In terms of pioneers Techno music revolves around three men, Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. Whilst the first two would be credited with originating and innovating the music respectively Saunderson was the artist charged with elevating it - bringing it out of the underground and into the mainstream without sacrificing artistic creativity.

He was the genius behind Inner City, which in ‘Good Life’ arguably threw up Techno’s greatest commercial highpoint, as well as other projects such as E-dancer, Reese and Tronikhouse. Jimmy Coultas was lucky enough to throw some questions his way recently, and here are the results.

"You’re playing at Liverpool techno institution Voodoo in a couple of weeks. Have you been to the city before and what are you expecting from the gig?"

Yeah I remember coming a long time ago, I think I played a live gig for Inner City back in the day, but it’s going back a long time so I can’t exactly say I remember too much about it! Of course it’d be much different at this time anyway as they’ll be a younger generation of people coming to the gig, but I think they’ll be some older cats coming down as well, people who’ll know my music from when it first came out. I’m anticipating a really good combination of the old and the new down at Voodoo.

"As part of the Belleville three you defined not only what techno was all about but the actual music itself. How do the three of you get along these days, and are you comfortable with the state that your legacy is left in?"

I’m still going yeah, I’m kinda living the role of living legend these days, just doing my thing and still getting music out. I still speak to Juan and Derrick, you know not as much as we used too but still by email or on MySpace, and we still talk about the music.

"Do you think that we’ll witness a period of revolution in the electronic music scene like we did in the late eighties ever again?"

Well I can’t see it, but then I never saw it when it happened and I was in the centre of it, you’ know you can’t really predict something like that happening, its just a case of being in the right place at the right time y’know.

I think the technology has to develop quite a lot for things to happen as well, there has to be quite a big shift in development to give us something we haven’t got now or cant even imagine, for their to be such a massive change to create a new movement or revolution.

"How has your sound shifted over the years in terms of the technology developments that have happened? Do you think you’re better at creating music right now because there are simply so many more different methods of doing things in comparison to 1986?"

Yeah, I think basically what has happened is that technology means now you can do stuff a lot easier, before you’d have to everything in the studio but now you do everything on a laptop, even do the mix on a record. There are a lot of things you can touch as well these days that make thing easier to produce off, so it’s made life easier for the producer this technology.

From a personal level, you can’t get the warmth out of a laptop; I definitely prefer to do things in a studio where I’m chasing that warmth, its something that’s always been a part of my records.

"So do you think that technology making things more convenient for producers has resulted in people losing the essence of the music?"

I wouldn’t say that no, Its not so much that people have forgotten what the warmth is about, its just harder to achieve with that type of technology. And I think with the younger generation, who don’t know what they’re missing, it’s certainly not been forgotten, how can you forget what you didn’t have? They appreciate different things in music now, you know they can get everything they want from listening to the lyrics and the song and get that emotional connection going.

"Techno differs from other forms of music in the fact that it was Black people’s spin of white European electronic music, as opposed to the other way round which has normally been the case, such as in rock n roll and in the last couple of decades hip-hop. What do you think was the lasting impression that this cross-pollination of differing musical cultures was?"

I think from with kraftwerk what attracted them to me was that they were making future music, it was something you didn’t hear of anyone else and they had their own look going on, that was cool to me. And then with stuff like disco, which was the black dance music movement that preceded us in Techno, they were bringing in records that were making people dance, but using you know vocals and adding a soulful edge. Our interpretation I guess centred on what we wanted to do, taking from these influences but giving our own point of view.

The music we made was out of need, we didn’t have enough music of the type we liked to play and at the right tempo as well, we could played three or four hours of disco but that wasn’t all what we wanted to do. Techno made everything dj led, and that was something we were trying to achieve, we could do music now as a solo artist and we didn’t need a band any more to get our musical views across, we could just do it by oursleves.

I guess you could say that we fused this future vibe from Kraftwerk with the dance and groove of disco. We were distilling our influences on to the track and I think that was what our spin on other people’s music really was.

"Who’s exciting you these days in terms of music production?"

You know I don’t think I can answer that question; I’ve never really been good at putting other people’s music across, someone who’ll name check artists and stuff. And I’m not sitting back and listening to other people’s music as such any more as I used too, so I’m not really in a position to answer that.

"And finally, what lies in the future for the Kevin Saunderson sound?"

Well, from my perspective, I’ve got the tour coming out now, which is like the last twenty years of my records put out there. I’ll be doing the E-dancer, Reese, Esser’ay, Tronikhouse records as well as the Inner city stuff, so people can piece together the fact that I’m the same artist doing all this. The same guy behind all these records.

After that I’ve got a remix anthology album coming out, me just getting a few of my friends and people I admire from the industry to work on my records, different people giving a spin on my work. I’m trying to shift my skills into film scoring too, use what I’ve achieved as an artist into demonstrating a wider musical direction.

But there will definitely be another album; you’ll get one more out of me from that. I guess there will be another five years or so of me touring and gigging, before I truly go into the other areas where my musical skills can go. That’s the way I see it for myself in the next few years.