe me and it's in her daughter's name / How the fuck is they supposed to eat? / How the fuck am I supposed to eat?" It's the same righteous nutjob thing Ab-Soul does well on Control System, but it's weighted down by the basic needs that prevent most of us from even having the time to ponder the stuff Ab's worried about. But man, this whole thing where you say Obama's exactly the same as all the other kind of corrupt, constantly compromising past presidents is a whole bunch of back-patting hipster cynicism (see also: Killer Mike's "Reagan"), but Ab-Soul's on this Philip K. Dick bat-shit crazy, the FBI-blew-up-my-home, sci-fi genius vibe, so it's easier to digest, maybe even expected: "Dear Barack, I know you're just a puppet but I'm giving you props/ You lying to the public like it ain't nothing, and I just love it, hope it don't stop." On the previous verse, Ab cogently deconstructed the myth that the suburbs are less drug-infested than the streets. He's the best member of Black Hippy, right? He's certainly the most hippie.

Killer Mike "Don't Die" An intro full of Nintendo sounds, James Brown horn stabs, a Dick Gregory sample, air raid sirens, and Killer Mike cackling and then: "I woke up this morning to a cop with gun/ Who told me he was looking for a nigga on the run / I thought for a second, and I screwed my face / And asked them dirty pigs 'Why the fuck you in my place?'/ He said, 'Chill or we kill, this is a warning' / Then I told him, 'Fuck you, where is the warrant?' / Then they got to punchin' and kickin' and macin' / Then, the whole situation went Larry Davis / Thinking about my lady and thinking about my baby / Thinking, 'These two motherfucking pigs going crazy' / They wanna kill a nigga 'cause a nigga on his rap shit / Wanna leave me dead on a mattress, Hampton / I'm a Public Enemy because I'm cold lampin' / And I don't give a fuck about a party in the Hamptons / And I don't give a fuck about a motherfuckin' Forbes list / Far as I'm concerned, that's a motherfuckin' whore's list." Then he talks some shit to the cops ("Motherfucker, my dad was a cop") over more air raid sirens and there's another verse. No chorus. "Reagan" is the real highlight of R.A.P. Music, but I'm gonna probably write something longer about that soon. Still processing this amazing album.

RL Grime "Trap on Acid" Afrojack's loping "Pacha on Acid," best known for being the bouncing, slightly geeked-up part of LMFAO's "Sexy and I Know It" (and both those songs, really just a cleaned up, not as vicious version of "Waters of Nazareth" by Justice, maybe the most important song of the 2000s) is the basis for this shticky, witty, not-quite mash-up, not-quite remix from RL Grime, who specializes in this kind of fusion, it seems. By acid, he means the subgenre, not the totally awesome psychedelic, because acid house is what you're hearing in those squashed-up squelches by way of Afrojack's jacked-up production style. Mixing them with grunts and the basic skittering sounds of Lex Luger suggests a fascinating fate for Luger's update on the trap sound, which as I mentioned, seems to be getting pushed off the radio by the jerk/hyphy fusion of DJ Mustard and others. Rather than curl up and die like most rap radio trends, the Luger stomp's being absorbed into the borders-breaking world of Soundcloud producers running circles around dubstep and post-dubstep and everything else. And those mixtape drops ("this is a certified hood classic") are nice insider jokes for all the blog-scraping rap dorks out there, legitimizing this potentially goofy rap-rave novelty.

Rye Rye ft. M.I.A. "Rock Off, Shake Off" M.I.A.'s "Big Things Poppin'" shout-out shows just how old this bonus track from Baltimore rapper Rye Rye's debut Go! Pop! Bang! probably is, but you know, I'm sure the label had good reason for holding off an interesting personality from a burgeoning Baltimore club scene with a co-sign from one of the most significant and subversive dance artists of the 2000s, right? Waiting until club music is accepted by way of LMFAO and then forcing Rye Rye to jump onto some EDM sludge, when she was ahead of the trend by at least five years totally makes sense! But whatever, "Rock Off, Shake Off" pairs a classic Bmore club chant with production by the Egyptian Lover and he provides a typically gurgling, kicking, clapping, Orientalist electro banger like it's 1983 again. And then, Rye Rye runs circles around it! To give you a break, M.I.A. does that half-awake chant thing she's been doing post-Kala. These two should just do a whole album together, with production from old school weirdos like the Egyptian Lover, and producers like Blaqstarr and Nguzunguzu. Listen to "Rock Off, Shake Off," borrow a bunch of old electro EPs from a more tasteful buddy, and never return to the terrible, regressive retro Girl Unit EP, Club Rez again, okay?

