If Capercaillie have dipped a toe in digital waters, Mouth Music seem to have jumped in with both feet. It may seem a giant leap from ancient gaelic folk art to electronic dub and ambient music, but with an eclectic mixture of old and new synths and ethnic instruments, producer Martin Swann has achieved an original blend of ancient and modern rhythms. The sound is at once natural and electronic, with its blend of natural and synthesised instruments, and live and sequenced drumming.

Yet Martin is no 'techno-head'. He is as knowledgable about virtual synthesis as he is on Celtic melodies and ethnic rhythms, and is perfectly at home with computers, samplers and ADAT machines. At the same time he can describe an old piece of Roland kit in loving detail.

"I'm very slow at new technology. I can't be bothered with it. If it can do what I want to do then I'm happy. The areas of interest I'm developing at the moment are much more to do with sounds.

"I'm interested in the issue of drumming. I've been working with this drummer, but we don't have the possibility of recording in a way that is going to work for both of us. We don't have the space for the mics, channels and tape tracks, so that restricts us to using loops. We have done some recording. We sat in the room for 2-3 days and he just played the drums and I eventually mixed them onto a DAT so that I could use it and run it off from the sampler. Drum sounds in the kind of music that we do has ground to a halt, everyone has been doing the same thing for ages.

"There are two things I keep thinking about. One, why is everyone obsessed with kit drum snares and hi-hats. Two, if that is the case how come no-one's working on a virtual drum kit. Then it wouldn't be just a case of multi sounds, but of creating the essential sounds and understanding why drums play differently and sustain for longer times, depending on where and when you hit them.

"It could all be done with number crunching. For the drummer it would be much more like playing a kit. It's not satisfying for a drummer who's used to playing a kit to play samples, because every time you hit them they make the same sound, and very little changes. You can change the volume and the pitch, but what you can't change is how it sets off the room harmonics, which is the key to how it lives. It's a specialist area really, and I'm more interested in getting to grips with that, than getting more recording power.

"The other thing I'm getting my head round is analogue synthesis. I ended up with 2 JX8Ps. The presets are crap, but when you start mucking around it's great. I don't have the PG800, I just do it from the front, which is fiddly but you can do it. It's my first venture into analogue, aside from a Roland module called the MKS7. It's called a Super Quartet, and it's like a very early multitimbral unit, with rhythm, bass, chords and melody. The rhythm section I've never used. The bass section has 19 basic, and two or so oscillator analogues. It's primitive, but three or four of them are spot on. They're not 303s or anything, but they are pretty handy.

"Then there are 99 chord sounds which are four note polyphonic, and 99 sounds in the melody section which is two note polyphonic. So basically you have two analogues, keyboards and bass in one box, and they're completely uneditable apart from one control which is called Dynamics Sens. It acts as frequency resonator, mixture or just volume.

"There will always be this huge gulf between those who make music and those who listen to it."

"I'm just getting an S3000. It's taking a while to appear and I'll need another one for live stuff. I've got a Mackie 32:8 desk, I had a Mackie 16:4 before that. They get the thumbs up those guys, they know just what they're doing. It's straightforward, very flexible, it's clean and gets your whites whiter than white. I've got ATC monitors, we got it all for the last album, so that we could do it here rather than at the studio. The recording budget for that was around about £10,000 to supplement what I had already."
"You can get away with a lot with just that one control. You can record something on another channel and then pan it over and then move it randomly at different speeds, which is good fun. There's a lot to be said for instruments that do absolutely nothing, where you have like, one slider and you don't know what its going to do on any particular sounds. I haven't written a song for about 3-4 years that hasn't used it.
For all this talk of samplers and technology, it's Mouth Music's effortlessly natural sound which impresses. Catching those moments in time which transform a drum pattern into a groove is a tricky business. Mouth Music have suffered in the past from being bracketed with the World and Folk music tags, but as Martin tells it, that has offered him the opportunity to observe other ways of working and learn from them.

"We have been to a lot of WOMAD festivals and seen a lot of musicians from all over the world, and they are playing instruments that are very characteristic of their country. You hear what these people are doing and you're baffled. You can be taken in by the whole thing and it's someone else's voice and you get hung up. I've tried to integrate a lot of those sounds and make my rubbish attempts to recreate some of their feel. Sometimes they aren't as feeble as you think, it's like listening to your voice on a tape recorder. When someone else hears it they assume a confidence and deliberation which you didn't actually have.

"There will always be this huge gulf between those who make music and those who listen to it. That's the saving grace of playing live, all those questions go out of the window, everyone is caught up in the event and everyone shares it. There is so much shared stuff that the gulf between the performer and the listener becomes less important, less worrying. It becomes a collective enthusiasm."

Enquiries to: Triple Earth Records, (Contact Details)

In a unique illustration of the uses of sampling this month the Re:Mix CD brings you not only the extended 'Got to' mix of 'Move On', but some of the building-block samples which went to create the 'Mouth Music' sound.

- Mouth Music: Move On (Got To Mix)
- mouthmusic samples