Banco de Gaia, aka the multitalented DJ/composer Toby Marks, established a distinctive fusion of electronic and world music in the '90s that paved the way, along with Loop Guru and a handful of others, for the current popularity of Indian and Near Eastern influenced acts such as Medicine Drum and Lost at Last.

For me, Banco de Gaia was a key inspiration early on, particularly via the epic journey, Last Train to Llasa double CD. In late 2000 when Six Degrees Records released Igizeh, I found it fittingly in sync with my life as I was preparing for a six-week odyssey in Egypt. Sure enough, not only is the CD themed accordingly, but Toby actually recorded segments on location inside the Great Pyramid at Gizeh and on the streets of Cairo, Luxor, and Aswan. It is a beautiful and moving LP, including a wide range of instrumentation and touching vocals on two tracks by Jennifer Folker of Portand.

Toby came by the Radio-V studios in San Francisco to visit with us for awhile. It was an enjoyable conversation.

MG: How did you establish this kind of sound, the Middle-Eastern trance sound that the Last Train To Llasa CD seemed to epitomize?

TM: I don't know really. I traveled a fair bit in the Middle East years ago, like 10 years ago and I suppose of all the places in the world it's one of the places I've been, more than anywhere else I've gotten familiar with the music and the styles there, the culture there. So when I started working with samplers it seemed anything was possible. I could sample anything I wanted, I could put whatever sounds I want in there and I always found it interesting to use stuff from other cultures because it's, for me, more stimulating than just using purely electronic sounds or Western sounds. And Middle Eastern stuff is something I was familiar with so that's where I started. I mean I've used pretty much everything since then; I don't have a particular agenda about using Middle Eastern music or Indian music or anything. I just grab what I like or whatever's around me. But certainly rhythmically Middle Eastern stuff is something I tend to come back to because I do like the feel of that.

MG: Well how about that Last Train to Llasa CD–it seemed like such a landmark–what was the inspiration for that?

TM: It’s funny because I think everyone assumed it was a concept album about Tibet and it really wasn’t. The track "Last Train to Llasa," when I was writing that, I kind of had the Tibetan issue in mind; it wasn’t exactly a tune about the Tibetan struggle, about what’s going on there but it did color the way the tune came out, put it that way. And that then became the title of the album, but the album itself wasn’t about Tibet or about anything in particular, but I used it as a platform to raise the issue and discuss the issues and raise the history a little bit so inevitably people tended to assume the whole album must be about that. And of course what then happens is people listen to it and every track they’d hear some kind of, "Oh yeah this must be about the blah-blah-blah." Every track seemed to be representing an aspect of what’s going on to some people.

MG: Isn’t that what happens with art sometimes where you might think it’s one thing and it’s something else to a lot of other people?

TM: And that’s one of the things I love about electronic music–there aren’t any rules. You can just chuck a load of sounds, make something that sounds good to me and then…. It’s kind of abstract so people will impose on it what they want to, which is fine. I’m happy for that.

MG: That’s one of the good things about not having so many lyrics to hem things in…. How about Igizeh? Of course we know from just the album sleeve, it was inspired by Egyptian culture and you recorded some of it live over there?

TM: Again, it’s a bit overstating it to say that it’s inspired by Egyptian culture. I did do some recording out there, I took the minidisk with me when I was travelling over there and recorded stuff in the great pyramid, which was pretty much a failure because they’ve put air-conditioning in there, which doesn’t work, doesn’t achieve anything, it just makes horrible noise. So suddenly it’s not a very good place to record anymore. In fact it’s not a very good place to be anymore in my opinion. It’s a bit of a shame…. But I got a lot of field recording out there and used a lot of those on the album. But again it’s not an album about Egypt and wasn’t particularly inspired by Egypt. The titles and the artwork are the last step of putting an album together when I work. I don’t usually write an album with anything in mind. Then once it’s finished I look and think, "Okay, I’d better call this collection something now." And package it somehow.

MG: So I’ve heard that that CD has had a really good response.

TM: Yeah, seems to be. It’s a funny one because I can never predict what’s going to happen. I don’t know how people hear what I do and what’s going to work for some people and not work for some people. But overall the response to Igizeh has been good. After five of six records it’s nice to know that I’ve established myself and I’m keeping the quality threshold up so that people don’t go, "Oh. I remember the good old days." People are still saying, "Wow. Yeah, I love the new record." I think Last Train to Llasa has unfortunately become, from my point of view, has become sort of a benchmark, if you like. To my ear it isn’t actually significantly better than any or the other albums, but for some reason a lot of people say, "Oh yeah, that’s my favorite." Maybe it’s because of the time it came out…it was a significant thing

MG: I think that’s part of it.

