Two and a Half Questions with Asura

You have been producing music for well over a decade now. How has your sound evolved over the years?
I think my music has always been a mixture of numerous influences, styles. I love electronic music, space and trance, but too, world music, classical, even pop rock. I guess that, since 1996, when  Asura was created, the evolution was natural, cause it's not commercial music, so it has no boundaries, no limits. I too tried many synths and gears, and for something like 5 or 6 years, many virtual ones. So my sound changed with my various experiments.

360 is an album in two parts. What do the chapters "Before" and "After" signify?
It's a very personal reason in fact. This album is a tribute to my father who passed away in 2009. He taught me love of music, and I share what I know in part thank to him with my listeners. You are  born, you live, and you die. But you give a message. It's like a loop. A circle. Life in 360. "Before" is when he was there, and "after" is... you guess what!

And what about the name itself - are you referring to a full cycle, return to the origin, as well as the unity of beginning and an end?
I don't want to keep my music enclosed in a formatted style. "Code Eternity", for example, belongs to the past, with its almost exclusive 4/4 beats, acid and loud basslines. We are in 2010 now, no more in the 2000's. I changed and my music with me. I will keep making this kind of music of course, cause I love it, but essentially for compilations, live acts, for the dance floor too. So now I want to go deeper in a mix of World Music, Trance Ambient, Trip Hop, Classical, Glitch, everything that I think can fit with my soul. I would like it to be a panoramic vision of music, at 360 degrees. That's why my 2011 album will be very different too, a spacey one. I will come back to a rhythmic album, as it's the case in "360", in 2013.

Talk a little about your collaboration with Ayten on El-Hai.
It was a virtual meeting at first, cause we met via Myspace. I send here some drones and she sang (divinely) on it. So we decided to make a track together, and it gave "El Hai", which means "Living God" in hebrew. And it won't be the last time. She has a heavenly voice, polymorphic I would say, and i am eager to collaborate on several other tracks, and maybe to released an album with her in the future.

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Read the entire interview on Headphone Commute

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Be sure to read Headphone Commute review of Asura's 360

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