Squadda B. ft. Pepperboy "Stop Trying" The "hustling and grinding sucked, but now I get to rap and that rules" approach is hardly new, but it remains fresh and really affecting when rappers do it without also doing that reverse idealization of the game, in which the terrible-ness of the streets is so well-wrought and daunted upon that it ends up seeming noble and awesome. Here, Squadda B of Main Attrakionz, and Pepper Boy — who despite his connections to Internet rap, has a really thrilling Lil Boosie-like quality that could find him breaking out of the Tumblrsphere — choose to dredge up memories of why dealing drugs just sucks and leaves you feeling empty. And producer Ryan Hemsworth, stand the fuck up! He's been doing a lot of great work lately (like that Live for the Funk mix) and on "Stop Trying," he takes cheapo synths and dinky percussion and puts his obvious old school video game obsession to work, adding this cute, catchy, melancholy Adventures Of Lolo 2-like melody to the end of the loop. The hook, "Stop trying nigga," repeated over and over, is pure Three Six Mafia and really shouldn't work, but here, because Squadda B is just weird like that, he twists its meaning to celebrate creative side-hustles. A kind of cloud rap version of "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

LoveRance's "UP!” is currently number four on Billboard's R&B/Hip-Hop chart, with a rather curious "featuring" credit: "LoveRance featuring Iamsu! & Skipper or 50 Cent." "UP!" was a minor hit last summer and began sneaking onto radio playlists in the fall. It seemed of a piece with Chris Brown's similarly spare "Strip.” Then, Tyga's "Rack City" arrived and brought with it a sudden, nationwide demand for minimalist hip-hop. DJs began mixing "UP!" with "Rack City," "Strip," Drake's "The Motto,” and anything else that was the opposite of maximalist Lex Luger's once-vital, now tedious slam-bam-glitch bangers.

In December, a 50 Cent remix of "UP!" arrived, giving the song the final push it needed to be absorbed by the mainstream. Once every urban radio playlist approved "UP!" featuring 50 Cent, DJs retreated back to the original or mixed in much more interesting remix verses from Young Jeezy and T.I. Consider that narrative: Buzzing local hit with a ton of potential becomes a real hit thanks to the zeitgeist of a regional rip-off from Tyga, then gets a 50 Cent remix even though no one cares about that guy anymore marking it as acceptable for urban radio approved playlists, which ultimately, allows radio to just play the original. Its Billboard credit? "UP!," LoveRance featuring Iamu! & Skipper or 50 Cent. I love how it devalues 50's contributions without even meaning to: "You know, these Bay Area dudes, or one of the most important rappers of all time, you decide."

Twenty-two-year-old MC/beatmaker Iamsu!, who raps on "UP!" and co-produced the song with four-man crew the Invasion, seems thankful for this twisting-turning path to hit rap song. But he's also well aware of its absurdity. Despite involvement in one of the biggest songs in the country right now, Iamsu's new mixtape Kilt never makes reference to "UP!" and seems to regard mainstream success with suspicion. On "Wake Up + 2 Milli," a two-parter about being relatively rap famous in your hometown, he addresses fame issues with delicacy, a complete lack of Drake-like smarm, and a new undergrounder's skepticism of the major label deal: "Took a couple chances, steadily duckin' advances"; "all I know is real, hundred dollar bills / Every show I kill, fuck a record deal." When the beat switches up to a rolling funk-fart beat for "2 Milli," Iamsu!'s hook laconically negotiates all of his future contracts: "Labels tryin' to sign me, I need two mill for this shit."

"Clothes, Shows, & Afros," produced by Trackademicks, encourages the immediate rewards of live performance and contextualizes life on the road with non-glamorous details like, "charging [his] phone in the Apple store." There's a moral edge to this kind of anti-boasting, and I have to stress again that Iamsu! is doing it at the very moment when he's supposed to be preemptively talking shit. On "Different," he boasts "my money legal, no work on the curb / That trap shit for the birds / Just chill in the 'burbs," like the natural evolution of E-40's sensible, crack-rap morality tales. The hook puts it even simpler: "I ain't like you niggas, we different."

The boldest move on Kilt then, is its mid-album switch from Bay Area bangers to R&B-inflected hip-hop. Melodic rapping is a big part of Iamsu!'s appeal, but right after "Get It In," the loudest, stuttering track on Kilt, comes "Fly High," a stoner R&B interlude that moves the mixtape into a more relaxed sound, without pandering. From here to the end, all the spare beats, most of them are produced by the same guys who made "UP!" and sculpted this mixtape's raucous, slap-happy first half, are fleshed-out with crooned, amateurish backing vocals and warm, Roy Ayers-esque synths — like Rick Rock remixing Odd Future side project, the Internet.

Kilt is anything goes Bay Area rap lyricism with a canny though never cloying pop edge. Think: Wiz Khalifa when he channels Too $hort and actually kind of gives a shit about his music, or Young L whenever the weed smoke clears and he reverts back to the snapping sound of Domo Kun. Iamsu! is a grinding rapper with some fame and a lot of heart, who learned the right things from D.I.Y. fore-fathers like E-40, and hasn't forgotten those values at the sight of his name towards the top of iTunes. He's a regional rapper with an industry-approved arrival that is actually worth checking out. Download Iamsu!'s Kilt

A French presidential candidate — now president — using a viral political advertisement featuring a song from Watch the Throne, Jay-Z co-signing president Barack Obama's pro-same-sex marriage sentiments, and the president shouting out Young Jeezy and slow jamming the news, are all reasons to rejoice in the cultural and political exchange that hip-hop has enabled.

