the beat of Cocoon

the beat of "Cocoon" sounds almost like a needle scratching on a vinyl record. How did you get that effect ?
Yeah, in that particular song the beat was done by Thomas Knak. He’s Danish, and he actually did click noises from the synth. What is actually quite interesting is that I have one sample on this record — and it’s on "Unison" — and it’s from this band called Oval, who have been one of my favorite bands for a few years, and they actually DJ. [Leader] Markus Popp would actually take CDs and scratch them, and put them on the turntable machine ; then he would play off of that.
And the good thing about that is, it’s sort of conquering the fact that most people think that technology is cold because it has no mystery, and it’s very calculated, and blah, blah, blah. So when you take technology and use the areas where it breaks, where it’s faulty, you’re entering a mystery zone where you can’t control it. It’s reacting more like an animal or a person to you, and you have to react with it. It’s not like you tell it what to do and then it does it, like a controlled, cold thing. But you take a knife, scratch a CD, put it on, and it will skip. You don’t know what’s going to happen.

CDnow, august 2001