You have been involved in a lot of different projects over the years, from writing your own symphonies to composing for video games, to remixing for artists like Madonna, Garbage, Nine Inch Nails and Evanescence. Some people might think there is no overlap between writing for a symphony and remixing Madonna, but you prove otherwise! What are some of the projects you've been working on recently?

So far this year I've finished the soundtrack to the enigmatically eerie and gorgeous cult-TC video game Out of Hell, which is a hellish concept album of 25 tracks. Good score for a dark night all alone at the controls, definitely not for the faint. It was compiled down from over 50 concept tracks and sketches and took a good few months to complete, but it was well worth it. It's pretty grim and yet kind of darkly spiritual. There is something in the soundtrack for everyone, and the creator of the game seems to have found a home for each and every track in the score. Each track audibly depicts different hells from different cultures. The tracks were uniquely named after most of the popular hells in history.

I also finished up the 3rd and final set of Synaesthesia compositions entitled The Darker Side of Synaesthesia, and they will be exclusively premiered worldwide in June in IT'S ART Magazine and the post-mortem will be in CGArena Magazine. They include about 10 new tracks built around the concept of the previous two sets from CGSociety (May 2006) and 3dcreative Magazine (October 2006), that your readers can still check out today.

I am also constantly working on new music and production work whenever I can.

How did you approach doing your Synaesthesia compositions, and how did the idea for these come about?

I've always been inspired by CG images, constantly surfing the net for galleries when I'm at a loss for any kind of creative inspiration. Yes, it's escapism, but it's very healing for me as a person and as an artist. There are so many talented CG artists in the world and the internet has created this enormous, kind and sharing community that enables artists to share their ideas, dreams, worlds and characters with the rest of us. I love bringing those dreams to life. Self-publishing is the revolution that we've all been living since the mid '90s and it is only getting better.

It wasn't until I started doing this for a few years that I noticed I was starting to hear music by looking at certain images. At first it was just recording after recording just sitting in my sketch folder. I showed the pieces to the CG artists who inspired them and they had a million kind words about how they sounded just like the picture and how I must have been inside their heads when they were painting. Then it hit me that I should do a gallery series based on this concept. Paul at CGSociety helped me to kick-start the whole thing as the first CG community to feature my series, or any composer to date, which was a very special honor to me. The CG community and a plethora of CG magazines really supported me in this conceptual series. It's all pretty magical how fast it took off. I give many thanks to all the communities, artists, websites and magazines whom have supported this project over the years.

I approach the pieces very simply. I place myself inside of the scene, listening for what is going on, and how the characters and scenery are feeling. There are a few basic technical things for me. For example, gaussian blur is reverb, darker colors are more textured tones, etc. However, the real magic is in that I don't really have to think about all of these things. Sometimes this is a blessing and sometimes it is a curse, especially when I see an image and have to run to my notepad to write down the score for it and I'm in a different room. It can be torturous, but mostly rewarding. I think it is a unique way to compose and, at the end of the day, it works for me.

We've heard parts of your soon to be released score for the forthcoming video game "Out of Hell." In it, you create these great senses of space. You also create some very disturbing grimy lo-fi elements. Do you have any secrets you'd like to share for creating these kinds of effects?

The secret is to not buy into the hype of learning "the right way to do it," and instead, just do it. Start with some free plug-ins to get acquainted with the idea of environment modeling before drowning in frustration. Sometimes having less gives you more possibilities. A cool secret is to sample your own environments and create your own impulses for convolution reverb plug-ins. Perfect Space [in Cakewalk's SONAR] is awesome for this, Sony's Accoustic Mirror is also a cool one. If you use these instead of typical Reverb plug-ins and presets, you are going to get much more realistic results. I carry a recorder on me when I travel to other countries and places, and sample like you wouldn't believe. I also create custom impulses with my portable laptop and a measurement mic. There are many ways you can do this, and most of them will give you an interesting result when paired with convolution reverbs.

