fullonline: Who is "Colin OOOD", where are you from and what is your musical background?

Colin OOOD: Colin OOOD is really Colin Bennun. I was born in the town of Exeter in South West England, where I lived until I was 19; I'm now 35 years old and have been making music since I started piano lessons at the age of 5, at which time I also had my first glimpse of an analogue synthesiser, an EMS Synthi. I was always interested in electronic music, and I spent all my savings on helping to buy myself a Juno 6 synth for my birthday when I was 15. Since then I've been in all sorts of different bands, from jazz and classic covers to pop, funk, rock and even folk music. In 1987 I wrote my first acid-house track (which you can download from the Voice of Cod website) but then left dance music behind when I went to University. In the early 1990s I started hearing more dance music again, and went to a couple of big hardcore raves but I never really connected with the music until 1993 when I heard "Hard Trance Acperience 2" by Hardfloor. Inspirational, to say the least... the next track I wrote was released on Phantasm's second-ever compilation, "Hard Trance and Psychedelic Techno". Six months later I met Steve and Nigel and OOOD was formed, with our first release also on Phantasm in 1996.

fullonline: Are you married and/or have kids?

Colin OOOD: Right now I'm single... I have no kids. Whether or not I choose to have children will depend on whether my life brings me someone with whom I'd want to share that aspect of life with, at a time when it's appropriate to start a family. I'd like to think it would at some point, but you never know what's going to happen.

fullonline: Can you keep a comfortable lifestyle working only as a psychedelic artist or a second job is needed?

Colin OOOD: It is possible; however for me at the moment it's necessary to have a job to survive, although I'm working on changing this.

Right now I have a job teaching music technology to kids between 8 and 16 years old - I teach four days a week and it's just enough to keep me afloat. I also offer my services as a mastering engineer, but that aspect is still in an early stage.

fullonline: What is on your CD player right now?

Colin OOOD: Well, it's on the Stooodio computer, but right now I'm listening to a 40-minute MP3 mix that someone just sent me anonymously, called "Up For It". It starts off with one of our Voice of Cod tracks and includes Infected Mushroom and Pop Stream too. I have no idea who sent it; it's really bugging me!

fullonline: How do you see the differences between your projects?

Colin OOOD: It's the particular combination of people involved that makes each project different, and the results are always a combination of the influences of everyone in the studio at the time, put through the filter of my programming and engineering (mostly) and varied according to what we're trying to achieve in that particular track. Beyond that I really wouldn't like to pin down the style of each project as my view of them is often very different from that of other people - except to say that Voice of Cod, OOOD and Benefactor are all �dance floor-oriented� and Unconscious Collective is much more eclectic. OOOD and Unconscious Collective are different to the others though, as they both have the same core members (me, Steve, Ryo and Rama), but very different output. Even with OOOD/UC, there's so much variation in the writing because we write in so many different combinations of people, particularly since Ryo and Steve started writing more on their own.

fullonline: Which one of your own music do you like the most? Does it have a special meaning to you?

Colin OOOD: Wow... tricky question. It's impossible to single out just one as a favourite, as there are a few that I'm particularly pleased with or that have special resonance. The first one that comes to mind is the Unconscious Collective track, Fluorostani Transcendance, which came out on Flying Rhino in 1996. Writing that track, and the B-side "Synchronicity Converger" was just pure inspiration; both tracks came out in one solid lump during a week's session in Oxford, and we knew straight away that something very special had happened. Then there's "Kundalini" by OOOD, which has one of my favourite build-up sections of any of our tracks, and one of the most satisfying drops (after Fluorostani, of course!). Of the latest tracks I've been involved in my particular favourites are "Free Range" by OOOD, which fulfils in every single detail the original intention when we started writing it, which was to create the ultimate start-of-set track, and "Bubbles of Nothing" by Voice of Cod, which is the best piece of writing Andrew and I have done, I think - and the production's not too shabby either.

fullonline: What other music style do you listen to?

Colin OOOD: I don't tend to listen to much music when I'm not writing or out at a party or festival. I'm not sure why; it just doesn't occur to me to put on a CD or listen to the radio. I listen to Radio 4 a lot [speech-only national BBC radio station] when I'm driving between schools; it can sometimes be a good place to get unusual vocal samples from! In the past though I've been a big fan of the Art of Noise, ELO, and Prince and the whole Parliament/Funkadelic thing, amongst others.

fullonline: What Psytrance Artists would you like to work with?

