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BT (musician)

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Brian Transeau
BT playing an acoustic version of "Satellite" from Movement in Still Life at a 2006 concert
BT playing an acoustic version of "Satellite" from Movement in Still Life at a 2006 concert
Background information
Birth name Brian Wayne Transeau
Also known as BT
Born October 4 1971 (1971-10-04) (age 36)
Rockville, Maryland, United States
Genre(s) Trance, House, Ambient, Film Score
Occupation(s) Producer, DJ, composer
Years active 1995 - Present
Label(s) Perfecto Records, Reprise Records, Headspace Recordings, Nettwerk, DTS Entertainment, Black Hole Recordings
Website http://www.btmusic.com

Brian Wayne Transeau (born October 4, 1971 in Rockville, Maryland) is an electronic musician, better known by his stage name, BT. He has been called the "Father of Trance" for his pioneering in the trance genre,[1][2] and "Prince of Dance Music" for his multi-instrumentalist skills,[3] and in recent years he has gained additional fame for producing Hollywood film scores. When recording with other artists, BT has used the aliases Kaistar, Libra, Dharma, Prana, Elastic Reality, Elastic Chakra, and GTB. BT is known in production circles for his signature technique, the stutter edit, also known as the BT stutter.[4][5] This technique consists of taking a small sample of a sound and then repeating it in a musical as well as mathematical way.

Contents

Early years

Transeau showed an early interest in music, playing the piano from the age of two.[6] As an adolescent, he heard electronic music such as New Order and Depeche Mode and began to love it. He attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts for one year before dropping out and moving to Los Angeles, California where he found himself largely an outsider in the closed Los Angeles electronica community.

Music career

BT moved back to the Washington, DC area where he grew up and collaborated there with his friends Ali and Sharam of Deep Dish in the early 1990s. Transeau's productions were not popular in the United States, and he had no idea that he had become a sensation across the Atlantic, where UK DJs like Sasha and Paul Oakenfold were regularly spinning his music to the delight of crowds. Sasha bought Transeau a ticket to London, where BT witnessed his own massive success; several thousand clubbers responded enthusiastically when Sasha played his song.[7] He was soon signed to Oakenfold's record label. In the early years of BT's career (roughly 1995-2000), he pioneered the trance genre, which was less hyper and more soothing than most other types of dance music. Despite the fact that he is not truly a DJ and doesn't claim to be,[8] BT has often appeared on the lists of the world's top DJs. In 2006, he ranked 73rd on DJ Mag's Top 100 DJ list. In 2005, he ranked 82nd,[9] up from 92 in 2004[10]. Additional rankings were 83rd in 2003 and 76 in 2001.[11][12] More recently, in DJ Times, BT was ranked as America's second best DJ, as voted by fans.[13] BT has said of his musical background, "I'm not the traditional type of dance music artist. I'm not a DJ. I come from a classical music background. I attended the Berklee College of Music, and I played in punk bands."[7]

Ima

Instantly popular, BT's 1996 album Ima helped shape the future of the burgeoning progressive house scene as it merged with, and later came to define, the trance music style. Notable on Ima was it's first single, which put the album on the map with a co-write and vocal by Vincent Covello on the break-out hit single for BT, "Loving You More." Another prized collaboration with singer/songwriter Tori Amos "Blue Skies was released afterwards and rose to the top of the dance charts as well. The title, "Ima" ("今"), is the Japanese word for "now."

ESCM

While Ima was comprised solely of the "progressive" sound, 1997's ESCM was more experimental (although it still produced several big records for the electronic dance music scene). The album featured more complex melodies and more traditional harmonies along with a heavier use of vocals. The tone of the album is darker and less whimsical than Ima. The album, as a whole, is much more diverse than BT's debut album. The LP was a hit in England, Australia and Japan.[7] The biggest hit from ESCM was arguably the trance classic, " Flaming June", a collaboration with German trance meister Paul Van Dyk. Indeed, Paul and BT would collaborate on a number of works including the excellent, unreleased " Namastai" as well as PVD's remix of BT's "Blue Skies". There was also a BT and PVD mix of the Van Dyk classic " Forbidden Fruit". It can be strongly argued that, while obviously talented, BT owes a lot of his club success to established DJs like Paul Van Dyk, Sasha and Paul Oakenfold.

