What events brought Zonal into existence?

Kevin: Basically, we disbanded Techno Animal for a multitude of reasons. One, we were sick of playing to the same audience every night, which was basically white dudes dressed in black. Two, we hated the name, and three, we were too noisy for hip-hop people and too hip-hop for noisy people.

Justin: I think we were accidentally paving the way for something. With The Brotherhood of the Bomb, for example, people are now saying "holy f#!k, this was in 2001?"

Does the name Zonal refer to the geographic, the plasma physics or the dashing red pelargonium meaning of the word?

Justin: I wasn't even aware of any of them! Zonal came from our obsession with Outer Limits and the Twilight Zone. That archaic vision of technology, the nostalgic, melancholy, weird black-and-white aesthetic, and 1950s sci-fi. I think the word Zonal was a way for us to articulate the effect that we wished the music to have upon our listeners, as much as anything.

Kevin: Whenever we listened to something and said "it's really zonal" it'd be really top marks, you know. With Techno Animal, we discovered the bruising side, but we knew that we still wanted an outlet for this s#!t that just sounds like heroin hop. Smacked out hip hop. Zonal was part zombie, part drug high, part let's leave the planet. Also, we liked that it began with the letter Z!

Justin: The word just looks great. It's an aesthetically pleasing word.

What Elektron equipment do you use?

Kevin: None.

Well, then this will be the shortest Elektron Talk ever.

Justin & Kevin: (Burst out laughing)

Kevin: When we started working on the Zonal sketches, I already had the Octatrack, Analog Four, and Rytm. The Octatrack is the one I mashed up when I did the EP for Elektron, but for some reason, I wasn't initially that struck by the Analog Four. I don't think I went very far with it, I didn't have much time at the time and I thought I had synths that were doing similar things. Then, when we decided to start the new Zonal stuff, I picked the Analog Four up again. I think I'd learned that you could use it with Overbridge. The Overbridge interface is really, really good, you know, and it's really instant. It allows you to get much deeper into the machine, without getting lost in the little menu screen.

For me, the screen on the old units is both good and bad. It means you learn not to necessarily look at it, and just use your ears and hands in a more tactile and efficient way.

Justin: That's so true. You know where your filter and resonance are. You hear your high-pass and low-pass.

Kevin: Or life-pass, as we like to call it! I love Elektron gear, I love the Elektron sounds, but I wasn't really a fan of the onscreen interfaces. For me, Overbridge was the final, huge plus mark. When I started using Overbridge with Analog Four, I was able to layer harmonics and distortions and overdrives. As I was sending it to Just, I was so excited by the tones I was able to achieve. The Analog Four is all over the Zonal stuff.

Justin: With Zonal, live, I've been using the Analog Drive, and the Analog Heat filters. They've been an amazing arsenal.

Kevin: The Analog Heat is an absolute revelation.

Justin: In the studio, I use the Analog Keys. That's the first Elektron gear I got hooked up with. The Analog Keys, then the Rytm. I've used the Keys a lot for my other project, JK Flesh. Loads. I used the Rytm a lot as well. Kevin has been making a lot of the Zonal basslines, and I've made the beats. For the beats, I still use a lot of samples, like I did in the 1990s, and 1980s even, which is great because I'll also be making a sample pack for the Digitakt soon. I love the whole Digitakt idea, that you're able to use on-the-fly samples, it's getting back to what I used to do with the old Ensoniq samplers, which me and Kevin used to use when we were first off.

Kevin: Didn't we use the Heat when we did the final Techno Animal show, too?

Justin: Yeah, we did!

Kevin: We sent the whole thing through the Heat, and we did these massive high pass-low pass shifts, adding drive and harmonics. Actually now, I just toured with Dylan Carlson for the last few weeks, and I used it exactly like that there, as well. On top of that, I used a Strymon blueSky after the Heat, basically liquefying everything with these massive waves of drone and reverb. What's so good about the Heat is that the quality is so crisp, and it's not adding anything unnecessary. I mean, we love detritus and noise.