Colin OOOD: I'm currently halfway through a track with Tron; he's a talented bloke and our styles work well together, I think. I'd also love to work with Ott again as I learned a lot while we were writing our previous track. Dick Trevor is also someone I want to work with; we've discussed it and even booked sessions, but for one reason and another he lunched it out... the git... but I'm sure it'll happen before we both retire. Collaboration is all about the personalities involved though, and I can sometimes be a bit shy around people I don't know (especially people whose work I respect), so it would be great to get to know people like Simon Posford or Bill Halsey a bit better, or Carlos Santan from Wild Things, or Nate Protoculture, or Dimitri, or a hundred other people whose tunes or DJing has inspired me.

fullonline: Is there any equipment you think can help you produce better music?

Colin OOOD: THIS!

My birthday is the first of November.

fullonline: Do you prefer to play at parties at any specific time?

Colin OOOD: I think as a live-act you've got to trust the promoter to know what you play, and to plan the party so the music flows right all night - or day. Or night-and-day.

I've seen both the OOOD and the Voice of Cod material work really well both in the morning and at night so really it's just good to play to a full dance floor and see the tracks do their thing. I've been involved in quite a wide range of styles so sometimes when I DJ it's also nice to play an opening set and take the dance floor from ambient all the way to 144 bpm... and obviously playing the final set at a festival is quite cool as well! The only thing about playing really early in the morning (eg. in London last weekend when we played a Voice of Cod set from 5 to 6 am) is that as a fairly straight-edge partygoer I need to conserve my energy for the performance, which (if I get really tired) can sometimes mean having an hour or two power-nap before we play - and I hate to miss any of the party!

fullonline: How do you choose the samples of your tracks? What is your favourite one?

Colin OOOD: They come from all over the place; from the TV, the radio, cassette storybooks, films... some of the best are made with just a microphone and a moment's inspiration. For instance, the sample in the Voice of Cod track "The Art of Funk Shui" is Andrew reading a script I wrote, processed to sound as much like Samuel L. Jackson as I could get! I believe that many samples work in tracks because they're being taken out of context; in my opinion there's nothing more pretentious than someone saying something 'spiritual' purely for use in a track. Rama (one of the other OOOD-members) collects vocal samples and random sonic madness as a hobby; recently he gave me 18GB (!!!!) worth of material which has been a fantastic resource for all our projects. Then there's George Bush... there's a website where you can download clips of many of his speeches as MP3 files, with each file named for what he says in it. Thi makes it possible to search the files by name for certain words and edit them together to make him say something like, oh, I don't know, "I fully endorse Voice of Cod".

fullonline: Tell me about the differences in your three projects. You see them as really different ways to express yourself?

Colin OOOD: There's more than three projects, actually! OOOD, Unconscious Collective, Voice of Cod, Benefaktor, and whatever other collaborations come along... really there's only one purpose for my involvement in any of them, and that's to make the best music I'm capable of at the time. OOOD has obviously been going the longest (11 years as I write this) and although Nigel hasn't been a regular part of the band for a couple of years there was a particular magic that happened when the three of us were all in the zone, still to this day I can get a buzz like no other from working with Steve. OOOD has always been about just writing whatever the fuck psychedelic trance we feel like whereas Voice of Cod has been more focussed on dance floor killarghs, and the combination works very well for me. Benefaktor is still quite a young project; Chris and I have only written maybe 3 or 4 tracks together, but each one has come out sounding great. Obviously there's only one project can actually be physically worked on at any one time, so when one project is really busy the others have to take a bit of a back seat. This is what's happened recently; in preparing the Voice of Cod album I haven't been able to work as much on OOOD as I would have liked, but now "We Are Free" is out of my hands I'll be able to work on the OOOD album instead.

fullonline: Tell me about your older releases. Why is so hard to find them these days? In what ways your sound evolved in your opinion?

