It's unedited so excuse the mistakes please.

Questions.

Thaddi/De:Bug: Tell me more about how involve came into being, and, most important, who was involved? which influences did you guys have? why did you all start making music?

Bevan/Involve: came into being when I decided to release the aspen 'retail snob' and jet jaguar cd's. I approached Michael who i'd known for a few years and asked him to release it on my own label and also to record an album of collaborative stuff. I had no distribution or idea how to run things. Just thought it would be cool. I next asked Clinton (pretty things) to record an album of his spooky ambient stuff and discovered Jeremy 'mandrake' who had been kicking about gigging since he was like 13 or something stupid. Also my girlfriend was working with a 3-D designer Andrew Thomas who was writing music and I checked it out, freaked and got talking to him and offered to release his stuff too...

Influences: Mainly from outside electronica. UK indie stuff, my bloody valentine, slowdive, seefeel, ride all that stuff. Michael is big hip-hop, jazz, soul fan. Clinton more Nin , smashing pumpkins stuff. we're all big Warp fans but on various 'camps' i'm a big AFX fan.. Clinton and Michael more plaid styles.. Michael's also a big fan of German stuff, introduced me to chain reaction, pole, scape, kompact, millex plateau etc etc. Andrew's more into leaf recs, dorobo, millex plateau, modern classical and jazz,,, loverly stuff.. Jeremy just listens to everything. seriously, he used to hang out in the library in wellington and listen to about 20 records a day....

I guess there is music we're all into .. some things that spring to mind sigur ross. arovane. cocteau twins. seefeel. chain reaction. loverly and deep stuff I guess. that's a common element in our music too. it's all quite deep and quite loverly too...

Thaddi: it might be a cliche, but new zealand is not really a place you think of in the first place when you deal with electronic music. besides the fact that you can always order records...what is it like to be part of a presumably very small scene?

Bevan/Involve: Ummm,, it always felt to me like it was a nice sized scene,, not too small as to suffocate.. not so big as to feel like you're only treading water. It was just getting hard to push involve being so far away from promotion and distribution. And stuff like getting vinyl pressed was pratically impossible. But now Clinton's in chicago, I'm in london, Jeremy's in akaroa, and Michael will be moving to Sydney or Melbourne so it's changed a wee bit. Andrew Thomas is still in Wellington, he has a wickid house in Roseneath (very near central city but up on a hill with amazing ocean views) so I can't imagine him ever leaving.

Thaddi: I think the signer album was issued by universal new zealand. small countries, different deals? how did that happen?

Bevan: Signer was co-released with Kog transmissions NZ. they are distributed by Universal in NZ. Originally I also had the involve stuff distributed by them, but they didn't go a good job and so we changed to Festival/Flying In.

Thaddi: You moved to the uk recently. personal reasons or did you also think of involve's future?

Bevan: I came to london to make money (pay off student loan) and push Involve and be closer to where our music should be.

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