Justin: Texture.

Kevin: And texture, yeah, but you don't lose out to the noise you don't want. You amplify the noise you do want, and you don't get the noise you don't want. The Heat's been amazing for that, live. It's shocking.

Justin: Yeah, it's ridiculous. It's become another instrument in the set. What we love about it is we can produce everything down to, you know, only below 500 Hertz, or only below 400 Hertz, and you can just set grooves off for a minute, and then add massive drops. It's also sort of how you do DJ shows, but it's so dynamic, especially with the walls that we use. Pretty dense and pretty harsh.

That's what I hear about the Heat: it's really hard not to use it, once you've started using it. It amplifies and treats the stuff you want without losing any of the texture.

Justin: Absolutely. I couldn't imagine a Zonal show without it.

Kevin: I've been using it for The Bug shows as well. Fundamentally, it sounds absolutely incredible.

Do you both have the Digitakt?

Justin: I still haven't got it!

Kevin: I have the Digitakt, but to be honest the last couple of months have been mental for me in terms of shows, and I haven't really dug into it as much as I want to. The little I have, I thought was amazing. Exactly as Justin nailed it when he described it, that's how I plan to use it. Both Justin and I were big fans of E-MU and AKAI samplers and before that, for me, even tiny, tiny Casio samplers which were all I could afford at the beginning, you know? The first Techno Animal album, Ghosts, is all samples, virtually. Samples no one would ever recognize.

Justin: We were playing them on the keyboard of the Ensoniq. Get this: Kevin's first sampler, in all reality, was a CD player! He would get these little loops that he'd record and present to me. That's how poor he was!

Kevin: That's how dope It was. Basically, all I had was a CD player where you had A and B ports. I'd hear a sound that I thought sounded sick, and with the remote control I'd try and nail these little loops. If they tripped me out, if they zoned me out at that time, I would then write down the track number, bring the CDs down to Justin in Church Stretton, and then he'd extract the sounds and loop them properly through his sampler. The CD player was sort of a pre-sampler for us!

The Digitakt is extremely accessible to new users.

Kevin: Exactly! So much fun. That sounds like an advert (laughs)! In all reality, it's all you want samplers to be. I was talking to Justin about this a year or two ago, how much I missed working with the E-MU.

Justin: We used to love the E-MU samplers.

Kevin: How much I missed hardware samplers. Obviously, the Digitakt is digital, and those E-MU filters were next level, and I still haven't heard anything quite the same. For just sheer playability, and fun to f#!k with stuff, the Digitakt is killing it. Every time Elektron has come with a new product, it's almost like they read your mind somehow. I was totally surprised when the Heat came along, and even more surprised when the Drive came along, and throwing cartwheels when Digitakt came along! It's just mad. For me, Overbridge has nailed it. I slayed the Analog Four for all the new Zonal stuff. Overbridge is genius. It means the screen of my computer is what I look at, not the screen on the unit. It's like a magnifying glass to the unit. I can get to where I want much faster, and layer things more intensely. Although I gotta say, I wish Digitakt had the analog rear-end filter/EQ of the Heat, then it would be nuts.

It's like an ultrasound image of the innards of the instrument!

Kevin: Exactly. Justin and I started out in hip-hop, and I think it's liberating that people can have the tools of those trades at their fingertips without struggling with technological grudgery or taking a long time to get a result. More importantly, even though my studio looks like a spaceship to most people, I'm actually not a technical guy at all. I'm used to getting sonic results instantly. I don't want to get lost in having to read through manuals 20 000 times to find what I need to find. I just want to be able to mutate and destroy sonics, turn them upside-down, inside-out, left-to-right, back-to-front as quickly as possible. Digitakt, for anyone, is amazing. I don't think anyone, unless you're a real arsehole, why would you want to leave the technology to just nerds? I want 14-year old council estate kids to use the Digitakt.

Justin: Yeah, exactly.