Colin OOOD: Well I think of the OOOD story in three chapters, each surrounding one of our albums (including "Free Range" which is the current work in progress). It all started with our vinyl releases first on Phantasm, then on Cabbaged, which led up to our "aLIVE" album on Cabbaged in 1996. The sound back then was very basic - no digital audio at all, just a totally live MIDI production. This meant that we worked and wrote in a totally different way than we do now, when everything's inside the computer, partly because we only had a very limited number of hardware synths and effects, most of which could only be used for a single sound in the track, and partly because each of those sound-sources was programmed from the front panel, which is a much more spontaneous way of making sounds. The writing on that first album was really inspired, I think, which perhaps made up for the production which wasn't at the top of the tree even given the general technical standards of the day. The tracks were recorded live at various gigs and there's all sorts going on as you can imagine; synths out of tune and even breaking down completely, not to mention mixing mistakes and extraneous behaviour by various bandmembers! What makes that album so good for me though is the whole live energy of it, rather than it being a piece of perfect production. It's an ongoing dream of mine to re-engineer some of those early tracks too, as there is some superb music on the album and the records that came before it. It's a shame the CD is so hard to find these days, but it was only ever a relatively small pressing and the distributors and the label both went out of business not long after it was released so it never got the exposure we were hoping for; a familiar story as you'll see...

The second album, "Breathing Space" (1999), was very much a transitional thing as towards the end of writing it I built myself a new computer and invested in Cubase VST. This meant that we could master the album ourselves (in a very basic fashion compared to what I've learned since!), and enabled the creation of "Hartley's Ambient Jam", one of my favourite of our ambient tracks. In addition, we had spent two weeks in another studio in Oxford mixing a whole bunch of OOOD tracks (the only time we've done this - everything else was written and mixed in the Stooodio, wherever that was at the time) and I had invested in a digital mixer and another sampler; all these factors worked together to make the second album a much more polished production than aLIVE. We released it ourselves on OOOD Records, distributed by MRL who had taken over from Flying (the distributors of our first album)... and who swiftly went bankrupt in a similar fashion, taking the album down with them! According to what we were told by the staff at MRL only 1000 copies made it into the country before the company became unable to pay its shipping bills. You can still find the album on sale in some places, particularly in Israel, but we have never received a penny from any sales other than the initial CDRs we made in the studio before we got the distribution deal; these were sold directly by us through mail order and by Chaos Unlimited.

Since OOOD's second album, computer power has increased somewhat and it's now possible to create complete productions totally inside the computer, with total control over every aspect of the track in a way that just wasn't possible five years ago, and this is now how we work. My own skills have also developed considerably, and at last I'm feeling confident with the sound I'm getting. However the lack of hands-on control means that sounds are created in a different way, which affects the way riffs are written, which changes the way tracks are structured... none of these changes are 'good' or 'bad', but they do change the direction the tracks take. Eventually I'd like to have a system with the power and flexibility of a virtual studio, but with the hands-on control of a hardware setup, but for now I'll have to wait... We have all the tracks for the next album, but even since we wrote them I have learned a lot, so I'm just beginning the process of going through them with whichever members of OOOD were involved in writing them, and bringing them up to scratch with fresh mixes. In the course of this I�m also going to be remixing some tracks from the earlier periods, like "Silence", "Spangled" and "Otherworld", and some of these may or may not also make it onto the album. "Free Range" will be released on Organic Records around December 2005, so hopefully there will be no problems getting hold of it - and we might even get paid this time!

fullonline: How it is to work with Organic Records? Tell us a little about the Tsunami Benefit CD.

Colin OOOD: Working with Organic is all good; it obviously helps that my studio partner in Voice of Cod has also been the label A&R for the past couple of years! Chris has also become a good friend so all in all, this is the first time in recent years I've worked with a label where I'm confident that my feeling of trust is not misplaced. As for the Tsunami Benefit CD, I helped as with it as much as I could, but in the end my involvement with it was very minimal; I helped source one of the tracks as the label concerned were taking to long too send the master, and I suppose I gave some moral support to Chris while he was working on it. He worked amazingly hard to pull it together as quickly as he did, and got severely stressed at times by the whole thing. I really think it did good for some of the people affected by the Tsunami; it raised about �9000 which went directly to rebuild three homes in Sri Lanka. That might not sound like much but it's three families who now have somewhere to live again.

fullonline: What are your future releases, and what are the labels you're currently working with?

