I have a very clear memory of working in a retail shop in the early 90s and one salesman I worked with used to sell a lot of Hi Fi systems by simply putting on "Crazy" by Seal and turning the volume up—it just sounded that amazing. Is it fair to say that working on "Crazy" launched your career as you know it today?

Yes, that's where I began. Blame Seal!

You easily have one of the most enviable resumes of anyone we've ever interviewed! What would you say are a few of the high points of your career up to this point, moments that you're most pleased with looking back?

Well, I think I'm just getting started, and my best work is still to come. But to give you a more useful answer, I'm especially proud of certain songs where I've managed to marry vocal personality with a particular musical idea. This matters to me much more than sales. Some of my favourite songs are my least big in the marketplace. My remix of Björk's "All Is Full" isn't widely known, but I'm very proud of it. I did a remix for David Sylvian for a limited edition 500 CD release, and that means a lot to me-because it was hearing "Ghosts," by David's former band Japan, that made me want to work in pop music.

I'd like to mention three songs I especially love, and tell you something about them:

Kate Havnevik - "Unlike Me"

When pop stars work with strings, it's either a bling thing ("look at me, I've got 100 people in penguin suits playing my song, I'm bigger than Beethoven") or it's a way of saying "I'm so emotional & sincere." This usually means you're insincere and manipulatively exploiting the associations of orchestral strings to pull at the heart strings. I wanted to create a song with a leaner, colder string approach inspired by modernist classical music, like Bartok & Ligeti, and by the subliminal pulsing of minimal techno. I gave Kate a two-bar loop, she wrote the lyrics, and I knew we had something brilliant. In my imagination, I've always been hearing all these strange infra/ultra clustery string ideas. Here I get to flaunt them. I really like the fact the song has an emotionally compelling structure, but it's not quite "that" structure—the one every pop song's supposed to have.

Björk - "Unravel"

I created the entire backing track, as you hear it, inside just one Akai S3000 sampler (32 meg of memory - wooh!). I wanted the song to sound "too slow." The "correct" tempo, for me, was "too slow." Does that make sense? I took it to Björk, she wrote the lyrics and melody, sang, and the vocals on the record are the very first take, sung with a hand-held SM58. When we took it to Mark Stent to mix, I learned one of the best lessons of my career (Spike, if you're reading this, thank you, thank you, thank you!). He threw up all the faders, and after just one play through, he went straight to the vocal & started riding it. Before that I'd always seen mix engineers start with the kick drum or something, work up through the track sheet, & only get to the vocals last of all. But reversing that just feels so right to me. The vocal tells you what the rest of the arrangement will allow.

Sugababes - "Maya"

I always wanted to make a song which is just a crescendo. Mutya [from the Sugababes] gave me a beautiful lyric to work with. I try to conceal the transitions, so you can feel the song grow, but you don't get distracted by the specifics of how it's growing. It's unlike anything else the 'babes have ever done. It's a kind of victory that the A&R allowed it onto the album.

You are credited as co-writer and co-producer as well as keyboardist for artists as diverse as Björk, Imogen Heap, Madonna, Britney Spears and most recently Alanis Morissette. You seem to wear a lot of hats in the different projects you work on. Do you more readily identify with being a producer, player, or writer? Or are all of these intrinsically tied together in your work?

I'm an accompanist. I love accompanying. I wrote a song with Frou Frou called "Breath In." And it's really about accompanying. It's my blurry memory of touring in the Björk band. We're all having these arguments, grumps, tortured phone calls home, getting off our faces etc. But then I'm on stage, ready to play "Venus As A Boy." I'm expectantly waiting for the sound of Björk breathing in. Because when she breathes out, I'll be with her together on the first chord of the song. All the cares of the world are gone, and I'm in heaven.

Our impression is that you're very technologically savvy for a writer/producer. How would you describe the role of technology in your creative process, and how has that changed over the years?

I like technology because it gives me more musical choice and control. I've always imagined interesting noises in my head, and technology has just got better at realizing them.

When I first had musical ideas I wanted to record, I found that if I got with a band and asked them to play them, the band would always push them towards what they already knew. They'd smooth out what was interesting and odd about the ideas and make them more conventional. But if I did things myself using sequencers, I could ring-fence the interesting element, prevent it being diluted.

The biggest problem with technology now is too many options. If you've got 120 different soft synths and all you're doing is opening them up and hoping the first 5 sounds you click on will get you excited, then you're flying blind. That's why the best music now is usually made by artists who restrict themselves to just a few pieces of software, which they get to know intimately.

You seem to be able to bring a certain edge to other artists' work. Has your experience working with with artists like Bomb The Bass, Björk, Lamb and Goldie somehow contributed or informed your work with more mainstream artists like Britney Spears, Madonna and the Sugababes? Do you think people seek you out to work on projects like this because of those past projects?

I think I have my own idiosyncrasies. It doesn't matter what I do, if it's Britney Spears or David Sylvian - my work with them is going to have a character and quality. I don't labour over that. If you've got that in your character it'll come out anyway—you don't have to force it. And yes, people seek me out because of stuff they have heard and love.

Flavors of Entanglement, the album you produced and co-wrote with Alanis Morissette last year, is a favorite in the iZotope office. How did you originally get involved in this project?

Alanis contacted me through MySpace and sent me a message saying "You Rock!" which was great! So I wrote back and said "You rock too!" So we hooked up, wrote songs together and recorded the album.

What were some of the big challenges you faced when working on the Alanis album? Are there any particular songs or details that stand out in your mind on this project that you are especially proud of?

I'm proud of the whole record with Alanis. I think Alanis is a great writer who can find the heart of a song really quickly. She also is a passionate performer. We caught emotions in the moment, then spent a lot of time later colouring in around her voice. Moments of urgency, then days of thoughtful sound-scaping. Great haste, followed by great care and love. I think the two timescales work to the album's advantage. I think the songs will endure. People will discover them and rediscover them later.

Can you name some moments where iZotope plug-ins came in handy in working on that album?

I'm addicted to anything that contains the words Spectrum, Spectral, Spec- anything. And yes, Spectron was the first iZotope plug-in I bought. Musically, I'm a colourist. I'm drawn to any music which is colourful. Pretty much the only music I avoid is a certain kind of monochrome grey-ochre guitar rock.

I also use Trash a lot. I'm interested in distortion which isn't specifically guitar amp modeling. The ability to distort individual frequency bands in more unorthodox ways is great for adding character to synth basses, for instance.

I use Vinyl too. Sometimes sounds come out of the sampler just too painfully clean and vacuum-sealed. I can use Vinyl in subtle ways to texture sounds, to give the illusion of air and space. "Soft" distortion is the hardest thing to get right. Most modeling effects cause a drastic sonic shift the moment you turn them on, but much of the time, what's needed is that gentle, mysterious warming.

You recently got Ozone. What are your first impressions, are there any particular features you like?

I've been playing preset roulette with it! Not very thoughtful or systematic, I know. I'm finishing off an album, and when I'm not sure about some old element in the mix, I spin the Ozone roulette wheel. Try some presets on it, see if they make me love it!

What does 2009 and beyond hold for you? Any upcoming projects we should be watching for?

If I name-check a project before it happens, it can put a curse on it. So I'll hold my fire. But stay tuned, there will be more interesting music soon, I promise!