MRH: With your familiarity with music technology, the way that it has evolved so fast in the past ten years, how do you see thing progressing in the next five? How do you see even the way that you compose changing in that time?

JF: It's at a very exciting stage right now. The 64 bit version of Logic just came out about ten days ago [and because] we can use vast amounts of RAM now, we don't have to think about it for the next generation of machines. It's really a full game changer.

We've hit a point now where it's so flexible to record everything, and there's so much you can do to a recording... I think we're on the edge of phasing out synthesizer patches; at least for me, I'm really close to that now. I'm really not playing a synthesized sound from the keyboard. It's where most things are going back to being recorded and then manipulated, and that's a big deal because we're really leaving MIDI and the whole last 25 years, and it's because of the power and the facility of the software that we're able to do this, and come full circle, back to being organic, but still with a firm focus on experimentation.

MRH: I guess it's kind of similar where you can get a violinist to play a certain sound, but getting something new from an instrument is dependent on the player's own skill and personal style. Digital technology is the same where you also need the skill of the person behind the computer and the keyboard to manipulate things like a virtuoso violinist and create something that's new and fresh.

JF: Absolutely. I think that there's been a leveling of the playing field. In the mid-eighties, if you had half a million dollars you could buy a Synclavier, and by owning that Synclavier, you would get work, and it had nothing to do with the amount of talent that you were going to put into the music. There was some horrific music that came out of that ability to buy the technology.

Owning really good technology now is about as unique as owning a piece of paper, so it's completely level. If you think what Beethoven could do with a piece of paper, or as opposed to what someone who had no musical training could do with that same piece of musical paper, that's how level the playing field is. I'm excited to see it weed things out to the people who are really serious about sound.

MRH: Going back to the Synclavier and other iconic synthesizers of the eighties, in many cases those sounds have dated the TV shows and the commercials and the films that they were used in, but if you go back further, maybe into the seventies where people were using older synth equipment, those sounds were really unique, and they stand out much more than the stuff that came out in the eighties.

JF: Absolutely. [Let's] compare in terms of synthesizers how an analogue Moog worked. You turned the thing on and it was kind of like having this crazy uncle: it would never really do the same thing twice; it would go out of tune; it was always this volatile machine, but when you hit the Roland D-50, you had this very precise, simple computer-controlled thing that when everybody hit it, it always sounded the same, and it really inundated music in a negative way.

I was very guilty of using the thing on (luckily) nothing anyone ever heard or saw, but I really learned a lot from those years about being inventive and digging in, so yeah, I think that it's absolutely, totally true that the early analogue stuff is probably going to hold up over time better... I'm conscious of trying to keep things holding up over time. I'm sure there's going to be places where I err in that, but I try to keep sounds which are innately musical, and I think that if you're just true to that, most of the time you're probably going to get it right... The really great synthesists and manipulation of audio come form people who try to be in touch with true musical sensibilities.

MRH: And one last question. Has Frederik Wiedmann (The Hills Runs Red, Return to House on Haunted Hill) been an active and important component in the way that you explore sounds?

JF: Freddie's around a lot and he mixed Legion and Whiteout (2009), and he wrote some cues on Whiteout. We're very, very close and always talking about new ideas. Sometimes we have sampling sessions where we come up with these crazy ideas; some of them work, some of them don't, and I really enjoy knowing Freddie and supporting his career, and he's just an amazing talent. I consider Freddie like a son. There's a new guy working here called Haim Mazar that probably in a couple of years will be the next Freddie, so we try to keep 'Frizzell University' moving.