You are a composer, but your technique is far from traditional. Listening to your compositions, it seems obvious that you think as much in terms of ambience, synthesis and effects as you do in melody and harmony. Do you think you would have wanted to be a composer 200 years ago, before DAWs and digital effects?

200 years ago, I think it would have been much harder for me to be a composer. Not by choice, but by class and "who you know." I'm not sure if my ancestors knew all the right musical people. I could have probably done well as a writer back then, due to my family connection being the Grimm Brothers. Maybe not though. I think composers like Mozart are amazing, but I also realize that they got to work on developing their talents because of the people around them that took care of them and nurtured that talent and gave them the tools they needed to truly blossom, be it a grand piano, harpsichord or an entire orchestra. The times have changed, tables have turned. Can you imagine how many amazing other composers in that time period that could have lived and thrived if given even an ounce of chance that Amadeus got? For every Mozart there are 50 other underground composers who never got the chance to shine, not because they weren't exceptional but due to a mixture of circumstances, financial status and pompously imposed societal status. Regardless, I would have tried to find a way to create or compose back then, with whatever tools and circumstance I was dealt.

On the other side of the coin, you've worked with traditional players in a symphonic setting. Do you find this way of working more demanding than working with a laptop? Do you ever find yourself wishing the cellist had an "undo" button?

On the contrary, I find a way to use whatever is recorded, in sometimes the oddest ways and sometimes for completely different projects months later. Perhaps a messed up cello performance could be a nice discord for the other pads and beds, or fit somewhere else in a score or game. The textures, tones and ambience you can make with cellos and other stringed instruments are pretty endless with the right environments, resampling and effects. You can resample it into a synth patch as a new kind of alien cello, or run it through Spectron for even cooler ideas and audible concepts.

As for working with live musicians, it might seem more demanding and intimidating (and to be honest, it sometimes is). You think to yourself, "wow, all these musicians are here, I don't want to waste their time, and I hope they don't mind working on my music." I've heard numerous composers think they will fall on their faces in front of a 50 piece. If you fall, you have to find a way to do it in style. But if you put your ego and the other players' ego aside and just get to the heart of the music and everyone focuses on getting it to a presentable stage there can be a compromise between the composer and the players to find a realistic and refined middle ground. If it needs it, mixing and re-arrangement can take over once the main points are recorded cleanly. Thanks to hard drives, you can pretty much keep recording and not worry about rewinding the tapes or require too many undos (if any). It's still a lot of work, for all involved in the process, but it is so worth it. I don't want to discount that.

In some situations you do your own mastering. How do you approach mastering dynamic, classical music as opposed to rock/industrial and remix work?

The major difference for me when mastering classical music and rock/industrial remix work is either pushing the volume or keeping it more dynamic. With a remix or industrial track, pushing the track to give it the most "umph" seems to work best for cars, clubs or wherever this particular rock or remix track is going to be played. With classical music, or any score or soundtrack-based music, I can let it breath more, give it more space. It can really tell a story that way. If you listen to symphonic classical recordings you will notice that sometimes they seem very quiet and then the audio crescendos to this big explosion of sound. Rachmaninov is a great example of very dynamic classical music. It's very exciting to listen to.

I thoroughly test tracks on headphones, crappy radio speakers, computer speakers, professional monitors (3 sets), and a 6.1 Behringer sub-woofer system. I listen to CDs mastered by my favorite mastering engineers as inspiration and references for volume and dynamics (like my favorite, Tom Baker, for instance). I am definitely not a certified mastering engineer in any sense of the word, so I still like collaborating with those kinds of people when I get the chance, however I can generally find a nice balance that works across that spectrum for the kind of music that I do with the plug-ins I have.

For me, the Sony Sound Forge 9's Mastering Effects Bundle [powered by iZotope] and Ozone 3 have been a huge help to me in mastering sketches, scores, compositions, mock-ups and a plethora of other stuff recently. The Mastering Effects Bundle is cool because the plug-ins are separated and I can experiment with odd mixing styles by layering multiple copies of it for bizarre effects or mastering individual tracks as opposed to a final-mix-down. Ozone 3 is great because it's all in one and can quickly get me started in the right direction, tweaking it all in real-time.

