After more than fifteen years recording, Meat Beat Manifesto leader Jack Dangers is something of an electronic music elder statesman. Early recordings like Storm the Studio (1989) and Satyricon (1992) got MBM tagged as, respectively, an industrial and electronica act, but Dangers has always followed his own path. The new Meat Beat Manifesto CD At the Center, released on Thirsty Ear's Blue Series, sees Dangers continuing the real-time, electric jazz explorations he began with 1998's Actual Sounds + Voices; it's one of the best albums of the year in any genre. I spoke with Dangers about the new CD, his upcoming Off Centre EP, the history of electronic music (a subject about which Dangers is both a scholar and enthusiast), the future of video sampling, and more.

All About Jazz: Let's start by talking about the new Thirsty Ear Meat Beat Manifesto CD, At the Center. This is something of a departure for you in that, while its textures and beats do mark it definitely as MBM music, it's very much a group record with flutist Peter Gordon, drummer Dave King and keyboardist Craig Taborn—all musicians associated to some extent with the Thirsty Ear label. It's not altogether unprecedented for you to work with other musicians; "Supersoul, from your 2002 RUOK album, has some live drumming from Lynn Farmer and, I think, bass guitar from you. But this new one incorporates a lot more live instrumentation than older MBM recordings. What motivated this recording project?

Jack Dangers: Well, I've worked on stuff like this on previous Meat Beat records. I don't know if you know the record Actual Sounds and Voices; there are a couple tracks on there which were done in the studio with Bennie Maupin and Pat Gleason, who used to do a lot of work with Herbie Hancock in the seventies. Bennie basically was the motivation for me to attempt to pick up a bass clarinet and make some noise out of it.

AAJ: Sure, I love his stuff in Herbie's Mwandishi band.

JD: Right. He played bass clarinet and flute. He did some solo records as well. I've always liked his work; I really liked it on the stuff he did with Herbie Hancock. I did some studio work with them back in '96, so it's not so unprecedented for me to work in that sort of style. I've always liked jazz and reggae; those are two of my favorite types of music, along with electronic music, like the more classical stuff—musique concrète, the stuff which came out of Germany in the fifties and France in the sixties. Etcetera, etcetera—it's a bit of a gamut if you throw it all together. Even on the very first Meat Beat album, and even in the band I was in before Meat Beat, I used to play soprano saxophone—until it got stolen at a show back in the late eighties. I used to use it more as a sort of noise instrument along the lines of Blurt, Ornette Coleman, that sort of style, but going through a noise gate and being triggered—a side chain triggering the sax from a beat or any other sort of a rhythmical trigger. You'd get this sort of very staccato-sounding strangeness. Again, just picking up an instrument and making noise of it.

It probably started when I first heard Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart. There's a bit of bass clarinet on there as well. So I picked one up twelve years ago, started playing with it. Recently I've sort of gotten into bass flute, mainly through seeing Hermeto Pascoal play a couple of times. So I've been playing that. And so I've always had these elements in my music. I sampled "Song for My Father by Horace Silver back when Meat Beat was supposedly this industrial band; that got some reaction at the time. I actually got the approval to use it, paid for it, all that sort of stuff. It was all above board! So I have always had these elements in the music—jazz elements, and dub. That's sort of been my musical life.

AAJ: You must have thought quite a bit about the instrumentation you wanted on this record. For example, Peter Gordon's flute is a very prominent component of this music, and, for that matter, so are Craig Taborn's keyboards. Was it the actual instruments or the specific musicians that motivated you on this project?

JD: It's a bit of both, really. I'd heard some of Peter's flute work on some remixes I did for one of the projects on Thirsty Ear for DJ Wally and I really liked his flute textures. So when it came to doing a record for Thirsty Ear, that was the first thing I sort of asked for—if he could play flute on it. Then I could bounce off of that with the bass flute. Craig and Dave more or less came in through Peter. I'd heard some of Dave's work and I'd heard a couple of things Craig had done and really liked his style. So it just seemed to sort of fall together. But yeah, the flute of Peter Gordon was definitely a main anchor—probably more of an anchor than what the keyboards were, to be honest with you.