Back in April, then socialist party candidate Francois Hollande embraced an ad that celebrated/enforced his cross-cultural appeal using Jay-Z and Kanye West's "Niggas In Paris." Given its title and the ad's message (a celebration of minority voting power in France), "Niggas In Paris" is literally the worst rap song that could be chosen, but it seems like it was there for its zeitgeist — as the rap song of 2011 — more than any literal meaning. Despite that lunkheaded insensitivity, it's worthy of celebration. As people who actually know things about French politics have observed, the real story of the French election was the baffling percentage of people, who, in the first round, supported the far right-leaning National Front. In that sense, the use of "Niggas In Paris" was a brash affront.

The ad, even with its official unofficial context (not created by Hollande's campaign, but tacitly accepted), could never happen in America. It probably shouldn't even be able to happen here. Even a well-meaning candidate better not be throwing around a rap song, however huge, called "Niggas In Paris." But take it as a simple example of rap penetrating the political culture and it is very significant. Rap is probably the only music that could conceivably soundtrack people of different colors and cultures, all gathered together enthusiastically brandishing their voting cards.

On Tuesday, just a few days after President Obama spoke up in support of his personal belief in same-sex marriage as a right, Jay-Z, as he talked up the Made In America concert, applauded the president's decision. He called a refusal to allow gay couples to marry "discrimination," and framed Obama's announcement in moral terms: "It's the right thing to do, as a human being." And it establishes a top-down continuum of tolerance that is important, particularly in hip-hop, which is casually homophobic — that's to say, homophobic the way most of the country is. Obama and Jay-Z have now transcended our mediocre moral center. That's progress.

Jay-Z's support is almost necessary for the president. Clinton Yates of The Root, writing for The Washington Post, suggested Jay-Z's statement is more important than the President's and I mostly agree. Though Yates' assertion that, "Jay-Z has absolutely zero vested interest at this point in delving into political matters," seems incorrect (so does his portrayal of hip-hop as impossibly homophobic, rather than just being a work-a-day closed-minded like most of the country). Jay is a canny pop culture icon and business man who has, over the years, explicitly placed himself at the vanguard of the mainstream. That means he makes sure his beats change with the times, he sometimes diplomatically speaks on pressing political matters, and well, started wearing those weird leather jean thingies that Kanye's been wearing lately because that's cool now.

This is Jay-Z doing the president a solid. The myth of African-American voters fleeing the Democratic party after his announcement is absurd, but Jay-Z taking the same stand is nice safety net. Plus, the president surely deserves that support. Not only for his decision, but because Obama has made himself out to be our first hip-hop-friendly president. Just a few days after that Hollande ad went viral, Obama, at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner joked, that in his second term, he wouldn't be singing Al Green (a reference to a January speech at the Apollo where he crooned "Let's Stay Together") but Young Jeezy.

That passing Jeezy reference is a nice nod to hip-hop fans and one step further into rap than Jay-Z, who is well-loved and respected, but thoroughly pop. For so long, the implicit agreement between rappers and political figures is that their support would be welcome, though rarely acknowledged. Rap fans just assumed a reference to Jeezy and his 2008 song "My President" wouldn't happen. And don't forget Obama's deadpan performance on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, where the president "slow-jammed the news": The comedy and authenticity of the skit were certainly heightened by the Roots' involvement.

Cynics left unimpressed by the president's hedged gay marriage stance might see these acknowledgments of hip-hop culture as a manipulation of a voting population mostly ignored, or taken for granted. Perhaps, it is that simple: Obama once again needs young people — the hip-hop generation? — so he's pandering. I don't think so, though I don't care if it is canny voter-grabbing. Similar to Hollande's embrace of the Jay and Kanye-soundtracked ad, there is at least a give-and-take between hip-hop and the political figure "using" it. Courting the hip-hop generation alienates plenty of people.

I'm going to guess I am not alone here, but the only time democracy and capitalism ever feel like they kind of work is when I'm listening to rap music. There's a knowing thrill I get buying into the lived-in sentiments of the Throne's "Made In America," and there's a touch of that in a hopeful speech from the president that wearily though never cynically acknowledges the country's history of discrimination. Watch The Throne is an album that somehow tapped into the sneering money-burning of the one percent, invigorated itself as rap's only event last year (and yet still, the end of something), and functioned as a convergence point for the nationwide tension between wanting to be mindful and wanting to buy a bunch of stuff.

Looming behind its crude celebrating, and despite a very Bain Capital-like boast from Jay ("The Nets could 0-82 and I look at you like that shit gravy"), "Niggas In Paris" remains a cathartic expression of making it against devastating odds: "I'm shocked too / I'm supposed to be locked up too!" The album and song, and rap music as a whole, which our president has embraced, is a tangled celebration of democracy at a time when, democracy feels pretty iffy.