Colin OOOD: Apart from Organic, we have current involvement with Liquid Records with a Voice of Cod track on their debut compilation "Build Your Own Reactor", and OOOD has a track on John '00' Fleming's current "White Label Republic" compilation. I've also doing mastering for a few people including www.cytopia.org, an on-line record label based in Amsterdam, and am in discussion with several other labels and artists about offering a similar service to them. The next major project though, as I've said, is the OOOD album and I'm just getting my teeth into that now. After that will probably be an Unconscious Collective album, and then who knows... there will definitely be more Voice of Cod tracks, and collaborations with various people, and I might even look for a label that will release my solo piano pieces!

fullonline: What do you think about people sharing music through mp3 instead of buying it?

Colin OOOD: It happens; it has bad points and good points... I think that if everybody shares music through MP3 instead of buying it then obviously labels have a big problem, but many people insist that they use MP3s to help them choose the music they actually want to buy, so the situation is more complicated than that. It can be a good promotional tool, I guess, but equally it can be gutting for both labels and artists to find tracks on the p2p networks before their release as it undoubtedly can affect sales in a bad way. However if labels want to survive I think it's up to them to find a response to this problem (if it is a problem) and put some effort into developing ways of selling their back-catalogue in a format which is obviously very popular! One thing about MP3s which is really bad is DJs who play them out; don't do it! If you're going to make money from other people's music (which, let's face it, is what most DJs do) then at least support the artists and labels by buying the music you get paid to play. Plus even high bitrate MP3s sound shit over a big system.

fullonline: How do you make your Live Acts? What equipment do you use in your Live Acts?

Colin OOOD: Each project plays live in a slightly different way, as the line-up on stage is different for each one. With all the bands we try and have as much live musicianship on stage as we can while keeping the tracks sounding as good as possible; this is obviously a compromise as no-one can play with the accuracy needed for trance! Also, having too many instruments playing live means you lose the 'mastered' sound so we tend to have full mixes on the playback while we improvise on top. With OOOD we have Steve and me playing live keyboards, with Steve playing a Korg Karma while I play VST instruments from Cubase on my laptop so I can have multiple outputs going into the mixer. Ryo plays percussion (Roland HR16) and a bit of keyboards, and Rama DJs the playback elements from his laptop and uses Ableton Live in conjunction with his MIDI controllers to inject sample madness into the mix. If the venue has any microphones, Steve and I also drop in a bit of darbuka now and again. I'm also fairl active on the mixer, dubbing out the live elements (and parts of the playback tracks too) and generally keeping the pot bubbling without boiling over.

Voice of Cod plays live in a similar way, but obviously with fewer people on stage; Andrew and I both have laptops with Andrew DJing the playback elements and adding extra layers with Absynth and a Korg Kaos Pad. My setup there is the same as it is for OOOD.

Unconscious Collective is different. Because it's not aimed at the dance floor we're much more free to experiment and even make mistakes. With UC we go full-on with the live band idea, with Ryo playing a full acoustic drumkit, Stevie on acoustic and electric guitars and me with as many keyboards as I can get my hands on! Rama again controls the playback and adds his (un)usual tasteful psychedelia. We also have some friends of ours singing with us for these sets; for example, when we played at the Glade Festival we had Ryo's sister Yas, Claire and Dee... they're all fantastic singers and hearing three-part harmonies drifting over our chillout tracks always sends shivers down my spine. Yas is working on her own album at the moment with Dub Transmissions, a label based in Birmingham. Because of the much greater live element with this project - in particular the vocal mics and the drum kit - it's impossible for me to mix it on stage and play keyboards simultaneously so we rely on other engineers to make sure the sound is good.

fullonline: You prefer to play a DJ set or a Live Act? Why?

Colin OOOD: Both! They're very different things and I really enjoy both of them. With DJing it's much less hassle carrying two CD cases and headphones rather than a full keyboard rig; you can simply turn up, party for a while, DJ and party again afterwards. Nothing beats the dance floor going off to a live-set though, and there's the chance of creating something really special with the people at the party. When it happens it makes the hassle of bringing (or hiring) all the equipment, sound checking, and breaking it all down again after the party totally worthwhile!

fullonline: In your DJ sets you usually play tracks from which other artists?

Colin OOOD: Mostly when I DJ I play tracks I've been involved in, from OOOD to Voice of Cod and even sometimes the early Unconscious Collective tracks, just for the nostalgia factor; I'm very much looking forward to being able to play re-engineered versions of some of the early tracks too. Recently I've been playing a couple of tracks from the E-Jekt album in my sets, but I tend to rely on the Organic and Liquid Records compilations for most of the other tracks; you don't have to go any further than that to find music that's right up my street! "Invasion From Hyperspace" and "New Generation" in particular are superb albums and there's only one or two tracks on each of them that I wouldn't play.

fullonline: What makes a good party? You think decoration is important?

