It's no good being precious about your waxings these days; if they aren't unrecognisably remixed, they'll become sample fodder, or even interactive CD-i's. At the forefront of this technology is veteran musician and producer Todd Rundgren. Cliff Douse finds him brimming with interactive concepts

Todd Rundgren has been making and producing albums for the last 25 years. Solo albums such as Something/Anything? and A Wizard, A True Star have achieved legendary status, while his band Utopia have been responsible for some highly adventurous and compulsive rock music. Todd is also, of course, one of the most respected producers in the business. He recently re-invented himself as TR-I (Todd Rundgren-Interactive) and his latest album No World Order is the first recording totally conceived for CD-I technology. It was recorded at his home studio in Woodstock, and features some striking programming, playing and rapping, bound together by Todd's superb production skills.

When did Todd first get the idea for a CD-Interactive album?

"Probably close to three years ago now, when my 19 year relationship with Warner Brothers came to an end. I thought that more than just moving to another label, I wanted to redefine what I was doing musically, and incorporate some of the things I'd learned about computing technology in a way that would change the experience of listening to it, and to a certain degree, the experience of making it."

Many people aren't familiar with the operation of CD-I. How do you change the parameters?

'There's a control panel that allows you to select a musical vector or parameter such as the mix, tempo or mood of the music and to specify how strictly you want a particular vector to be adhered to. Like for instance, if you're having a dance party and you want all the songs to be uptempo, then you can set it to a particular tempo and tell it to always play the fastest music that you can find, and only occasionally throw in something a little bit slower. That particular method applies to any other aspects of music that you're allowed to change."

So is CD-I the thing of the future?

"Well, CD-I and related technology like CD ROM are today's technology. Exactly how big a market they are eventually going to enjoy, who knows. My involvement is on a conceptual level, and my expectation is that I'll eventually be delivering music to people over more direct connections like interactive television. Something more explicitly in the home entertainment realm, and therefore something that most people don't associate with a computer. For most people, a computer's main selling point is its productivity.

I consider listening to music productive, but most people consider it to be a leisure activity. That's the kind of thing you expect from your home entertainment centre. The advantage of CD-I is that it is a home entertainment device. It goes where television is, rather than where a computer is. I think that in the future you won't go to the record store any more, but switch on the TV and say 'this is the kind of music I'm interested in, find me some'. When that happens, it could be an advantage to me and other artists who have grown frustrated with this business of selling plastic discs. I wouldn't need a record company then. I could go into the studio this morning, create a musical idea and make it available for people to listen to this evening. People may be able to ask for the music that was made today. And be able to get it!"

What equipment was used on No World Order?

"I was using an Apple Powerbook with Cubase and various keyboards. I also used a Fernandez P-Project guitar. From a musical standpoint I get somewhat experimental, in that I aggressively absorb influences into what I'm doing, and this was a particular case. I was incorporating other sounds and things that I previously had dabbled in. I suppose you could say that the rap influences were pretty different, although I've done things in the spoken word realm before."

What will he be playing on the new tour?

"The only instrument that I really incorporate in the show is the guitar. All the other sounds are being produced through a combination of synthesizers and computers. The computers are also controlling the lights, video and other aspects of the show. Other than that I more or less play the computer, I guess, by sending commands to it, telling it what part of the music I want to do and causing it to make selections about the lighting and stuff like that."

What's so unusual about the live setup?

"We set up in the round, because it changes the ground rules and blurs the dividing line between the performer and the audience. Just about everyone else takes a traditional approach, where they set up the band on the stage. Normally the edge of the stage is the dividing line, unless of course you encourage stage-diving during the show (laughs). This particular set up immediately gives the audience certain options. For instance, if you don't like the sound, or what you're seeing from where you're standing, you have the freedom to move almost anywhere in the room and change your viewpoint.

Then we give the audience further opportunities to interact with the show. We have several levels on the stage. At a certain point I may let the people closest to the stage get up on one of the levels, and then suddenly everyone can see them as well as they can see me. The continuum of interactivity extends all the way up to me getting people out of the audience and having them come up the central part of the stage, in some cases becoming the total focus of the show. We did the Woodstock festival recently and I'd taken to soliciting guitar players out of the audience to solo on one of the songs. It worked out remarkably well. You'd be surprised how many passable guitar players there are who turn up at the show and just expected to listen! And I think that the audience is highly entertained by seeing one of their own get up and take over the show. It's not like a game show, where the audience vote for everything."

Surely such a complex setup must have presented numerous technical problems?

"Maybe someday we'll recognise that recontexturalisation actually is an art form"

How well has it been received?

"Well it was awkward at first, but for reasons that didn't necessarily have to do with the concept of the show. When we first put the show up in Tokyo, through some miscalculation we'd lost about 10 days pre-production. So we spent almost the whole time we were in Tokyo and about half of the American tour trying to make up for that loss of time. We had parts of the set that weren't completed and we were working on it while we were travelling for the first 20 shows. The video was either on or off, or only partially working. We had so many new technologies incorporated together in a way that nobody had really attempted before, so there was always going to be an initial challenge."

"We managed to get an audience response almost everywhere. The set is pretty spectacular just to look at, and we usually manage to squeeze some music out of it (laughs)."

Will the material be exclusively from the latest album, or is it a selection from Todd's extensive repertoire?