Seventeen years ago, Squarepusher (Tom Jenkinson) began his career as a breakbeat gadfly, chopping up jungle with Jaco Pastorius into a style known briefly as "drill 'n' bass" (or, better still, "weirdy-beardy"). Since then, across a dozen albums, he has established himself as one of electronic music's least predictable musicians, capable of infectious 2-step garage, sepulchral ambient, molecular breakbeat science and even an entire album of solo electric bass. Fair-weather fans might snicker, "Spinal Tap Mark II performs Jazz Odyssey," but anyone who really knows Squarepusher — a gauntlet he threw down with 2002's Do You Know Squarepusher — recognizes that there's a method to his madness.

Jenkinson is famous for meticulously constructed rhythms and audacious, even alienating, stylistic shifts, and both qualities are readily apparent in a conversation with him. He's cordial, candid and 100 percent engaged, but I've never heard another musician speak in such analytical terms about his own work — terms that might sound cold, until you realize the extent to which his right-angled career is as conceptual as it is wildly expressionistic.

During our 40-minute conversation, I began to think of Jenkinson as electronic music's very own David Foster Wallace: a virtuoso in rebellion against himself, deeply attuned to the minutiae of his craft and even more deeply concerned with the dialectic between artist and audience, potential and expectation, expression and implosion. His speech even comes to sound like a series of footnotes, riffing on the issue from every conceivable angle.

Squarepusher's new album, Ufabulum, is a box of conundrums ribboned with riddles, even by his own standards. On its surface, it might be the most immediately gratifying record he's done in a decade or more; oddly, though, he approached it as an almost mathematical exercise. And the album itself is, in a sense, incomplete: Jenkinson created the music along with his own computer-generated visuals; to get the full experience, you have to see the live show. (Jenkinson's track-by-track notes, however, help illustrate his vision of EDM gone CGI — as well as opening a window onto his unusually vivid perspective.)

We talked about video synthesizers, synaesthesia and self-indulgence; read on for the full interview.

Hi Tom. You're in São Paulo, are you debuting your new live show? That's very much what I was doing, the new live show. Which doesn't actually include any old material.

Tell me some more about the show. It's an audio-visual set, and you've designed your own video synthesizer — what exactly is a video synthesizer? I termed it a video synthesizer; it's just a rough way of referring to it. Part of the idea of using that term is that some of the ways in which it generates images are analogous to how a synthesizer generates sound — i.e. through mathematical functions which can be combined in various ways to generate patterns. It takes in information from the sound, so part of the sound from the show will be then inputted into the video synthesizer, and it will decode that into information which can then be used to control the images. It also takes in information in a much more simple, instructional form. I.e. you'll go, "Now turn the screen red," "Now move this object from this position to this position," and so on, in the same way that you would output information to a musical instrument from a sequencer. Broadly speaking, the idea is to be able to generate images in real time, using certain forms of information, and those images can be changed in real time. In that respect, it's quite clearly differentiated from playing a piece of video, which is obviously going to be the same every time you play it. The point about this is that I can have real-time control, so that at any given time, if the music changes, a parallel change also occurs in the images.

Are you using any pre-recorded video at all? No, none.

So it's sort of like the difference between a sampler and a synthesizer, then. That's a reasonable analogy, yeah.

You have some incredibly descriptive imagery in your track notes to the album, which I love. You said of "Red in Blue" that the chord progression "suggested a kind of occult mist where objects would appear in mid-air and vanish again only to reappear elsewhere; the mist was dense, but fragile." Are you synaesthetic? Yes. But I don't think that's uncommon, is it? This is something that lots of people have.

What kind of relationships do you have between sound and other senses? It's always struck me that it has a kind of ad-hoc nature. It's hard for me to predict in advance what sounds will give rise to what images. In that respect, my investigation into it is somewhat empirical. I'm trying to discover that. In the track notes, obviously I've given descriptions to try to form a little bit more of a context for the images that are being shown in the show. Nonetheless, it wasn't always the case that the story came first. Sometimes the sound will evoke the story. Sometimes the story evokes the sound. It's certainly never quite the same: Each time I embark on a new piece, the actual mechanism and structure of the way I go about it is subtly changed.

For example, the one you described, the objects coming and going in the mist, that was very much inspired by the sound. That was not an idea or an image which I had prior to starting work on the piece of music. It was very much the music which evoked this kind of image and idea. On the other hand, the "Dark Steering" track, where there's a description that briefly describes this dream about missile tracers in the sky —

And then it morphs into a scene of flying through a library? Yeah, yeah. [Laughs] The idea started with the missile tracers, and then flying through the library came later. That was almost a response to the sound, whereas the initial starting point was these tracers. That was my initial reference point from which I started working on the sounds. As I say, on each given piece, the way it works is slightly different. But the point was to try and foster as coherent a relationship as I could between picture and sound. So that there was no sense of tokenism, there was no sense of it just being strapped on for the sake of it. There's no sense of it being, like, trying to keep up with the Joneses, like, just because lots of people now use visuals at shows, I also felt obliged to do it, regardless of the fact that I may not have any good ideas. I'll only do it if it feels like I've actually brought something to the experience of listening to the sound through the picture.