Movement in Still Life

BT released his 1999 album Movement in Still Life and continued his previous experimentation outside of the trance genre. The album, his third, features a strong element of nu skool breaks, a genre he helped define with the popular "Hip-Hop Phenomenon",[14] in collaboration with Tsunami One. The LP moved into less experimental music and was somewhat worrying to some fans on the artist's message boards. The strong hip-hop influences on "Madskillz-Mic Chekka" and "Love on Haight Street" combined with pop flavors to cause doubt that BT was moving away from his roots. However, the album hits a spectrum of genre-work. "Smartbomb" is a mix of funky, heavy riffs from both synthesizers and guitars woven over a hip-hop break and includes a lyric sample from "Love on Haight Street". "Shame" and "Satellite" lean toward an alt-rock sound, while "Godspeed" and "Dreaming" fall into classic trance ranks. "Running Down the Way Up", a collaboration with fellow electronic act Hybrid, features sultry vocals heavily edited into a progressive breakbeat track. "Never Gonna Come Back Down" (featuring vocals by Mike Doughty) was the most popular single from the album, and appeared on the Gone in 60 Seconds soundtrack in radio edited form. "Mercury and Solace", while failing to achieve the commercial success of "Never Gonna Come Back Down", is the most commercially remixed song from the album.[15] Jan Johnston sang vocals on this track and others, with Kirsty Hawkshaw also making significant vocal contributions to "Running Down the Way Up" and "Dreaming".

Emotional Technology

The original versions of many tracks that were to be released on the follow up to Movement in Still Life were stolen from BT's studio during a burglary around Christmas of 2001. $75,000 worth of equipment was stolen. The 11 lost tracks included collaborations with Sarah MacLachlan and Peter Gabriel which were never duplicated. The album that replaced the lost tracks was Emotional Technology, released in 2003. It featured more vocal tracks than BT's previous fare, including six with vocals by BT himself. Emotional Technology was BT's least experimental album to date, and many consider it the "popiest" of all of his work. The big single from the album, Somnambulist, draws heavily from the breakbeats and new wave dance of New Order and Depeche Mode, whom BT has cited as major influences.[4] The rest of the album fairly escapes genre labeling. from the dark guitar work of Circles, to The Only Constant is Change which is reminiscent of Satellite, the album blends genres and changes genres in mid-track.

This Binary Universe

BT's fifth studio album, This Binary Universe, released in 2006, is his second studio album released in 5.1 surround sound, the first being the soundtrack to the motion picture Monster. The album features a mix of many genres, including jazz, breakbeats, and classical music. Three songs feature a full 110-piece orchestra. BT has said that the album has a lullaby-like quality, inspired by his daughter, Kaia, who sat on his lap throughout most of the song writing process. Animated videos were created to accompany each song.[16] The videos are included in a DVD packaged along with the CD. Keyboard Magazine declared of the album, “In a hundred years, it could well be studied as the first major electronic work of the new millennium.”[17] Unlike his last two albums, which featured vocals on almost every track, this album contains none. The tracks also change genres constantly throughout. A good example is "The Antikythera Mechanism", which starts off almost lullaby-like complete with a piano, acoustic guitars and reversed beats. Halfway through the track, the song explodes with a 110-piece orchestra, followed by a section of breakbeats and ending with the de-construction of the orchestra. An hour-long video interview with BT focusing on This Binary Universe is available on the DivX Stage6 BT channel.[18] Through the months of November and December of 2006, BT toured the album with Thomas Dolby opening. This 3 piece band set featured many instruments created by BT himself, as well as introduced his live stutter edit plug-in that will be released in 2007. The concert also featured a live slideshow of images from the online website DeviantArt as a backdrop.[19] Images and accounts from the tour to date can be seen at dA Presents.[20] The Stutter Edit as well as Break Tweaker are both software created by BT's company "Sonik Architects" and will be released sometime in 2007. A demonstration of the stutter edit can be seen in the posted interview above. See Granular synthesis

Collaborations

  • GTB (Guy Oldhams, Taylor, & Brian Transeau)
  • Tori Amos - "Blue Skies" on Ima
  • Mike Doughty, guitarist and former lead singer of Soul Coughing - vocals on "Never Gonna Come Back Down" from Movement in Still Life and Gone in 60 Seconds soundtrack.
  • Guru (Gang Starr) - "Knowledge of Self" on Emotional Technology
  • The Psychedelic Furs' singer Richard Butler - "Shineaway" on The Jackal soundtrack and 10 Years In The Life.
  • NSync - "Pop" on NSync's album Celebrity
  • Britney Spears - "Before the Goodbye" and "I Run Away," from the international versions of her album Britney
  • JC Chasez (backing vocals) on "Somnambulist" and lead vocals on "Force Of Gravity" from Emotional Technology
  • Rose McGowan - "Superfabulous" on Emotional Technology
  • David Bowie - "(She Can) Do That" on the Stealth score
  • The Roots - "Tao of the Machine" on the Blade II soundtrack (also appears in the Need for Speed: Most Wanted video game)
  • Peter Gabriel on music for the Millennium Dome project in 1999 [21]
  • Billie Ray Martin - produced several tracks and remixes for Deadline For My Memories
  • NSync - Shortly after Movement in Still Life, BT produced NSync's "Pop." With this song, one of NSync's biggest hits ever, he introduced his trademark stutter vocals to the masses.[22] After the success of the track, fellow label-mate Britney Spears worked with BT, creating two songs. One of the tracks, "Before The Goodbye," was hailed as "groundbreaking" by MTV.com[23] and rumored to be the lead single from her third album until unspecified conflict with Jive Records led BT to insist the tracks be removed from the US version of the album, causing "I'm A Slave 4 U" to be released instead.
  • Tiësto - BT provided vocals on the Tiësto single "Love Comes Again"-- in exchange, Tiësto remixed BT's song from Emotional Technology, "Force of Gravity." BT recently contributed vocals to Tiësto's track "Break My Fall."