"Both. It goes back as far as A Wizard, A True Star. But since the show is an improvisation, there's no guarantee that I'll play any particular thing on any given night."

Are there any songs that he'd never play live?

"There probably are, and the reasons would just be technical rather than philosophical. You know, I've sung 'Hello, It's Me' live, and I have as much of a gripe about that song as anything."

Utopia have been keeping a low profile recently. Did they split up?

"We had no official split. We just got to a certain point where everyone had to go off, not necessarily to do solo projects, but to get their personal economic situations under control. Now that we've all re-aligned, it becomes more difficult to get all of us in the same place at the same time. It was never really declared that we were finished, but nor was it declared that we were... not finished (laughs). We were quite successful in the beginning with that style of music, but eventually people got more into punk and disco and these more rudimentary musical forms. Then we kind of fell by the wayside, along with just about every other band that was heavily instrumental."

Does Todd have a favourite album out of all of the ones he's recorded?

"It's difficult to single out one. There are a couple of albums in which I had a large challenge I had set out for myself, and I was happy that I met that challenge. For instance 'Acapella' was something of a challenge and I felt I met it, so I'm pretty happy with that record. Most of the records since then have had some element of exploration or adventure into an area that I hadn't been too often. So I've been pretty happy with the recent records."

What about his fascination with theremins?

"The first time I saw anyone play a theremin was in some sort of travelling Evangelical show. Somebody would go from church to church with a theremin and a glass harmonica, which is just a bunch of wine goblets all tuned with water in them. So it was a kind of a spooky introduction to the instrument, because it's not only got a weird technology and playing style, but this was all happening in a church. So it made the instrument seem twice as spooky."

"The set is pretty spectacular just to look at, and we usually manage to squeeze some music out of it"

"That was one big huge modular Moog synthesizer. Roger Powell was then a spokesman for the Moog Corporation, and he had one of the larger and more complex synthesizer setups. Keith Emerson had an even more complex setup, I think, but only about 10 percent of it actually worked (laughs). It was just knobs that looked good. Roger had a complete setup. We wired together a certain patch, and did an improvisation by programming about 24 of those old sequencers and twiddling around with the knobs and switches. Then other instruments were added on top of that - weird guitar and stuff like that."
Todd's enthusiasm for electronic music was demonstrated back in the '70s with the epic 'A Treatise In Cosmic Fire' from the album Initiation:

How does Todd write his songs?

"My writing process over the years has become fairly lop-sided, in terms of concept versus transcription. In other words, I may ruminate about the music that I'm working on for many months and even years, before I get down to actually committing it to tape. So I pretty much think about what I'm going to write about. When I say that, it's not just the melody and the lyrics, but also the general mood of the music. Then I'll go into the studio and frantically get it all down on tape. So I can't say that there's any difference from song to song, in the way that I actually come up with material. It all happens according to that process. I don't see the diversity that maybe other people see. I've drawn a lot of influences, but I tend to try to integrate them in a way that sounds personal, and I sometimes don't even notice the stylistic or musical disparity between one and another tune."

Was Bat Out Of Hell expected to be such a commercial success?

"Nobody expected it at the beginning. They had to release 3 or 4 singles before one of them actually took off. Then they just went back and released all the other ones again, and it became highly successful. It was a fun project in as much as it was the early part of Jim Steinman's eventual career in music, and they had a more sensible approach, I guess, to the studio. We only rehearsed the music for a couple of weeks and then we went into the studio and did most of it pretty much live, and then overdubbed the vocals. So the whole thing didn't take more than a month to do. Subsequent Meatloaf albums and Steinman projects have taken years to do."

Has Todd been doing much production recently?

"Not much at all, actually. When I got into this interactive music project I realised that it was more than simply recording the music. There was a sort of public relations component to it, that I knew I was going to be involved with, and I figured that would probably take at least 2 years, which is up until about now."

Are there any future projects pending?

"I've just started writing my next album. A lot of people aren't aware of the fact that No World Order is actually 2 years old because of its herky-jerky release pattern; it came out in Japan almost 2 years ago, and it was released in the States a year after that. So it's about time I got into some new music. At this point I haven't formulated an overall concept, but that happens later in the process. I'll start to find the central focus of what I'm doing and then write to that."

How does Todd feel about the changes in music over the years?

"I don't think people listen to music in the way that they used to. They expect that the music is going to fit into their busy lives in some way, rather than them making special time for it. On this side of the pond, there's been a sort of panic in the music business, because they're unable to get a handle on what people want to listen to any more. So the whole industry is kind of fragmenting, which is good to my mind, because there's no single recognisable format. Therefore people become free to make any kind of music they want and find an appropriate audience for it."

But surely a lot of record companies are more interested in bringing out cover versions of 50s, 60s and 70s songs?

"Well, the history of human culture is cyclical anyway, and now we have the opportunity to examine the artefacts of the previous cycle and compare them to the current one, and in that sense there's nothing new under the sun. My personal feeling is that the human race has reached this kind of plateau, in that there's so many people and so many tools for creating ideas that every seminal human idea has been expressed in one way or another. We're just recycling them all now. The problem is that we haven't got to the point of recognising that there's a skill to recycling as much as there is a skill to coming up with the original product. Maybe someday we'll recognise that recontexturalisation actually is an art form."