This is something I really don't like, if I see this kind of tokenism, where people feel that they have to supply a visual component to their shows, but they didn't necessarily have any real inspiration for it, they just went out and got some third-party guy to design it for them, who himself didn't have much of a clue as to why or what these images should be doing. It's an odd situation. I only would do it if I felt like the pictures bring something to the sound. I'm pretty confident that that's the case for this project.

For someone to experience fully what you are trying to do with this record, do they really need to see the live show? Well, that's a very good point. Because obviously it brings up, in a quite stark fashion, the seeming contradiction between what I'm saying about these visuals being very close to the heart of the project, and yet, with the album, you don't see them.

I suppose, given my initial considerations regarding how these images would be displayed, that that pretty much determined the course of how the project was then presented to the public. Basically, from the very outset, I had the idea that the images would be displayed on the LED mask that I wear on stage and on the rear LED panel which is situated behind me. Secondly, that LED would be the product I would use to transmit the images, because of the particular quality of light that it generates and the intensity that you can achieve with it, which I feel is something that's not really possible to realize with projectors, for example. And thirdly, the scale: The absolute minimum size of the rear screen is five meters by three, which I see as being totally essential to realizing my aims, in terms of getting the intensity and the scale across.

So the compromise of releasing this in a format that the public can appreciate at home is obviously really difficult. That immediately throws away the scale and it throws away the intensity. If you were looking at this on a computer screen, I'm sorry, but it just doesn't work. Obviously, there's the option of doing this as a DVD, with all this stuff scaled down so that you could then watch it on a television or a computer, but that, for me, was such a strong disavowal of the initial ideas that I decided not to do it. And I thought that actually an audio album is better, and feels like a more satisfying thing to offer to the public, rather than this halfway house where the visuals are combined, but they don't receive the correct kind of treatment. It's quite a compromise, of course.

The other point is, I've striven to recreate some of the mental images this music brings about for me; that's of course not to say that the public should see it like that. I could be quite happy for someone to have their own response to this, and for that response to be entirely different to my own. That's what makes the album feel like a satisfying thing to offer to the public. You just leave it much more open-ended as to how they respond to it. The problem with the show, I suppose, is you're somewhat railroading people into a particular kind of visual response to the music, and they may or may not agree with it. Whereas the album allows that scope, either to not have any kind of mental image, or to have your own personal one, which I'm more than happy to try to foster. Each one has its problems. There's no perfect representation of this project. In any case, if you disagree with the images I'm putting up there, you can always shut your eyes.

Let's talk more about the album. I like that it feels very much like a proper album, like a unit, a coherent piece. BuIt also feels like you went back to your roots a little bit. I mean, we're probably moving from the sort of territory which I'm comfortable to talk about into territory that I'm not so comfortable with. I see this as probably more your job than mine, to make those kinds of assessments. I don't mean that in a rude fashion. I just mean, I'm very close with this. I'm concerned with it, as much as I am aesthetically as I am technically. There are numerous ways in which I'm concerned with this music that a listener just wouldn't be. So I think that kind of assessment is really public domain. I don't know what I can offer in that respect. I can certainly say the idea of trying to replicate something I've done in the past is quite offensive to me. Trying to recapture something I was doing 15 years ago, that's certainly a long way from my intentions.

But I hear a sense of pleasure in this album that reminds me of, say, Feed Me Weird Things, much more than your recent releases. I would say, in a much more flat-footed way, certainly the album was starting from different premises than the albums I've made in the last seven or eight years — one of the main things being not using any live instrumentation. In a technical sense, there is resonance with what you're saying, because I actually returned to a certain method of making music which — disregarding the fact that I was also working on visuals, which makes it rather different — is not so far away from the techniques I used on, say, Go Plastic, from 11 years ago. There are certainly technical resonances. And of course, though the aesthetic ones may spring up in relation to those, I like to think that I'm not in any way producing a redundant offering, something which is basically a replica of something from before. If there's a sense of resonance between this and earlier work, I'm perfectly happy for that to be there, but as I say, it's more your job and the general public's to explore that and investigate. I'm confident to talk about music in technical terms, in numerical terms, but I'm not necessarily so happy to talk about it in biographical terms, certainly when it comes to my own work.

I did want to talk to you about technique. I was struck that, at least on the surface, there are techniques that you were using in your very early records, particularly the rapid-fire beat-repeat effects. How are you constructing the music? The central element of the sessions from this record was the sequencer. It's a very, very, very programming-heavy album. Just information, information, information. It's just lists and lists and lists of numbers going into the sequencer, and that controlling the various sound sources in the studio. It's just a creature, a monster of control, if you like. One of the fundamental things that I set out to do, initially, is that there was going to be no live performance [of instruments on the record]. That's a big deal. That means that there's no manual manipulation of instruments, that it's all coming from data. That lack of manual contact with the sound-making device is, for me, significant. I've spent such a long time working with music in that fashion. It's a big thing for me. If you cut it out, that makes a significant impact on the session.

