Brian Transeau floors India

Renowned electronica producer BT aka Brian Transeau, who was in the city recently to kick off the Sunburn festival, speaks about his love for Indian food, technology and scoring for films.
To sit right next to BT aka Brian Transeau, barely a couple of feet away, is a surreal experience. The 39-year-old legendary electronica producer/composer is good looking, charming – apart from the crazy hairdo, he resembles Oscar-winning American actor Jeff Bridges – and an extremely intelligent conversationalist.On Friday night, he arrived at Blue Frog, Lower Parel, literally at the stroke of midnight, to kick off the Sunburn festival with a high-energy set that set the dance floor on fire.
BT, for the uninitiated, is known universally as one of the best electronica producers in the world, and is famous for his collaborations with “God of Trance” Tiësto as well as his film scores (prominent credits include The Fast and The Furious and Monster)
He arrived, dressed in black, looking pumped up and ready to go. Sipping on Red Bull, he chatted with us for about 15 minutes before going up on stage. Here are excerpts from that conversation:
Let’s talk about the Grammy nomination for your latest album, These Hopeful Machines (nominated for ‘Best Electronic/Dance Album’). Could you describe that moment when you came to know about it?
Oh yeah. It happened just a couple of days ago and this is literally the first time I’ll be talking about it without losing the plot emotionally. So, I was on my way here and the journey’s pretty long. After the first leg of our flight, we had a stop-over in England. I switch on my phone to see almost 700 text messages, congratulating me on my Grammy nomination. Till then, I’d no idea about it.
Almost immediately, I burst into tears and the airline staff actually had to take me outside to see if I was okay – I was THAT overwhelmed. It was as if someone had died in my family. I told the crew, “I’ve been nominated for a Grammy,” and they all applauded for me.
What does it mean to you, a Grammy nomination?
This is the greatest professional honour I’ve ever had. It feels absolutely wonderful to be recognised by my peers for the work that I do. It’s an honour just to be nominated, really; I don’t care if I win or not.
How has your experience in India been so far?
Oh, it’s been absolutely amazing. I love the culture, the energy, the hustle-bustle of Mumbai and – above all – the food! The food here has to be the best I’ve ever had in my life.
What has also been really cool has been discovering modern Indian music. I’m aware of the rich tradition of Indian classical music and its intricacies, but I’d never heard the contemporary Indian sound – a mishmash of Western arrangements and Indian melodies. I also had the pleasure of meeting two Indian composers, Salim and Sulaiman, who very graciously invited me to their studio. It was astounding for me to learn that they had apparently been influenced by a lot of my work, and I feel quite honoured to know that.
You’re known for being a technologist and actually developing your own software applications to produce music. . .
Yeah, I’m quite a geek that way. I have a team of programmers under me and I do some coding myself, although I must confess my C++ skills are fairly limited. These applications are developed by me out of necessity. For e.g., Break Tweaker, which took a year and a half and 1.2 million lines of code, was made specifically for my album This Binary Universe, because I couldn’t achieve what I wanted through existing software applications.
Similarly, my iPhone-based software Sonifi, allows you to do live techniques like filter sweeping and stutter edits using the touch-screen interface of the iPhone. I once played a gig in front of 15,000 people using only my phone and this software.
How does it feel to do film scores in addition to your regular work?
For me, doing film scores is the greatest rush I can get. I have a classical background, so, this is the only time that I actually get to conduct a 110-piece orchestra as well as truly try and break barriers.
In film music, whatever you do should make sense in context to the scene and the movie. If a score requires synths and drum machines, you do it. If a score requires you to use a 14th century Armenian instrument – which I did for Monster – you do it. It’s very important to get it right because, according to me, film music is the only space in which classical composers get to create their art.
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