Kevin: And I want to listen to tracks, scratch my head and wonder "how the hell did they come up with that?" When I heard "I Luv U" by Dizzee Rascal, I didn't know how he came up with it, the idea. The idea wasn't the technology. The best music, no matter how technologically dependent it is, the best music I hear is the one where I don't know how they made it, and I don't care! It's about the music. It's even better when you don't know how it's made. Even better if I scratch my head for longer, and my jaw hits the floor for longer.

On that note, do any of you ever feel constrained by the musical hardware that you're surrounded by? Would you ever consider doing an all-acoustic or even an acapella song?

Justin: I think abuse of machines is what Kevin and I bonded over. That's how we work, and that's what we'll do, I think I can safely say. My obsession with machines goes back to the Eighties, and I like being at the mercy of machines. I often find them limitless, to the point where I could just go on and on with it. Where does it end? I think of them as these infinite, limitless machines that you just keep exploring further and further, like outer space.

Kevin: If I was asked how to recreate an album, I couldn't tell. It's not trying to mystify how I did it, it's just literally impossible. I kept pressing the buttons until I got closer and closer to the sound I was chasing in my head, until I hit upon it. I have no idea how I created that sound. With virtually every album I've ever made, I'll have a really hard job telling you how I got to that sound. I can tell you the instruments I used, or the machinery that was part of it, but I can't really tell you how I got to where I got in the end. Just like Justin said: you just get lost in time and sound and in the mechanics, until you finally get goosebumps, when the right sound jumps out, or the right combination of notes.

Justin: This is it. Kevin and I have never really adhered to rulebooks, and I think we find manuals, obviously they're meant to be a guide, and you can reach points quicker if you read about the route one should take, but for me, I approach machines much the same way I approach my guitar playing. I haven't got a clue what I'm doing! I've learned the basics of rhythm, the basics of tone, and it's all textural. I get interviews from guitar magazines where I'm asked things like: "wow, man, this tri-tone chord, how did you come up with that?" and I'll be like, "you tell me!" I have no idea! It sounds great, it looks great as well, but I have no idea what it is, you know what I mean? Kevin and I share the same thing there, there's no right route, it's only sound. If it takes us two days to get to something it might take some extremely learned kid to get there by a rulebook two hours, then so be it. The journey doesn't matter. We get what we want, but we can't tell you how we did it. There's no mystification. For us, it just harks back to our punk roots, basically. It's all DIY.

Kevin: I just played at Roadburn Festival which I've never played at before, and I actually got slayed by a doom metal band called Slomatics, that I hadn't been aware of before stepping into the room. What caught me about them, particularly, was the texture and tone of extremely slow riffs. It reminded me about what I loved about Godflesh when I first heard them, in that these were riffs I wanted to hear, endlessly, and be crushed by, endlessly. When we started working on Zonal, we said we really wanted a mixture of riff orientated sounds and drug-orientated impact. To somehow mix what we always loved about hip-hop, in terms of repetition and in terms of taking you to other levels of consciousness. It's like drugged out, sludge out hip-hop, but more out there, in a way. And most importantly... ridiculously heavy.

Justin, how would you describe the Analog Drive in terms of an external or internal part of the body?

Justin: Initially, I took it out at a Godflesh show in Exeter City, of all places. I had just got it, and I didn't even try it before the show. I was like, I'm just going to get there, get my Marshall stack, and this is going to kick arse! Unfortunately, it didn't! I'm not leveling this at the Analog Drive, it was a combination of the fact that it was the first time I used it and the guitar I was using. Later, when I tried running the Analog Keys through the Drive at a JK Flesh live hardware mix I was doing, then it completely made sense. The tone and texture I was starting to get out of it, that reedy, archaic pulse and this really fleshy, skinny sound that we're starting to introduce into Zonal, this nightmarish, textural world. The part of the body you asked about, then, I guess it would be the skin. It was definitely getting into some very creepy sort of, goosebumps-prickly skin sensation, yeah!