I'd say, as well, it's been like a holiday, making this record. It's so much easier when you don't have to play instruments. If you imagine, over the years, the records that I've made that do feature live instruments, you're moving from the perspective of a recording engineer to the perspective of a musician or a performer, and these two things are quite different. They're quite distinct attitudes. They all have their own concerns and problems associated with them, which are not always particularly compatible. There's the ego, as a performer, and there's the love of the craft from the recording engineer, and also maybe from the producer's perspective, it's much more about trying to keep an overview. It doesn't matter how much you enjoyed playing that; does it work in the piece of music? You've immediately got a tension springs up between the two. I can think, "Ah, I really enjoyed that, and it felt so good," and it sounds great for me, and in the end, the producer side of me is saying, "Yeah, well, doesn't matter. It just doesn't work." Then you have to throw it away. Crikey, that's actually something I've gone out of my way to do. I love that challenge. But throwing that challenge away temporarily, setting it aside and going, "Right. I'm just the programmer. That's it." The perspectives of the programmer and the producer, I feel, are fairly consistent with each other. It's easier to take a step back from it; there's no integrity of performance. There is a craft to programming, but you don't feel precious about what you've done. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work, and you rewrite it.

It's interesting, because there's such a vogue right now for live jamming on hardware synthesizers, just letting the machines run, and editing later. Your approach on this album is really the opposite. Absolutely. I'm trying to leave as little to chance as possible. In this instance, I'm not interested in what the machines can contribute. I'm trying to absolutely dominate them. I'm not trying to get their input. I don't want it.

Earlier, you mentioned the ego involved in live performance. You used to be known for some pretty chaotic live performances — I seem to remember you downing a bottle of vodka at a show in San Francisco, many years ago. Oh crikey, yeah. I mean, I'm 37 now. I've lived almost half my life, to an extent, in the public eye. Anyone will recognize that a person can change in significant ways in a 17-year period. Chaos — I've always been attracted to chaos. And there are dangers associated with chaos — musically, as much as there is personal risk associated with that. How can I put it? I look fondly on those days. It's not quite as easy for me to down a bottle of vodka onstage anymore. Maybe because I've got this mask on my head.

As I say, chaos has always attracted me. It's a funny thing. My describing the process of making this record as being an absolute creature of control and rational deliberation: I would absolutely say that. I think for some people that the effect on the listener would translate to being quite tedious, quite mechanical. But if I had any conviction that that was the case, I wouldn't have released the record. What I'm trying to do is to foster as much control as I can, so I can actually generate as vivid and hallucinogenic and chaotic experience as I can, just for myself as a listener. You've got to remember that I'm also a listener, as much as I am a composer. One tries to please the other, and yet there are divergent interests.

Again, I want a certain thing as a listener, and, coming from the perspective of a composer, you have to confront certain limits. You have to say, actually, "This is what you want to hear, but tough shit." To do that is either really far too difficult, or alternatively, doing this is redundant. I don't want to do that anymore, I want to explore new methods. So the composer has his own attitude. I'm not saying I'm unique, of course, I think everyone who makes music is also a listener, in some fashion or another. But I'm just trying to be as aware as possible of the different needs of the two characters.

I was reading an old Pitchfork by Dominique Leone, where he wrote that Ultravisitor sounded like "the work of someone more in love with himself than his audience." [Laughter]

A lot of critics seem to have an idea of you being a self-indulgent producer — that you're defying and even frustrating your listener's expectations. How do you feel about that? First of all, any musician that's not self indulgent, I can't imagine that they'd be any good, to be honest. Any musician that puts himself primarily at the service of his audience is likely to quite rapidly become a self-repeating machine. With audiences, there's always a tension. Audiences, particularly at gigs, tend to want to hear the favorites, and if you're not careful, as I see it, and I certainly feel that I've observed it in looking at other people's careers, you can get fenced into an area that the audience wants you in. And if you don't do that, then you risk losing them. This is something that I've tried to get away from as much as I can. Don't feel for a minute that I don't respect the audience. What I'm doing is a mark of respect, in the sense that I'm doing exactly what I always did. I never disavowed the principles which have dictated my work and dictated me becoming known in the first place. What I feel is actually the wrong thing to do is when a musician gets known, having done what they've done out of love and having fun and enjoying themselves, gets known for it and then switches tack and thinks, "If I'm going to continue to be loved and respected by my audience, I have to repeat, I have to keep referring to this moment of glory." And it becomes a prison. It becomes a thing which restricts their future activity and consequently dries up their enthusiasm for their work. And kaput: End of their career.

The funny thing is that an audience can also detect this. There's always this tension where you're trying to create the creative process afresh, to give yourself the best chance of giving something to your audience that they're really going to love, and actually show them something new. And that entails sometimes pissing them off. Because to give yourself the chance to do it, you have to keep everything open, you have the creative process fluid, you have to keep the idea of what you are as a musician open-ended, in order that you will have the chance in the future of making something that they will love as much as they did the first thing you did, but also for that to be different to it. Is that clear? Because this is quite an important point for me. And I realize that a lot of people think I'm self-indulgent and that that's a bad thing. I would say: Yes, I am self-indulgent, but it's a good thing.

