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Though he's still in his twenties, Matthew Dear's musical resume reads like that of a middle-aged veteran, with his electronic pop, minimal techno and high-profile DJ and remix credits garnering praise in every quarter of the music press from XLR8R to the New York Times. His purely dance-floor instincts satisfied by recent releases as Audion, Dear has now released Asa Breed, his most accessible, pop-inflected work to date. Dear's new solo record is full of melancholy and wonder, but never sacrifices the sense of rhythm and flow that come naturally to him.

ARTISTdirect got a chance to pick the young phenom's brain and found mannequins, robots and frying pans, all decaying together happily when they're not spilling over into futuristic tunes.

Between your various releases under your own name—including remixes—and as Audion, you've covered a lot of stylistic ground. Is there anything specific you want to do in music that you haven't done yet, or is it more a matter of just seeing what comes?

Hmmm... Maybe some kind of off-the-wall soundtrack stuff. That's the only thing I can think of now that I've been interested in doing that I haven't done yet. That's way down the road, but, in general, I just like to constantly evolve. Whenever you get bored doing one thing you gotta do another thing...

Asa Breed hangs together pretty well. Did you conceive it all together as an album or is just a bunch of tracks that you made and eventually realized they fit together?

Yeah that's usually how I work—the second thing you said. I don't make albums start to finish, I never really have. Some of the songs are really old, some are pretty new, some are in between. Some of it is going to be released as Audion material. But there's no real separation between any of it at first. When it comes time to put the album together is when I start listening to all the tracks and thinking about which ones sound good together and which ones don't. And then certain songs and ideas start to gravitate towards each other.

Do you feel the work you've been doing as Audion has caused you to want to make the records you release under your own name even more in a pop and less in a dance vein? 'Cause as far as I'm concerned nearly every cut on the new album is at least as much a traditional song as a dance track.

Yeah, I mean, I've designed it that way. I wanted to make a separation between the Audion alias and my own stuff. 'Cause the stuff I released in the beginning was more rooted in dance than I think it was in pop music. But I've always recorded this kind of thing at home—the weirder, more experimental pop stuff—so it was just a matter of time before those kinds of songs got released. And I'm glad the Audion thing has taken off a bit so people can start to see that's where I'm gonna do most of my dance music, my techno music, and everything under my own name is gonna be this vocal pop, verse-chorus-verse stuff.

Both nostalgia and the future are often invoked when describing electronic music. Do you see a contradiction there or does that make sense to you?

No, I mean this music is very rooted in the past because it's very technology-driven, and technology's always changing, so as soon as the technology changes I think a lot of the music that was made with older technology gets associated with this sort of nostalgic feel. But the way I like to look at it is just 'cause the machines change doesn't make anything retro, or of the past, I think there's still options of using older equipment and new techniques to really just mash it all together, and continue to make modern music. But I think it's okay. There's nothing wrong with relating things to the past or the future.

What kinds of vintage gear figure prominently in your set-up?

Not that much actually. I'm mainly software based. A good friend of mine just lent me an 808 drum machine. That's probably the only piece of analog gear I have right now, other than like a bass guitar or an acoustic guitar, which is about as vintage as what, the '40s or '50s? But I have techniques of running software-generated sounds through my favorite little series of warmers to make things sound older. And I use a lot of static, noise, and air from my microphones. I like to blend the organic world with the electronic world. I don't like keeping things too clean. I like pushing things a little bit harder and letting them sound a bit more distorted and dirtier because I think that gives everything more of a humanistic feel.

Can you recount an especially transcendent musical moment in your life: what was playing, where you were, who you were with?

There's been so many. It's hard to pick one. In general, I just remember being young and hearing all things electronic. I always think back to Herbie Hancock's track "Rockit." In the early '80s, he had this video on MTV with mannequins and weird robots and stuff—it was just this big robotic scenario going on—but it was very man-made at the same time. It was almost like one of those—what do they call them—Rube Goldbergs. Those things where every interaction causes another reaction in the machine: like the marble rolls down the tube and hits the bird that turns over and cracks the egg, and the egg falls into the frying pan. Stuff like that. It had this really intense sense of connectivity. So I can remember, at maybe seven or eight years old, seeing this video and just being mind-blown by this world of electronic gadgets, and the music was so bizarre. I think that was a really big, searing image in my head. And I always new I was attracted to stuff like that, to odd, electronic-sounding things. Stuff that was just so pure and weird. But I had no idea there was this electronic underground scene going on. I was just infatuated with that kind of music.

So it sounds like it was the concept as much as the music that excited you?

Yeah, I think I just had this sense of escapism in my head at that age, thinking there was this other world out there that I had to find—maybe at that time it was like an Epcot Center-ish type futuristic thing. I just felt like I had to find something, that it was out there somewhere.

Would you say you're ever trying to get a concept across with your own music?

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