“Being exposed to Cage forced me to expand my consciousness and enhance my appreciation of the sounds — intended or accidental — that are always around us, and helped me compose works that use conventional and unconventional instruments alike. All sounds are acceptable musical materials,” he adds.

“Stockhausen’s compositions brought the idea of movement to me, how he used the direction of the sounds and their movement in space as aspects of form,” says Devine. “It was another totally new concept to incorporate into my music — this idea of surrounding the listener with sound, to actually imply movement.”

From Punk to Electronic Music
Early in the 1990s, when techno was becoming more popular, Devine started to get interested in electronic music. He’d enjoyed hip-hop and aggressive punk music in his early adolescent years, listening to everything from Dead Kennedys to Public Enemy, Minor Threat and Fugazi.

“When industrial music came out, it kind of fused both of those elements together. It was this new form of music that combined the hard-edged elements of punk mixed with these low bit digital sounds of hip hop and digital sampling,” says Devine. “And for me, it was the perfect hybrid… a nice transition from what I’d just come from.

“As the industrial scene was coming in, and the scene of the late 80s started to die out, I was hearing interesting things happening in Canada and England with techno music and with groups like Meat Beat Manifesto and Coil. So I started getting more into experimental music,” he reflects.

“So, that kicked off everything for me in the beginning. I kept trying to take it from there, from the early hip hop and the punk scene, industrial into techno, into what I’m doing — discovering the Warp Record label from back in the early 90s and kind of keeping the evolution going from there,” he adds.

Warp Recruited
While taking some summer classes in 1999, Devine got a message on his answering machine from Rob Mitchell, one of the owners of Warp Records. “I never sent Warp anything,” he says. “But I got this message saying ‘We’re looking for Richard Devine. We’d like to get in touch with him, please.’”

Before he knew it, Warp enlisted him into the ranks to propel the Warp name into the new millennium, putting out tracks, touring and doing remixes for other Warp artists.

Designing Tweaky Sounds
Devine also started doing sound design work for Native Instruments in 1999, creating highly complex and intensely programmed sound banks for virtual instruments like Absynth.

Next page: Enter Computer Synthesis