You split your time between Arizona, the UK and Hungary. Are you inspired a lot by your surroundings? Do you write music on the road, and if so how do you work?

I write plenty of music wherever I am with whatever I have to write it at the time. It could be a piano in a cellar or darkened stage, or my mouth for beat-voxing themes for a friends TV show [GadgetGossip.net], or anything else.

I am mostly inspired by surroundings, change of scenery, creative personal work space and environment. I honestly believe we are all a product of our environments, no matter how you slice it, and thus so is the music. I try to make sure the environments I am in work in my best interests and the music's best interests, though. Generally with stringed instruments, you want to give them as much space as they need to tell a story, and in others, you want to confine it. It all depends on an emotional choice of the story or scenario.

I like antiquated and historical locations. To actually live and work in these kinds of settings is sort of escapism meets idealism in the best creative way. I am lucky to have been given these kinds of chances.

How did you eventually decide to go to Budapest to work? You were working with an orchestra there and also doing some recording. Can you tell us more about this?

I seem to be addicted to living in new cities and working in different cultures. I have already traveled to, and lived in, the UK and Europe a bunch of times due to different opportunities that have popped up over the years and Budapest was yet another one of those cool opportunities that just fell into my lap. Any chance I can get to work in a new city with talented people is always welcome at any time in my life. Budapest is a really cultured, musical and creative city. It is classy and sophisticated and yet still warm and realistic. I love it.

Recording in Budapest was enormously therapeutic and revealing for me as a composer and artist. Absolutely stunning musicians and concert halls and gorgeous scenery and lifestyle to keep the inspiration high throughout all of the hard work, re-writes, sketches and additional side projects. It was for me, the third part in a 3-year culmination of work that would have been my second symphony. The work was nearly completed and coming together at an amazing pace. It should have been released December 2006. The only down side of the entire process of working with the orchestra was (as publicized and written about in my blog) my hard drive crashed upon returning to USA last year, and all of those orchestra sessions are still in limbo on the drive, waiting to either be recovered or lost forever.

I am much smarter now, with three sets of backups in different locations for present and future works. You don't take it seriously until it happens to you. I know I used to feel invincible. I'm now completely obsessed with hard drives and hard drive technology and concepts like future-proofing and shelf-life. I lost a large piece of myself and many years of work. I do hope the world will hear this symphony in the near future, I am working with a data recovery firm to attempt to save the recordings.

Filmmakers like David Lynch and Robert Rodriguez are starting to do their own sound design and music in addition to editing their own movies. Do you think your ambition as a composer will grow to the point of crossing over to making movies, animating or creating something visual to go with your music?

I have been mostly focusing on music these past few years, but to be honest, I eventually want to get back to my filmmaking roots, directing and writing as well. I'm still as fascinated with cameras and technology as I was as a kid. And yes, I want to score my own movies. I'm taking it one thing at a time for the moment though.

Before I was composing, growing up I "wrote and directed" so many live plays with the neighborhood kids, stunt shows, talent shows, animated with early forms of 3D software. I wrote video games, stories, and "movies" as a kid (usually about aliens and other sci-fi stuff), complete with credits (written in QBASIC) and music. You would be surprised what you can do with little to no budget and some help from friends, if your heart is really into finishing the project. I think it is money and egos that slow the entire "creative" process down.

Technology has made it possible for millions of up-and-coming Rodriguezs and Lynchs to do all kinds of stuff that people could never do before. The internet has made so many of our careers possible. Creativeness is no longer compartmentalized and production doesn't necessarily require huge teams of people stepping on top of each other to get a day's task completed. If you want to be your own camera man, your own composer and your own accountant, you can. And people do. I'm no different. When I need to learn something new, I read and learn about it from books, the net, magazines, figure it out and incorporate it into my own little hive mind. I can then begin using these new skills make even better projects, with ever-growing quality and experience. That's the beauty of technology.

To learn more about Justin Lassen visit www.empireofmodernthought.com.

To hear and see the Synaesthesia compositions, visit CGSociety's feature.