Let me ask you a biographical question related to this. When you were younger, did you have a fan-based relationship with certain artists that led you to think this way? Were you ever disappointed by one of your idols? When I was a teenager, I played in various bands, local bands that were trying to get signed, trying to get known and get out there and establish a career for themselves. I looked at this more as an observer — in these groups, I was not playing my own music, they were not my own pieces. I was more, I suppose, just a bass player, in those days. And typically a lot younger than the people I was playing with. So I saw this process at fairly close quarters, but nonetheless I had nothing really personally at stake. It seemed to me that these bands were desperately trying to get known. And in order to do that, they would really try to calculate what people wanted to hear, and then try to deliver it. It seemed to me that that actually really negated lots of creative possibilities. And when I say creative possibilities, I mean things that can ultimately be rewarding for the fucking audience. I don't just mean things that are enjoyable to play for the musicians that leave the audience cold. I mean things that can actually bring life and vigor to the fucking scene. I remember trying to contribute ideas—"Why don't we try this, why don't we try that? That could be interesting; that could be a new way to articulate this music"—and my ideas were often received in a quite abruptly dismissive way. Like, "No, that's not what people want to hear." But actually, you're making a lot of assumptions about what people want to hear. Why don't we concentrate on what we want to hear, and see if people join in, see if they come along with us, so to speak? But that didn't really ever happen.

I've had so much experience with this tendency to try to predict and placate audiences. I thought actually, well, I'm just going to see what can be done when you follow your own interests. Because then, if you win an audience, you've won on every level. You've satisfied yourself, you've satisfied them. If I try and predict the audience, I might well satisfy them, but I've got no guarantee. And I certainly won't have satisfied myself. Every time I make a record I throw everything at risk. I stake everything on it. Because I think, if I win, then I've got the best situation I could be in. And what rational human being would not want to be in the best possible situation? I'm just trying to fucking get to that. And I don't have an interest in frustrating people, but it is sometimes a byproduct of this process. But I'm confident that an attentive listener, even if they don't agree with the aesthetic decisions, will detect commitment and passion in what I've done. And that should be sufficient to keep interested in what I do next. But you know, I'm speculating. I really am. There's no manual for this. Lots of people would summarize my outlook, as you rightly say, as being self-indulgent, and dismiss it. That's up to them. I'm trying to make things which transmit as much love and life to people as I can. Sometimes, by doing that, you actually frustrate people, because you've switched tack. But I switch tack in order to keep alive, to keep the chance of making that perfect record possible.

Legowelt, a.k.a., Danny Wolfers, is a prolific sort. Slogging away in his studio in the Hague, surrounded by some of the finest (and sometimes buggiest) analog music-making implements known to humankind, he can bang out old-school synth-and-drum jams with the ease of the late Christopher Hitchens reeling off a 1,500-word diatribe about Henry Kissinger, somewhere in between the third and fourth glass of wine. Not that Wolfers necessarily imbibes with the gusto of Hitch, nor ascribes to any of his polemical ideas — merely to say that the Dutch producer's prodigious output means that he can afford to give away some of the goods, every now and then.

He did this a few months back with his album The TEAC Life, a 14-track album of dreamy, dusky, Detroit-inspired techno that he offered as a pay-what-you-wish download from his own website. It's still available; I donated $10 to his PayPal for it, which seemed more than fair — and he's blessing us again with a new production called "Deep Space Gazing."

The TEAC Life actually came with a brash sales pitch that Hitchens probably would have appreciated (dodgy punctuation, notwithstanding). "Ok people here it is the new Legowelt album which is free to download for u all," wrote Wolfers, proceeding to draw a line in the motherfucking sand: "Its got a hella lot deep tape saturated forest-techno tracks on it and when I say Techno i dont mean that boooooooooooring contemporary shit they call techno nowadays with overrated tallentless pretentious douchebag cunt DJs playing a few halfassed dumb mongo beats and being all arty fartsy about it. F*ck that, I am talking about: Raw as fuck autistic Star Trek 1987- Misty Forests- X-FILES,- DETROIT unicorn futurism made on cheap ass digital & analog crap synthesizers recorded in a ragtag bedroom studio on a TEAC VHX cassettedeck in DOLBY C with an unintelligible yet soulfull vivacity."

(I love that he took the trouble to asterisk out one of his swears, but not the rest.)

"Deep Space Gazing" is a less contentious proposition. Wolfers describes it as "old school U.K rave proto breakbeat techno" sourced from the Commodore Amiga, Roland R-8, and Roland MKS-100, and while I'm in no way capable of verifying his gear list — I had to look up the MKS-100 — he's certainly got the description down pat. With a vibe evocative of 808 State, Baby Ford, and early Warp releases, it feels like raving your face off in a remote field deep in the U.K. countryside, complete with an omnipresent layer of tape hiss settling in like frigid dew around your up-all-night feet. It's lo-fi, hi-concept, and comes with a "mandatory" Star Trek sample.