TM: For me the music keeps moving on but still staying in the same kind of area; still seems to work.

MG: Well, what are we going to do…you know we have the web channel and the weekly show that we do and we always have a hard time positioning ourselves–electronic, techno–the whole categorization on this new music is really a problem. I mean I don’t like any of the names. The idea that it’s electronic music is kind of silly; all music these days is produced with electronic tools.

TM: Especially if you’re sampling and it’s not electronic music in general. Most of what I do is acoustically generated acoustic stuff recorded and then sampled.

MG: So how do you describe your music?

TM: I try not to. I have a real problem with it.

MG: [Laughs]. Ethnic trance, or…?

TM: I came up with [pauses] global ambient-techno dub. I decided that covered most of it.

MG: [Laughs]. Global ambient-techno dub–it’s pretty good.

TM: Which doesn’t tell you anything really at all. There isn’t a single track that would actually fit that description but overall that probably covers all of it.

MG: It just points out the problem in our language with the titling.

TM: It cracks me up because classical music is called classical music, there aren’t so many sub-genres, and yet it covers a huge amount of music. And people just say, "It’s classical." Whereas this stuff, people seem to need to define. Or pop music in general, people always seem to need to break it down to tell you what it is before you hear it…the point is to hear it.

MG: There is something about the composition process facilitated by digital tools that allows a producer of what we call electronic music to really be a composer than your normal pop song-crafter. And I was just thinking of this because you mentioned classical music and you mentioned earlier that a number of people have said that electronic music is really closer to classical than it is to rock in some ways as far as the complexity, the potential for composition…

The thing about electronic music is it’s constantly evolving constantly changing and there’s new things happening and to take those new things and say that is like something which came before, is in a way demeaning.

TM: But again, are you talking about Eminem or are you talking about Future Sound of London. Some electronic music is more like rock to me. What I do has elements of it in there, it’s got influences from all sorts of things. And I think I remember years ago someone came up with the idea that Richard James, Aphex Twin, was the new Mozart, which I thought was absolutely hilarious. I cannot quite work out how you justify that comment but a lot of people said, "Yeah, yeah! Richard James is the new Mozart!" Because it makes a great sound bite but it becomes meaningless after a while to make comparisons. Sometimes I think a lot of people have a habit of trying to equate every new experience to something in the past, "Well this is a bit like something I can relate to." And the thing about electronic music is it’s constantly evolving constantly changing and there’s new things happening and to take those new things and say that is like something which came before, is in a way demeaning. I’m not bothered about what I do because I don’t think what I do is particularly groundbreaking–it’s what I like to do and it’s a combination of different elements, but some electronic music really is pushing back both the creating process and also the listening process. Then it becomes pointless to say this is like Mozart…. I think Richard James was one of those people in the early days of Aphex Twin that was doing things to people which hadn’t been done before that I was aware of and certainly sounded different–sounded very different.

MG: Who have your inspirations been of folks involved in electronic music?

TM: I don’t know. These days I have to say most electronic music I hear bores me completely. I can’t get anything out of it, I don’t enjoy it. Most of it I find is just machines going beep–not all of it, there is still some really good stuff about. But I have to say that I’m not a great fan of electronic music and I listen to Radiohead before I listen to techno.

MG: You’re positioned in the electronic market but it doesn’t seem like your music should be confined to that market, it’s world music too, wouldn’t it be maybe?

TM: Some stores put it in the world section I gather, which again is quite weird for me because I have no claim to be world music at all, no pretentions about that. What I do is electronic music made in England using modern technology and I happen to incorporate sounds from other parts of the world. Maybe some people have such limited experience of music that to hear Indian singers on western music is such a radical revelations that they go, "Oh! We can’t call it rock, we can’t call it dance, better call it world music." Because they can’t figure out where else to put it. And then you find out over the years that there’s a million other people doing stuff with Indian vocals and Arabic percussion is not that big a deal at all. But initially for some people, like my parents for example made all sorts of strange comments about my music, it’s still alien to them compared to what they normally listen to.

MG: When you playing live are you mostly playing festivals?

TM: It varies.

MG: What’s your favorite?

TM: I love playing festivals because the music always works really well at festivals and given a choice I’d rather do festival gigs than club gigs. If the weather’s good.

MG: What are some highlights [of 2000]?

