Why did you stop making guitar "drone" music and shifted to the Space Program?

The main reason was that i found my previous line of work completed, when i was finishing Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance by late 1999. I clearly felt i had achieved what i could ever have hoped to, and would become formulaic from there on. I can't tolerate repeating myself. So my decision was to just terminate it and enter something new, as radically different as possible from the previous work. The first things i decided for the new "era", was that the music would be based on direct action over silence, it should be made of real-time decisions and it would be electronic. Another key factor that propelled me was that the world is changing in alarming ways and we need to take action and be aware. My previous line of works was mostly designed to be an immersive experience, an alternative environment. Taking a hard look at it, it seemed to me an escapist approach to music. So i decided to make music that would be the opposite: sharply produced sounds over silence, made by direct physical action and resulting exclusively from individual decisions. A more fitting approach to the idea that we must be active as individuals in changing our collective destiny...

What is your notion of space in music? How do you specifically relate sound and silence in your program?

I use the word "space" as a metaphor for many instances of space in our lives: mental space, acoustic space, visual space, physical space, etc., as a comment on the ever-increasing saturation of them all. Space has become an expensive or hard-to-find item. But more concretely we're talking about musical space, which is roughly equivalent to silence. When playing with others, using silence is critical to create space, it is hard for a musician to play anything if such space is saturated. Space thus becomes a measure of transparency, where all sounds can be heard in between multiple silences (this may seem obvious, but it's often ignored). Otherwise, a sound's meaning and function changes dramatically with the shape of silence around it.

How would you define "post-free jazz electronic music"?

It is a broad definition, which can include not only mine but other approaches to electronic music. It has a double meaning:
a) Electronic music that is informed by post-free jazz, that is, by developments in jazz that are beyond "free jazz", naturally excluding fusion, jazz-rock, and jazz "folklore" revivals of 1950's bop, cool, etc. So we're talking about jazz forms that welcome irregular metrics, an open field of sound frequencies and freedom from "themes", chord progressions, etc. "Post-free jazz electronic music" operates beyond traditional instruments, built to play "notes" and beyond, of course, the culturally established sounds of jazz typical instruments.
b) More broadly, electronic music that is made historically after free jazz and regards itself as being some kind of consequence, or at least takes it into account. When i first tried to understand/ explain the Space Program, i described it as a sort of imaginary development from free jazz through the way of electronics. Curiously, there was indeed a proliferation of electronics in jazz in the early 1970's, but i observed that approach was keyboard-based (derived from piano culture) and therefore it had an harmonic (vertical) grid. On the other hand, since it was mostly jazz-rock, it was embedded in a straight rhythmic (horizontal) grid. So, a music structurally based on square shapes.... I wanted to make music in the Space Program that is totally free from such grids. The time is liquid and the full frequency spectrum is used, without any scales or traditional Western-based harmonic structures. However, phrasing and swing are core values in this music, as in jazz.

What does "improvisation" mean to you? How does it figure in the Space Program?

"Improvisation" is a very tricky word. Jazz musicians use it to refer to realtime decisions, while operating in a system with clear rules and techniques. Other musicians practice the same kind of decisions but leaving the system aside, and call it "free improvisation".  The Space Program is about making decisions within a system. Many "improvisers" also work within their own system, so i take some distance from the whole "jazz vs. free-improv." discussion. I think it's all just about the choice of decision-making strategies. I'm interested in truly free music, and the "canons of improvisation" can sometimes get frighteningly conservative.

Otherwise, there is (in the Space Program) a strong element of unpredictability and instant response, because my instruments never behave in a fully predictable way. They're made in a way that it's impossible to control them with full accuracy. How i handle that could be called "improvisation" as well, because that's what it really is: How you instantly deal with a problem.