Get the goods from www.legowelt.com; check out The TEAC Life while you're at it, and then send him some money. Even unicorn futurists need to eat.

Exercises, a new mini-album by the Montreal musician CFCF (Mike Silver) for Toronto's Paper Bag Records, is a masterpiece of restraint. With stately piano melodies informed by Ryuichi Sakamoto and judiciously applied synthesizers that convey a subtle touch of the cosmic, it's one of the most limpid recordings I've heard lately.

So it's ironic that Skype decided to act up during my interview with Silver, turning his voice into a garbled robot mess; it sounded a little like the VoIP pipes had been infected by a malignant strain of mutant Auto-Tune. (Actually, given that voice synthesis and processing was a byproduct of military technology, as Dave Tompkins explores in his fantastic book How to Wreck a Nice Beach, perhaps the idea of Auto-Tune morphing into a computer virus isn't so far from the realm of possibility.)

Still, you make do with the materials at hand, as Silver himself explains of his decision to pursue the stripped-back palette of Exercises, a record begun while most of his gear was packed away in storage. Read on as he discusses exercising restraint, channeling inspiration and making springtime music in the depths of winter.

Where are you living these days? I was in Paris for half of last year, from January to June. Now I'm back in Montreal. I was born here, and I live here.

Did you go into Exercises with a specific goal in mind? It kind of came together gradually, without me really thinking about it. I started off just making piano [and] synth workouts, and it gradually became something where I thought it could be a full record, and I decided to build on that. At first, I didn't know if it was going to become an album or anything; I was just working on pieces individually. I did try to work from a template for a few pieces, try to keep the elements limited and stay within a certain palette. And so eventually, after I had four or five tracks, I started to think about making it a full record. From there I tried to make it a bit more cohesive as far as the themes, and try to find a visual element that I found inspiring.

It kind of came together because I did a piano version of a track from my last EP, The River, and it was kind of in the same vein as the stuff on this record. I put together a video for it that was basically edited together with footage from the David Cronenberg film Stereo. It was all filmed at the University of Toronto, in Scarborough, which is kind of this big, concrete, brutalist building. So making that video inspired me to work further in that direction.

Are you a trained pianist? No, not at all. [Laughs.] It's not a piano; I recorded it all with MIDI keyboards and my laptop and stuff, so it's basically just a piano plug-in. I was moving all my stuff out of my apartment when I was recording it, kind of shuffling, because I was about to move to Paris, so I was kind of in between things at the time.

What was Paris like? Were you there to make music? No, I was there with my girlfriend at the time. She was going to school, and I kind of followed along. I'd work on music during the day, but I didn't really have much going on over there. I was just kind of hanging out.

Was being abroad helpful creatively? I wouldn't say it was helpful, because I felt a little bit in limbo as far as what I could work on. A lot of my equipment was back here, and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with some stuff I had been working on. It did make me work within my limitations, as far as not really having much around. A couple of things that are on this record were recorded there — some of the more electronic stuff, basically. It did start me in some other directions.

I was struck by how different the new record is from "Cometrue," for instance. Are you typically working on many different sounds at one time? I would say so. During the day I'll put on a lot of different music, and depending on my mood, I'll get inspired by all sorts of different things. It just comes from noodling and playing around with the sounds. I don't try to work in one specific sound; that's never really been my way of working. I like to explore all sorts of different things, and try to relate them to each other.

Will you do more material in the vein of "Cometrue" — that kind of deep, melodic house? I love that song. Oh, thank you. As far as the next few things I'm working on, they're not really in that vein, but I can never really predict what I'm going to be working on. I think "Cometrue" kind of goes back to my first album, in terms of trying to combine dance music influences with more subtle textures. The next few things I'm working on are a bit more pop-oriented, not really on the dance side of things.

You have mentioned the influence of Peter Gabriel, Talk Talk, and David Sylvian — and of course you cover Sylvian's "September" here. I get the sense that you have a very romantic streak, musically speaking. Yeah, I would say so. I don't really go for cold, mechanical sounds. I don't like to go too dark — even when I go dark, I try to make it emotional and melodic and kind of earnest. That's my taste in music coming through, I guess.

Are you a seasonally affected composer? I was thinking about songs like "September" and "December." Absolutely. I'm a seasonally affected listener, so it comes out in the music, too. Whenever spring comes around, I always put on the same things — like, Sarah Records albums or Cocteau Twins, stuff like that. And then, when summer come around, I'm just in full-on pop-music mode. I get inspired by what I'm listening to, obviously, so it comes out in the music. I mean, when I made this record, it was deep winter, like, December 2010 and January 2011, and I was just listening to very, kind of, frosty piano, simple things like that.

Does it feel strange to have it coming out as spring turns into summer? Yeah, maybe a little bit. But a lot of people here in Montreal were telling me, "Thank God that record came out now" — they're really happy because they're all in finals and studying, and it seemed like the perfect soundtrack for that.