My name is Samuel and the world is significant to me. My backround consists of a constant acknowledgement of beauty.

My name is Jonathan Dean. I've lived in California, Germany, Florida, North Carolina, and Louisiana. I've always been into computers and
abstract thinking. I've always been pretty strange.

UDR: Describe your working relationship, and some of your earlier experiments. Have either of you had any formal training?

JON: We met a couple years ago at a friend's house. Sam tried to get me to be in a band with him. I wasn't really into the idea but I went along just to see what might happen. Eventually, I turned him on to electronic music and we started just doing that. I myself had been doing it for about 2 years. I wasn't too serious about it and most of my songs were shit. I think we've improved tremendously over the past few years. I have no traditional musical talents. Sam plays the guitar or something.

SAM: Jon and I have a developed musical relationship. It's not like we just met and 'got right to it'. When we met, I didn't even listen to electronic music at all. I was playing in various types of indie-rock and hardcore bands and Jon was already messing around with the software, making small loops and such. We started to hang out because we both noticed that we were both intelligent, and soon enough knew that we understood each other's outlook on life. He tried several times to introduce the electronic music to me, and I still didn't hear it or understand it. I was like, "That's cool music man," but I didn't hear it as 'music', just noise. I introduced Jon to a drug called DXM, and we began to have amazing experiences on it. The second time we tripped was the most most amazing time of my life. I, in the room, frantically trying to put on music that sounded good; At The Drive In, Modest Mouse, Poison the Well, Converge, and other types of music. I didn't realize how all the music I listened to sounded the same, I never noticed how all these bands are almost exactly alike. They all had guitar, vocals, bass, drums. Jon saw I was in a drug induced panic, and offered to play some of his music. He put on Autechre's Draft7:30 and left me alone in the dark room to listen. Probably about 15 minutes in, it finally hit me. Music is beyond instruments! There are other ways of expressing yourself musically. It was like this new world ripped a hole in my reality and pored out all over the place. I wasn't sure what exactly was happening, but I did know I'd found something I'd never noticed before.

Days after the experience he showed me all the groups, mostly stuff from Warp Records. Jon also showed me this program called Fruity Loops and I began making electronic music immediately. For the first year I was listening and making music, Jon and I never collaborated. We made our own music separately, yet remained best friends. I think we tried to collaberate a few times, but it didn't work. My project was called It's A Tesseract (which can be found on myspace) and Jon's project was called People Thought.

The birth of Zoogoo was basically us exchanging data. The first song we made, "Madness", I used Jon's loops as a backbone for the whole song, and I layered other parts and composed. So, one of our methods for making music is basically us just trading our loops, samples, and methods for creating sound. Later on, we came across the idea of using midi controllers, and that's how we began to make live music. We'll set up various types of samplers and control them with knobs. It takes about a week to set up something good, and we just shut off the lights and turn off our monitor screens, and twist knobs like mad scientists. We have been perfecting our live setup and we think it will be the basis of music creation for Zoogoo. It's really a big pain-in-the-ass to program everything. If you can just program a few things to modulate, you have an unlimited resource for loops and samples. The main factor in music is communication between humans.

JON: Our workflow is pretty chaotic. In the past we have just exchanged
sounds and loops and then gone off into our own little worlds. Sometimes we would patch tracks that we did separately together. Usually I would program really detailed beats and Sam would take them and integrate them into whatever he was working on at the time. Now that we do things live its pretty much an equal mix of work between us both.

UDR: What drives the Zoogoo concept? Talk about your process, and any other relevant creative details.

JON: Zoogoo is meant to be the soundtrack to the life of a very confused
and chaotic creature. It is constantly evolving and knows no boundaries. It moves the way it wants, to express exactly how it feels at that moment. The process has one main ingredient, and that is the compounding of data. Sounds go through many processes to get them to sound as complex and saturated as possible. Something may be several generations down and over a year old before it finds a place in a track.

SAM: Life is boring and it seems like making music is the best thing to do. The reason I make music and art is because I have made contact to synthetic life forms in some unknown demension. I guess I am trying to recreate my experiences. Jon, I think, makes music because he dreads working at a carwash. I am just finishing up school for graphic design, so that I can make crappy art for fat guys instead of making hamburgers for fat guys. As an artist you have to work a shitty job to support yourself and your art(supplies and such). There doesnt have to be some amazing explanation as to why you make music, you kind of just do, because it's the best thing to do at that time. Our hope is to get on a major electronic label and tour the world. That's all we're asking for.

UDR: How important is it to you that other people experiment with psychotropics? It seems you value the revelations you've arrived at through drug use... do you believe it is important for artists to try and enhance their perceptions in this way?

SAM: Well, I actually don't condone the use of drugs, because people take it the wrong way. Most people abuse it and use it as entertainment more than they use it for spiritual use. I do condone things like anti-depresents and things like that. I take a whole slew of medications that help me out a lot. In fact, I don't know what I would do without them. As amazing as we are, we're still physical beings and need to take care of our bodies.

Although I'm 'iffy' to say, "Drugs make your music and art better," it's kind of true. Any form of perception changing and deception will possibly lead to enlightenment. I would of never 'heard' the music if I had not tripped.

If artists learn about the drugs by reasearching them and reading about experiences, they'll get a better understanding of how they work and how they can benifit from them. Drugs help as much as they hurt. The more you meditate and drift off in thought, the more you'll seperate yourself from society which will lead to pain, loneliness and suffering. On the bright side, you will become knowledgable about your universe and all its wonders. I have seen drugs hurt more they they help though.

JON: I don't do these things very often, but I do think they help you with the way you see your world. Do they help you with music? I don't know. I mostly have had revelations in other areas in my life. Maybe it has had an impact indirectly, but I have always been creating things like this and because it's such a technical thing. I can't make a direct connection between the two. The best thing I've noticed about drugs is it tends to make people listen more carefully to music. I hate how I'll play something brillliant for someone and they'll just nod their head or say, "yeah, that's neat." They never really listen.

UDR: Zoogoo can be both chaotic & ordered. Do you think a great deal about editing the structure of your pieces? or are they recorded in real-time? You mention programming... to what degree do you incorporate programming? How much of the sound making process is indeterminate?

Where do you draw the line between method and madness?

JON: In the past we were a lot more into programming and being precise about the composition of the tracks. I would spend days working on just one beat and making it perfect. The majority of everything I did was put together painstakingly on the computer with the mouse. It was really pretty awful (the process).

Over the years we’ve slowly migrated over to playing things live. I’m at the point now where almost everything I do is live. I patch together different sessions and I’ll still program some things that I think sound best programmed (like little precise transitions between larger sections in the songs). Even though a majority of what I’m doing now is done live, I still spend a good deal of time cleaning it up and making sure things fade together and flow nicely with mouse editing.

Of course the live sets that Sam and I have done together are completely spontaneous, and we’ve released whatever live stuff we’ve done in the past almost completely unedited. Right now we’ve got a piece we did that we want to spend some more time on adding bits and pieces to. So it’s a good mixture of live and 'studio' work where it’s needed.

What we’re really trying to achieve as a general theme is a very organic sound. We want the order to be framed by chaos. To me it seems very obvious that none of the songs are random. This, I suppose, is where the line is drawn. When it gets to the point where you can’t tell if there is a pattern or not, then it starts to become less music and more random noises. Our tracks might fall apart at some points, but this is only in contrast to the points that they pull themselves back together, which I think is another good example of the organic theme we are trying to infuse it with.

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