Upcoming collaborations:

Film scores

In recent years, BT has moved into film scoring, creating the scores for Go (1999), Under Suspicion (2000), Driven (2001), The Fast and the Furious (2001), Stealth (2005), Underclassman (2005), Look (2006) and Catch and Release (2007). He produced the score for the 2001 film Zoolander but then had his name pulled from the project. His tracks for the film were finished by composer David Arnold.[26] His score for the film Monster (2003) has received particular acclaim.[4] He is now slated to work on a film titled The Possibility of Fireflies which stars Kelly Preston and will be released in 2008.[27] Transeau has also done the score for video games Die Hard Trilogy 2: Viva Las Vegas (2000), Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions (2002) and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 (2004). BT has even ventured into television, creating the scores for the TV series Kevin Hill in 2004 and for Tommy Lee Goes To College for NBC in 2005. He also executive-produced the Tommy Lee series, the idea for which he actually developed and sold to NBC.[8]

Live performances

Unlike many trance artists, Transeau frequently performs his music live. In August 2000, he headlined the E-Pavilion at EndFest. For New Year's Eve 2001, he performed at a Los Angeles block party with Paul Oakenfold and Deep Dish.[28] In 2004, he did a very popular "last night of summer" concert at BT Tower (named for British Telecom). On August 6, 2006, BT performed at the Campus Bash for WWDC 2006, the last bash to actually be held at the Apple Inc. campus at 1 Infinite Loop Cupertino, California. On August 11, 2006 he performed the opening performance to a sold out show featuring DJ Tiësto at The Borgata in Atlantic City, New Jersey.[29][30] BT in December 2006 toured in support of This Binary Universe in a dual-headliner tour with Thomas Dolby. BT performed at the second to last night at the AXIS nightclub in Boston, MA on September 14, 2007. He opened with "Let it Be" by the Beatles and flowed into hard progressive trance. BT will be performing at a charity event in Salt Lake City, Utah on December 15th, 2007 called (Not so) Silent Night. Mikey Dough (M. Doughty of Soul Coughing and BT's track Never Gonna Come Back Down) will be opening with his debut house set.

Software

BT has written his own software called BreakTweaker for his latest album. He will be releasing it in 2007 under his software company, Sonik Architects. He plans to then come out with a line of tools and plugins specifically aimed at musicians and DJs, including his signature stutter edit.[31] Both BreakTweaker and StutterEdit were initially scripted by BT at the command-line level during prototype development.[17] He has a team of developers now working on delivering a feature-complete product leaving him free to focus on higher level architecture and development. In addition to his "BT Stutter" edit, BT's signature sound is also achieved by means of a method of sound manipulation called granular synthesis, where sounds are broken apart into tiny pieces and rearranged to create very chaotic and wild soundscapes.[32] BT is one of the direct pioneers of time correction techniques.[33] Time correction is a method by which a producer takes a series of samples with random occurrence (such as rain) and time corrects each individual hit according to a rhythmic and mathematical grid, much like the BT stutter. The result is that the seemingly random pulses take on a rhythmic form as well as a developing pattern, but retain their chaotic and unpredictable character. Transeau has developed his own method of time-correcting which he calls "nano-correcting," which is correcting any note shorter than a 64th note. He is writing a book on stutter editing and time correcting and has included a chapter on nano-correcting.[33]

Personal life

Transeau has implied on occasion that he is a fan of the television series South Park, despite being against watching television. In January 2007, Transeau lost items valued at a total of US $150,000 which included his personal computer containing the show display of 'This Binary Universe.'[34] This is the second noted robbery which has befallen Transeau. In response to this, Transeau had posted a US$20,000 reward (or his equivalent time as a producer) for information leading to the recovery of his music, and on his website has noted attempts to create a non-profit community subscription service where individuals can record details in an attempt to help track future stolen goods. When asked about his sexual orientation by People Magazine, Transeau had this to say: "Although I do have a feminine side, as most men do, particularly artists, I am not a "flaming faggot", as has been reported in some media. I do get "stoked" however, about music!" Therefore, the fact that he combines this claim with being a father to his daughter Kaia, would deem any rumors of homosexuality to be largely inaccurate.

