Nick Bugayev is an accomplished Canadian computer musician who has a wide and varied portfolio. He is currently reading for a PhD in composition, focusing on the techno genre. Aside from this has collaborated with the Compagnie Marie Chouinard (Quebec) dance company on a cutting edge art installation (Cantique 3) which seats two observers in front of Jazzmutant Lemur touchscreens, allowing them to control and manipulate a facial and onomatopoeic dialogue between two performers. He has been hired many times over as an audio programming guru, has played laptop in a band and has a flourishing career as a DJ/producer. So what is it that makes the future Dr Techno tick?

Can you tell a bit about yourself, how and why you got into music ?

My first love in music was the violin. I started playing when I was 6 years old. I also started messing around with computers at the same time, teaching myself computer programming. I've been involved with music and computers in one way or another ever since. The second inspiration was the first time I heard a 303.

I was a teenager and I didn't know anything yet about synthesizers. How the heck were these sounds made!? The rest is history. I eventually went back to school, did a degree in Electroacoustic composition. I spent a few years doing music for videogames, doing various fine arts projects and now I'm back to techno.

How did you discover Jazzmutant's controllers?

It was a case of a good thing coming from a bad thing, really! My studio was robbed in 2006, but thankfully I was insured. So when the time to gear up again, I really had a wide range of choices. I'd spotted the Lemur a few months earlier, and as I was focused on live performance, it looked like the most cutting edge device I could get.

Why did you choose to use it above other products on the market?

I chose it because I could make it fit whatever concept I was working with. I've used it for so many different situations, and it's proven consistently adaptable. It's always the same answer that comes back, isn't it? Instead of trying to bend my concept to fit a physical controller, I could design a control surface to match the concept.

When I was doing live improvisation with acoustic musicians in the Bistouri project, the live configuration changed every show, depending on how many musicians and mics we had. The Lemur was crucial because I could easily adapt the template to work with as many inputs and effects I needed.

How has using the controller changed the way you work?

One of the most inspiring things that happens when using the Lemur is that it makes me see software in a different way. If I'm building my own software, I know exactly how I want to use it.

But when I use a commercial package, like say Ableton, I end up doing very different things with the Lemur than when I'm using a mouse. I recently made a little module to control the Resonators in Ableton. Now, usually you end up having the Resonators as a fairly static effect, maybe tweaking the amount and color of the effect but no more. On the Lemur now, I can play all the resonators like a keyboard, only in a small pitch matrix. Or if I turn off the grid, I can have LFOs on each Resonator. I end up doing the same sort of thing with the EQ8. Instead of using the EQ8 for mixing and tone adjustment, it becomes a performance effect where I can grab 4-5 bands at the same time. So overall, I end up performing things that were static before, or that I would draw in laboriously with a mouse. It's such a different frame, having many parameters simultaneously available to different fingers.

What do you find most useful about it in terms of features?

On a technical side, the scripting introduced in V2 has been extremely useful. On a physical controller, a knob is a knob is a knob. I used to be aggravated by controllers which promised vast control, but implemented double and triple functions for a same button. On the Lemur, controls can change their appearance according to the task at hand, they are contextually dynamic. I can also make controls show feedback from other controls and from the computer. With Ableton that means getting feedback from clips, the mixer and effects. For me it was key to have a controller with a lot of feedback from the software.

What would you like to see in future revisions of the software?

I'd like to see more options for modifying the appearance of objects. Curves, diagonals, skins.

What are your plans for the near future?

I'm doing a PhD in composition right now so that's the main thing, my topic is about producing minimal techno. Right now, I'm interested in the early 90s minimal sound, those process based tracks with links to 70s minimalism. So lots of reading, listening and producing. What I'm trying to do now is focus on a specific sound. A couple years ago, I set a goal of writing a track per week for a year. The project lasted six months, I got 25 tracks out of it and learned a lot about the creative process. My first releases came out of that so it got me involved in the whole release process. I did a track per day project for a while, to have a look at how I could play with the speed of my creative process. The track per week one was interesting in the wide range of styles that came out, I had specifically set no aesthetic boundaries. So right now there's less emphasis on how fast I'm producing, more on the style. I'm looking at the different meanings of 'minimal' and experimenting with them.