Kevin: Everything we're obsessed by is texture and tone. The Elektrons, the new s#!t, basically allows us to amplify harmonics, to blur sounds, to distort sound, to overdrive tone, and that's everything we look for. It's just a gift to us, that the company is investing a lot of time in amplifying texture and tone.

Justin: Absolutely. From that exclusively Analog Keys chain into, I think all I had at the end was an SSL compressor or something, just getting it really dirty and squashed, it was getting into some other areas entirely. It's not so much music we're making, as texture and sound. It starts rendering the music almost unimportant (laughs)!

In his 1962 novel, The Drowned World, JG Ballard gives his prophetic vision of climate change, polar ice caps melting and every city in the Northern Hemisphere being submerged. His typical Ballardian twist is that he sort of makes you look forward to it! What's your take on global warming?

Justin: I've never read that one. It's one of the very few Ballard books I haven't read! Regarding climate change, we're extremely aware of it, and obviously believe it's real. That whole climate denial thing, I find it truly bizarre, really. How could you deny it? We live in a vastly different world to the world I remember from the late 1970s, in the context of climate. Kevin will attest to this, as well. In terms of it having an impact on our work, I mean, what doesn't impact our work, you know what I mean? What humans do to the planet, I think we resolved ourselves to that many, many moons ago. In terms of the human being being intensely flawed.

Kevin: Very big question, Daniel. What Ballard does really well, in what he talked about in your conclusion of his novel, and generally, is that he nails how humans shape-shift and metamorphosize in a catastrophe.

Justin: His own life, as well.

Kevin: Yeah, huge catastrophes; his wife passing away at a very young age, where he has to face up to catastrophe in a World War II prisoner of war camp, he seemed to find a way to overcome catastrophe and use art.

Justin: In order to transcend it.

Kevin: And to explore the apocalypses of the mind. I think that's what we've always been trying to do. Music as therapy. Managing this paranoia, which any sane being should have about the world being out of control, in terms of climate. Also, we want to be control freaks, but none of us are in control, you know? I think the chaos that continues through climate change and through human behavior is echoed in what we like about making music. A chaotic epicenter to make music. Music that does metamorphosize continually. It can change shape when you think you know it but you don't know it, and where the future is a glorious unknown. Of course, no-one knows what the future is going to bring, and that's the beauty of the future, really. You can fear that, or you can cherish it.

Justin: We adapt. We are forced to adapt. Whatever the powers that be do to the planet, we're all going to be victims of this. That old tradition of putting the young people up front because they're the least aware of their own mortality, what a repulsive, abhorrent thing to do. Putting 14- or 16-year olds at the frontline. They're your children, essentially. What genius came up with these concepts? The world is essentially repulsive, and so is mankind. We do a great soundtrack to that, and use these machines made by this mad Swedish company (laughs)!

Kevin: People who listen to our s#!t just assume that we're manic depressives who hate life when it's the exact opposite. Through our music, we're able to get out a lot of the s#!t that crushes most people on a daily basis. Basically, I consider myself a pretty cheerful person.

Justin: Absolutely. Kevin and I spend most of our time laughing. I mean, if we weren't laughing all the f#!king time, we'd be f#!king crying!

That's the beauty of making art, regardless of what your weapon of choice is. Your art may be dark, aggressive, and visceral, but you remain a happy and cheerful person.

Kevin: Quite often it's called dark when Justin and I put something out, but for me, the s#!t's all about fire and light. Blinding light of consciousness. It's literally about starting a fire in your heart and mind. How can that be darkness?

Is there a Zonal album in the works?

Kevin: Yeah, we've nearly finished all the tracks. The bare bones are there, we just need to decide if and where we'll deploy vocalists and things like artwork. But the core is there.

Justin: We probably have more than enough music, it's just the details left.

Did I see a dog popping into view there, Justin?

Justin: It's a big, beautiful mix of Shepherd and Labrador. She's a beautiful dog. I've got a zoo here, literally. A dog, two cats, a hamster, two chickens and a goldfish. I'm sure there's something else knocking around, as well. It's a mad world, this house, and then me on top of it all!

Interview by: Daniel Sterner