Tell us about your live show…

“This is something I’ve been developing for a long time. Really it came from my feeling that DJing had become less and less of a ‘real’ skill. Like I spent my whole life learning how to be a tight DJ, and spent all my money on vinyl, and now nobody cares anymore! With all this digital stuff it’s easier, there’s less risk… It doesn’t feel as real as it used to. Like, I feel like I need to take something to the stage that I’m good at, like there’s a reason for me to be there! I mean, I really enjoy DJing or whatever, and I try and put as much into it as I can, but with this you can do something else. I didn’t want to use a laptop: with Ableton Live you can do some really cool shit and I really like what people can do with it, but you can just press play if you want to. I wanted to do something with no safety. So I run everything off an MPC, which has simplified, bounced versions of beats, FX, mid lines and so on from my tracks.

“The MPC is the main clock and master sequencer, and that’s controlled via a 49-key MIDI keyboard, with a MIDI thru going to the Virus. It’s all mixed on a 16-channel mixer.

“So I’ll program in a little loop on the MPC, and keep it looping, and I can play Virus over the top, and all this comes in different channels on the mixer, and I have a limiting stage and I have two effect-like reverbs on the auxes. I’ve got a hardware filter so you can low-pass/high-pass stuff in and out while the MPC just keeps churning out basic loops. You can dictate when it moves onto the next bit, a bit like Ableton, and you can sort of really plan your stuff nicely that way.”