CE: If you were forced to rework your musical arsenal without electronic components or computers, what traditional instruments would you choose?
Mt. Eden: I think I would choose piano. I love the sound of piano and my dad plays it so I was always keen to learn.
CE: What computer/music programs do you use the most, and which are your favorite for processing and making music?
Mt. Eden: Ableton, Fruity Loops and Reason. I usually make everything in Ableton, and I use Komplete 7 vsts inside Ableton for most of my sounds. When I use Fruity Loops I just use it for drums, and I use Reason for making my bass lines when I get sick of what I have at my disposal in Ableton. I use Ableton because it is a pretty straightforward software that lets you get things down quickly, and also I like how I'll be able to take my tracks straight into live sets later down the track.
CE: If not for the advent of electronics and electronic music, what might your preferred medium be?
Mt. Eden: Probably just organic music or some other form of visual art. I was studying architecture before so I find anything to do with form, space and atmosphere pretty intriguing.
CE: Do you have any formal music education, or did you "jump right in"?
Mt. Eden: We pretty much just jumped right in, Jesse and I were mixing music together on turntables and computers at 13 years old. This naturally lead to doing remixes and originals.
It probably would have been really good for my music to have learned an instrument.. I'm forced to rely on my intuition of what sounds good, and don't generally know why it does or what key it's in and all of that. In saying that though, I sometimes hear dubstep from people who can play all sorts of instruments and I often find myself thinking its "over-musical", that they have lost the simplicity which makes something catchy and dope... it's easy to fall into this trap.
CE: Would your advice for aspiring computer/electronic musicians be to take the academic route, or to simply "jump in" and get their hands dirty?
Mt. Eden: You just have to jump in. Don't worry about not learning an instrument. You don't need to be an expert on musical theory. You can't really go wrong as long as you know what you like and you put in lots of time and love into what you are doing. You can always come up with basic melodies and drums for your tunes and perfect them later when you learn all of the ins and outs of software and you have some good monitor speakers to mix down your tracks on. Be patient though, and get as much feedback and constructive criticism as you can before you release anything.