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How to Turn a Dystopian Sci-Fi Novel into an Electronic Music Album

When the author you're collaborating with is famously anonymous.
Digweed and Muir. Image: courtesy of the artists

How do you go about adapting a dystopian science fiction novel into an electronic music album, when the author you're collaborating with is famously anonymous?

If you're John Digweed, one of the biggest names in electronic music, you might start by asking the author himself to select some passages from the book, then have him come down to the studio and do some voice-over. But first you'd have to get in touch.

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This is what Digweed did with science fiction author John Twelve Hawks, whose 2005 New York Times bestselling novel The Traveler tells the story of characters ("travelers") who can astral project and evade a virtual panopticon enforced by "the Brethren." It's from this anonymous perch that Twelve Hawks attacks the surveillance state.

After publishing The Traveler, Twelve Hawks sent Digweed a copy of the book with a letter thanking him for making the music that became the soundtrack to his writing. Digweed replied with a thank you note via Twelve Hawks' website, but never saw the author's reply in which a collaboration was floated. After reading the novel on holiday nearly two years later, Digweed contacted Twelve Hawks again. And so began the electronic album adaptation of The Traveler.

"When John and I started our conversation, we both had open minds about what a possible collaboration might lead us to," Twelve Hawks told me over email.

With the collaboration cemented, Digweed and his frequent colloborator Nick Muir set to work on the album's futuristic tones, while Twelve Hawks selected various sections, passages, and phrases from the novel. From this selection, Digweed and Muir picked the ones they thought worked best, then convinced Twelve Hawks to do the voice-over but with voice modulation to maintain his anonymity.

THERE WAS NO GIVING HIM A RING AND ASKING HIM TO POP BY THE STUDIO TO RE-RECORD LINES 3, 5 AND 7…

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Digweed described recording the highly private Twelve Hawks' voice-over as exciting, a little strange, and slightly nerve-wracking. Twelve Hawks is always on the move, and they only had one chance to record his voice. "There was no giving him a ring and asking him to pop by the studio to re-record lines 3,5 and 7," Digweed said.

"We had to get it right, but luckily it went like clockwork," he added. "We spoke for a while about the state of things, and he's a fascinating character to listen to, then he disappeared off from whence he came and we haven't seen him since."

To modulate Twelve Hawks' voice, both for anonymity and to blend it into the album's electronic tones, Digweed and Muir used various plug-ins and software, pitch shifters, harmonizers, frequency modulators, and so on. The jumping off point was the sound of the voice scrambler Twelve Hawks uses for phone calls to publishers and journalists. Digweed and Muir essentially did a hi-fi variant of that technology.

Twelve Hawks liked how the voice modulation functioned as an aesthetic, not just a privacy safeguard. "Altering my voice made me less human, and kept the emphasis on the words and the music," he wrote. "I wanted my voice to be just another element of the album."

Digweed likened this type of "mixing of genres"—electronic music and fiction—to the stock-in-trade of DJ mixing. He likes being able to mix records from all over the world, from producers of all nationalities, then make a single piece of entertainment out of it.

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Altering my voice made me less human, and kept the emphasis on the words and the music

"It's about finding the common denominator between them and at the same time being open-minded enough to embrace great new ideas if you hear them," he said. "It occurred to me that the principle really wasn't that different if you were to find that common denominator between different artistic fields, so it made sense to attempt the project."

The album is a fusion of techno, ambient, drum 'n bass, and Krautrock. Amid the record's sonic mutations, there is a sensation of moving forward against the relentless crush of the surveillance society depicted in the book. Listeners hear a train arriving in a bustling station before being thrust into propulsive dance music. They experience the electronic equivalent of the novel's alternating moments of inertia and velocity, before departing on closing track "Last Line."

"We didn't really stick that closely to the actual timeline of the book," said Digweed. "It was more about capturing the atmosphere of the world that JTH had created." The album does, however, open with the first line of the novel and close with the last.

While Digweed didn't set out to make an anti-surveillance statement, Twelve Hawks was not shy about his aims. He told me that the fictional "worlds" of The Traveler and the rest of his books in the Fourth Realm trilogy "reflected the huge expansion of government and corporate surveillance programs that occurred after the 9-11 attacks."

"When The Traveler was published, I was accused of being 'paranoid,'" Twelve Hawks said. "But, Edward Snowden's revelations showed that just about everything I predicted in 2004 came true."

The Traveler is out now on Digweed's Bedrock Records.