You skillfully play a wide variety of instruments. Has mastering the flute, violin and piano helped you wrap your head around how synthesis works?

I don't play the violin, just the bass guitar, guitar, flute, a little bit of drums and piano. When I'm making up synthesizer patches, I tend not to try to emulate much stuff. I just try to make something that's completely new, so I don't know if it really helps that much!

What was your first encounter with an Elektron instrument?

It was the Rytm drum machine. That was when I was rehearsing with David Letellier (Kangding Ray) in the other band that I play with, SUMS. He was using it in the studio, and I just loved it straight away.

I remember that, within ten minutes of using it, I just thought, I need to get one of these. Then I got the Analog Keys, and an Octatrack that I use with David as well. But that's quite new for me.

So the Rytm kicked it all off for you, so to speak?

Yes, pretty much. Which is strange, because I'm not mainly a drummer or a drum machine person, but as soon as I heard it, and the fact that you could mix in the samples with the onboard stuff, I just thought that was great. It's amazing.

Do you use the Overbridge integration for the Analog instruments?

I was using it as a beta tester. I only just downloaded the new operating systems today, for the Analog Keys and the Rytm. I haven't had a go at the latest one, yet.

It is going to be very handy for me, when we start to go on tour again, because then I can just take my drum machine, or the Analog Keys, out and use that as the sound card, which is going to be much easier on a tour bus. I haven't used it so much already, but it's going to be really handy.

With the album Rock Action, electronic instruments were introduced in a big way into the Mogwai sound, and the album before that, Come on Die Young, saw the first use of samplers, if I'm not mistaken.

You're right.

Do you recall what it was that set you off on that trajectory?

I think it was just trying to do something different, instead of just having guitars all the time. All of the bands that we were influenced by, in the beginning, were mostly guitar bands. We wanted to change that around, and that really helped.

We worked with David Fridmann on *Come on Die Young *and *Rock Action*, and he helped us with some samples of strings and trombones to start with, and on *Rock Action *we really started to use drum loops and electronic programmable stuff.

We used some old stuff like Vocoders as well, which is usually associated with bands like Kraftwerk. We really loved that sound and wanted to use it.

Perhaps not the vintage, but the grainy and depth of sound aspects of those things have always been important for you, I guess?

Yeah, totally. It's great to have. We've always said, guitars are guitars, and you can do a lot to a guitar, effects pedals and stuff. But any time you start to bring synthesis or electronic instruments into it, it really becomes more unique, I think.

Because you're using sounds that no one else, maybe, has found before. I think that's quite a good tool to make something that sounds different.

Rave Tapes is heavy on the electronics, as well.

That's what happens when you move to Berlin and Schneiders Buero is just around the corner (laughs)! All sorts of modular synth modules. I keep building it, it's really addictive.

What's that addiction like?

It's like alcoholism, something people from Northern Europe are very familiar with!

Can you imagine that Mogwai takes a turn toward austerity at any time in the future, dropping all electronic instruments, or is that not an option now?

No, not now that we've got all this stuff! More and more people in the band, like Dominic (Aitchison) who was strictly a bass player before, I think he got a Bass Station. He decided to teach himself really simple bass lines on the synthesizer, and Martin (Bulloch), the drummer, he was using drum pads which we would attach a sampler to.

I have been trying to get him to buy the Rytm machine as well, so hopefully we may have that on stage at some point!

Some orthodox fans of Depeche Mode refused to buy their albums when they started using electric guitars on their albums. Did you experience something similar when you made the same thing but the other way round, when you started introducing electronics?

There's nothing attractive about musical snobbery. To give our listeners credit, they've generally been on our side when we want to try out new stuff, be it types of instruments or doing non-album projects. It's important not to get yourself stuck in a formula.

Who came up with the name Mogwai?

I think it was Stuart (Braithwaite). We had a concert and we had to have a name. The first thing he thought of was that, but he always wanted to change it, but once people know your name as a band, it's a bit difficult to change it without losing momentum.

Is it inspired by the movie classic Gremlins?

Yeah, totally. It was. But we didn't realize that it was the Chinese word for devil or ghost. So, for many years, the promotors in China didn't want to have us over because they thought that our name was bad luck! It seems to be ok, now. We've been there a few times.

Please name your favorite, grisly Gremlin death!

It's got to be from the first movie, because the second one wasn't very good. Doesn't someone... ah, man, I can't remember one! I can't even remember. That's terrible! You only just watch it around Christmas, usually. You know what, it's not really part of the movie, where they get killed, but when the kid tells the story about Santa Claus coming down the chimney, and he gets stuck in the chimney, that's pretty dark! That may be the darkest bit in the movie, even though there's monsters. The most horrible part.

As I asked the question, I realized I'm hard pressed to remember any Gremlin deaths from the first movie myself. Didn't someone get caught in a blender?

Yeah, someone got caught in a blender, that's true.

The first film is actually surprisingly dark.

That's true. I think some of the best kids stories, especially the fairy tales from a long time ago, they're always really dark. People get killed, people get poisoned, you know, people go to sleep for a thousand years and they're much less sanitized than all the new Disney stuff.

I think kids can appreciate the darkness, more than the film people think.

The Hollywood output is very pre-packaged not to offend anyone and not to cross any lines.

It's just sanitized, isn't it?

I did see the second Maze Runner film recently, though, and it's pretty cool. It's mainstream, it's kid's stuff, but it's got the darkness.

I didn't see that.