Colin OOOD: The people! Then the music, then the decor, then the location/the venue. But it's the people that make the parties what they are. A good sound system is very important too. All the other elements must be just right for a truly unforgettable event, but without the people a party is just an empty room or forest clearing full of loud noise.

fullonline: What do you think people should do to make a better scene? Any visions about the future?

Colin OOOD: Imagine if everyone who went to a party did one thing to help everyone else enjoy it, whether that was bringing decor (with the agreement of the organisers!), dressing up, bringing fruit for the morning, whatever... if everyone contributed more than just a bit of money and some enthusiasm on the dance floor then we would all get so much more out of the scene - because there would be so much more being put in! Taking care of your trash at a nature party is also a really good way of making them much more enjoyable, quite apart from the fact that it helps those left behind at the end of a party to clean up afterwards. I have no idea what the future of the scene holds but it's up to everyone who takes part in it to make it what they want it to be.

fullonline: How long does it take for you to make a new track, from the ideas and inspirations to the dance floor? Any hint for a person who is starting making psytrance?

Colin OOOD: Starting from a blank screen it can take just a weekend to write something playable from scratch, but sometimes it's months before we're completely happy with a track. For example, "Free Range" by OOOD was basically written in a couple of weekends and we were playing it out within a month or so of starting it. For 9 months we thought it was finished and then someone (Steve I think) had the idea to add another riff in the final section of the track. We had one session on it in Devon and all of a sudden it dropped into place, and now it's impossible to imagine the tune without it. Then again, Voice of Cod's first track "We are Free" took 36 working hours from start to finish one weekend, with a couple of evenings to-and-fro over MSN tweaking it and getting the final section right.

Any advice I could possibly give must obviously be taken with a pinch of salt, but one thing I've noticed is that lots of people have problems finishing their tracks. If you can get past this hurdle and actually finish every (or most) tune you start, instead of having the beginnings to 20 tracks, but none finished, then you're on a winner because each piece you finish will be better in some way than the last. You're training your ears all the time and you learn not just from each track you write, but a surprising amount in between each one too, and the tracks you've finished will be a good record of your progress (which can be very encouraging when nothings seems to be sounding the way you want it to. By 'finish', I don't mean 'end up with a piece of music that sounds like it could have come off the latest Nano compilation', I just mean the best-sounding track you can come up with at the time no matter what it sounds like. You have to be honest about your skills, and know when the law of diminishing returns means that it's pointless trying to make further improvements. Find two or three tracks that you really like the sound of and use WAVs of them as references for the quality of your own engineering; change these tunes every couple of months so that you don't end up just copying them! Hearing well-produced tracks is also a good way of learning your speakers.

fullonline: We all know that all kinds of weird stuff happens at psychedelic gatherings. Can you tell us something different/funny that you saw or happened to you in a party?

Colin OOOD: In 1996 we did an OOOD gig in Oxford, where Nigel, Steve and I were all living at the time. Timothy Leary had died a few days before, so Nigel wanted to make an announcement before we played. I reluctantly fixed him up with a microphone; anyone who knows him will know why I wasn't overenthusiastic about letting Nigel loose in front of a crowd with a mic in one hand and 2 litres of Strong White Cider (may contain traces of apples) inside him. He made a very short, solemn speech about Leary and his influence on certain aspects of the scene, before finishing with the immortal words "...and so now... will you please join me... in sixty minutes... of... TOTAL INSANITY!" whereupon he hit the trigger button on his EMS Synthi and... space warped.

Half an hour later in mid-track I noticed he wasn't at his electronics; I turned round from the mixer to see him standing in full view of the dance floor at the back of the stage, pissing in a pint glass. He put the glass down, zipped up and went back to tweaking.

I never did see what happened to that glass after our set; I just thank the Gods he was facing away from the crowd.

fullonline: Any last comment, message and/or promotional link?

Colin OOOD: We are the genetically-unstable vegetables. We are here to protect you from the blow-up parsnip of Neil Armstrong.

http://www.voiceofcod.com
http://www.organicrecords.net
http://www.triskelemanagement.com

fullonline: Thank you for the fat answers... Keep making music!
Respect!