Discography

Albums

Singles and EPs

  • "Oneday" (1992) (vocals by Fawn (musician))
  • "The Moment of Truth" (1995) (As Brian Transeau)
  • "Relativity" (1995) (As Brian Transeau)
  • "Loving You More" (1996) (vocals by Vincent Covello (musician))
  • "Embracing the Sunshine" (1996)
  • "Blue Skies" (1996) (vocals by Tori Amos)
  • "Love, Peace and Grease" (1997)
  • "Flaming June" (1997)
  • "Remember" (1997) (vocals by Jan Johnston)
  • "Godspeed" (1998)
  • "Mercury and Solace" (1999) (vocals by Jan Johnston)
  • "Dreaming" (2000) (vocals by Kirsty Hawkshaw)
  • "Smartbomb" (2000) (vocals by Rasco)
  • "Never Gonna Come Back Down" (2000) (vocals by Mike Doughty)
  • "Shame" (2001) (vocals by BT)
  • "Somnambulist (Simply Being Loved)" (2003) (vocals by BT and JC Chasez)
  • The Technology EP (2004)
  • "Force of Gravity" (2005) (vocals by BT and JC Chasez)

Compilations

  • R&R (Rare & Remixed) (2001) - A two disc mix album showcasing BT's remix work, rare songs from his early career and previously unreleased tracks, most notably "Sunblind".
  • Still Life In Motion (2001) - A collection of remixes and edits of songs off of Movement in Still Life.
  • 10 Years In the Life (2002) - Disc 1 is a collection of rare songs, remixes and edits of Transeau's songs, showcasing Transeau's progression as an artist over the span of a decade. It notably includes his very first track ever recorded, "The Moment Of Truth". Disc 2 is a mix album and features remixes and rare tracks done by BT, including remixes of Madonna, DJ Rap, The Crystal Method and Deep Dish. Most of the rare tracks by BT are under the names of his many aliases. The booklet that comes with the CD features stories by BT about the making of each track on both discs, as well as a series of comments about his early career, remixing, scoring films and producing music in general.

Film appearances & scores

Remixes

Video game appearances and scores

Sample CDs

  • Breakz from the Nu Skool (2002)
  • Twisted Textures (2002)
  • 300 Years Later (with Nick Phoenix) (2005)

Aliases and Pseudonyms

  • BT
  • Prana
  • Elastic Chakra
  • Elastic Reality
  • Libra
  • Dharma
  • Kaistar
  • GTB

See also

References

  1. ^ Roland US Community Article
  2. ^ Peter Arnberg Article
  3. ^ Jive Magazine Review
  4. ^ a b c Keyboard Magazine Article
  5. ^ http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/bt/
  6. ^ LA City Beat
  7. ^ a b c Remix Magazine
  8. ^ a b http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2004/10/02/the_world_at_his_fingertips/?page=2
  9. ^ DJ Mag's Top 100 DJs 2005
  10. ^ DJ Mag's Top 100 DJs 2004
  11. ^ DJ Mag's Top 100 DJs 2003
  12. ^ DJ Mag's Top 100 DJs 2001
  13. ^ http://www.djtimes.com/bestdj/index.htm
  14. ^ Lunar Magazine interview
  15. ^ http://folk.uio.no/ulfb/odd/btdisc.htm
  16. ^ BTs' Last FM site
  17. ^ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named costacomm
  18. ^ http://stage6.divx.com/BT
  19. ^ News: DeviantArt Presents BT and Thomas Dolby, 7 November, 2006 - DeviantArt News
  20. ^ http://dapresents.deviantart.com/
  21. ^ http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1445116/20010712/story.jhtml#/news/articles/1445116/20010712/story.jhtml
  22. ^ http://www.jivemagazine.com/review.php?rid=320
  23. ^ http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1444712/20010622/bt.jhtml
  24. ^ "Btmusic.com :: View topic - Blake Lewis - Break Anotha".
  25. ^ Dana Meltzer Zepeda (June 27, 2007). "American Idol's Blake Lewis Dishes on New Album". TV Guide. Retrieved on 2007-06-29.
  26. ^ http://folk.uio.no/ulfb/odd/films.htm
  27. ^ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named www.imdb.com
  28. ^ MTV News Article
  29. ^ http://www.theborgata.com/Main.cfm?Category_1=10000&Category_2=10200&ReleaseID=F8432DFB-C29B-0A4C-0E2E0A66E272BF77
  30. ^ http://www.clubplanet.com/mailer/2006/08/borgata-0811/
  31. ^ Progressive Sounds
  32. ^ http://music.ign.com/articles/637/637464p2.html
  33. ^ a b http://emusician.com/mag/emusic_sonic_surgeon/index.html
  34. ^ http://www.btmusic.com/Brian_Transeau_Home_Robbery.pdf

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