It's a pretty visceral Lord of the Flies, Stand by Me, Running Man kind of flick. Anyways, besides Mogwai, you've also recorded & toured with Arab Strap and Fuck Buttons (featured in this Talk). Of all your musical mates, who's the most likely to pull a massive prank, or stir things up in general?

That's a good one. I think probably Aidan (Moffat) and Malcolm (Middleton) from Arab Strap. Man, they just used to get up to some crazy stuff that I can't even tell you about (laughs)! Probably, it'll come out in a book one day, and I hope that they don't mention that I was there.

Tell me about your new project together with Kangding Ray, SUMS, that recently headlined the Berlin Atonal festival!

Yeah, roundabout christmas time, or New Years, last year, he got in touch with me through a mutual friend in Berlin, another French guy, and we met up in the bar that I own.

He was asked to do something for Atonal, and he didn't want to do it on his own because he thought it would look boring, and he wanted a thing with guitars. He's been a big Mogwai fan for a long, long time, I think. He even went to see Mogwai before I joined the band, pre-1998. We just kept talking, and started to get together roundabout February-March, to see what was going to happen. It was a lot of talk. We thought maybe we would get a lot of orchestral instruments, and then we thought, nah, that's going to be about shit.

So we whittled it down to a double bass, for some really low bass end, and we got a drummer guy as well, so there's four people in the band, along with David and I, and just a lot of electronic stuff and lots of guitars, and stuff that we, both of us, have never really done before.

It went really well. We've got another one in Italy coming up, and maybe some other shows. It's good fun. It's quite nice to work with someone else than Mogwai, because you sort of learn how other people work, and it's good for you. It's almost like a holiday away from your other band! You learn quite a lot.

Do you know if the Berlin Atonal venue, a massive abandoned power plant, has been used as a sound stage or something?

I know that Ableton Live based one of their convolution reverbs on that hall. I was looking through reverbs on Ableton, and on one it said "German Power Station" and I said to David, hey look at this, and he said, yeah, they used this room for the reverb. I thought, wow, that's kind of cool.

I have no idea if it's used as a sound stage. David's studio, where we rehearse every few weeks, is actually in the same building, but it's on one of the stairways. It's like a little room there. We would walk through, and there would be, you know, BMW shows one week, and then the next week there would be Bayern-München, a German football team celebration. It gets used for lots of different stuff, and food things, and it's just a really weird place. They try to use it for as many things as possible, but I think the best thing is definitely the Atonal [Festival].

Have you lived in Berlin for a long time?

Yeah, six years this month, actually.

If you could imagine an existence in a parallell world where you were completely musically illiterate, what would you see yourself doing instead?

I've always been interested in travel. I mean, the way we travel, with the band, it's not very inspiring because you just get somewhere and stay in a dressing room. You don't really see much of a place. You don't have time.

Yeah, something to do with traveling around, and maybe write. Travel, write. Or something. Nothing too stressful.

Did you hear about the newly invented Yaybahar instrument?  It is a combination of all matter of vibrating instruments, effectively making it an acoustic synthesizer, and the sound is transported from the soundboard through two conduits, one for bass and one for treble, that are actually two slack spring metal coils, that each lead to an appropriately sized drumskin membrane amplifier. It sounds massive!

Did I see a Youtube clip of that, a while ago? There was a guy in a round room, it was looking out toward a view - yeah, I think I saw that a while ago. That was amazing!

Is that something you'd like to get your hands on?

Yeah! Actually, we did, for the SUMS concert that we did in Berlin, we had bought an Eowave Resonator. It's like a black box with a cymbal inside of it. It's almost like the Ondes Martenot, the old metallophone thing, and you can put any sound source into it.

It's a sort of suspended cymbal, and it will act like a speaker. The problem was, the Ipad that we were using live didn't work (laughs). So we had to not use it. But I think we'll use it in Genoa, for the show there.

I'm really interested in trying to make weird stuff out of speakers that vibrate like that. It's really cool.

You recently had a Mogwai birthday party at the Camden Roadhouse, with bands like Jesus & Mary Chain and Public Enemy celebrating 20 years of Mogwai. Tell me a little bit about that weekend!

Yeah, we had done two nights in Glasgow, the weekend before, and then obviously in London, because there are so many more people there to come. We decided to do a week of shows with bands that really influenced us, or we liked at the moment. We had a few of the bands up in Glasgow doing some stuff as well.

It was all the idea of Barry Hogan from All Tomorrow's Parties, we worked with him. We have been working with him for years. I wish I could have been to lots of them, but do you know how expensive London is? You can't even stay there for any more than a few days (laughs), you won't have any money left! So we could only stay for, really, our days, but we heard good reports about all the bands that played.

What's your favorite way of using an Elektron instrument?

Annoy my wife! She can hear me, and the pads on the drum machine, and also probably see the little lights that flash up on the Analog Keys which is a bugger when she's trying to do work.

We share an office room in our house, and her computer station is directly opposite mine. She can see everything that I'm doing and hear the crazy noises, so, yeah, pretty much: to make my marriage a lot shorter (laughs)!

When is the next Mogwai show?

We have two shows in India, in November or December. We've got two more shows and then that's it for this year. Next year, we've done a soundtrack for the BBC, we will play the soundtrack at a couple of festivals.

What's the name of the BBC project?

It's a film called Atomic by Mark Cousins, he makes a lot of good movies, and he's a movie critic as well. It's from the atom to the atom bomb, and everything in between. We did the music and the sounds for it. It looks really good, and it's going to be fun to play it live.

Interview by Daniel Sterner
Photo by Rachel Burns