TM: I spent the first six months of the year locked in the studio working on the album and didn’t play out at all. Then the summer we did two gigs; did a tiny one–Glastonbury festival–we did an unannounced up in Greenfields on a really small stage powered by wind and solar, which was really cool, nice little gig. That was the only festival we played the summer, so…really quiet, concentrating on the writing. Having said that we were in Acapulco [in November 2000] for the ACA World Sound Festival, which was mixed for me, I mean technically it was a nightmare. They didn’t have the production in place properly, they didn’t have the people there who knew what they were doing to make it work for us. I think some of the DJs were okay because someone plugged in a pair of decks they could just about cope with, but actually dealing with a live band, they were just hopeless. It was messy.

MG: What does your live band consist of?

TM: On stage now there’s two of us, there’s myself and Ted Duggan, who’s the drummer I’ve been working with for the last few years. In ’97 I put together a five-piece ban which was really good fun at the time, around the time of Big Men Cry, and it worked really well playing that album live–worked really well that way.

MG: Great.

TM: Now we’re down to just the two of us, and it’s cool because although the five-piece was good and was really fun to have that kind of interaction and the playing again, the two-piece is much tighter, much more electronic. Not sounding, but actually it’s the way we present it and the way we can control what’s going on is much more back to how I used to work, basically mixing on stage, taking the studio on stage and doing live mixes so now we have a combination of the two, with Ted playing electronic drums and acoustic drums, and then I play guitar on some tracks, I play keyboards and I’ve got some electronic percussion. I also do some mixing as well.

MG: Fantastic.

TM: It’s the best of both worlds, sort of bionic.

MG: That’s what everybody wants.

There is a demand for a show to go and look at. I personally don’t find watching DJs interesting at all and I don’t find watching a couple of people mixing on stage very interesting.

TM: For me it’s better than just standing on stage mixing because I still think there’s a place for a visual show. I know a lot of club culture has become or was about anonymous DJs and just about dancing; you didn’t need to know who was playing or where, it was just about the sound but over the years that’s gone by the way and you’ve got all these superstar DJs now and everyone stands and faces the DJ. And there is a demand for a show to go and look at. I personally don’t find watching DJs interesting at all and I don’t find watching a couple of people mixing on stage very interesting. But once you actually see people physically moving and their movement affecting the sound that’s coming out; that’s why drummers are so good on stage because he moves his arm and you hear this clang and so having an element of live performance to look at as well as the interactivity and spontaneity that brings to the music seems to make a lot of sense to me. It also means you can reach a larger audience because some people don’t particularly want to go out and dance or they’re not clubbers, they’re not used to that. They’re used to going out to a bar and watching a band. So they have that choice. In our gigs we’ve had some people who are completely tranced out, eyes shut, don’t care what’s going on onstage at all, and then other people have stood there staring–totally enjoying it, but that’s just their thing.

MG: As you say, best of both worlds…. So have you worked with triggering visuals as part of performance?

TM: Not to a great extent. One of the things I’m planning when it becomes possible for me to do it, both time and financially, is to start working with film or video and become much more interactive using video samples. I’ve got a number of plans on that front. The technology’s there to do it now. It’s just a matter of finding the time and the space to develop the show. For now we do work sometimes with Décor and static stuff rather than moving imagery. Sometimes there are certain bands or artists whose live shows consist of a barrage of video and a couple of blokes on stage mixing. Often it seems very disjointed; the video seems almost tokenistic–it’s like, "Well there’s this huge space we’d better fill it with something." I don’t want to do that. I don’t want it to be: "Let’s have video because we can or because it’s nice." Because one problem is, you do that and you start losing the ability to have a light show and a lot of people seem to forget that a good old rock-n-roll light show is really effective. The Grateful Dead knew this…Pink Floyd. Plenty of people have done spectacular things just using light–not using moving imagery. I still think there’s a lot of potential there. Some of the best live productions we’ve ever done have involved using a lot of lights, ‘cause you know, they’ve got golden scans and telebeams and moving lights now not just spotlights on-off-on-off; you can do far more. If you get into video too much then you start cutting down your options regarding lights and you can’t have other lights on. So it’s just nice to find a balance rather than just saying, "Oh, we must have video."

MG: Well what’s kind of cool–and I’m anxious to see some of the electronic artists start using–is the ability to trigger images. I mean you can just have a little laptop and one of these little projectors and boom you have it, you can trigger still images or little video clips, just kind of on the fly, while you’re performing.

TM: We toured over here in ’95 with a band called EBN, Emergency Broadcast Network, and these guys have done some of the video for the U2 tour in ’94. One of their guys was this computer genius and he had written the computer software for a video sampler and basically their whole live show consisted of a spoof news program–hilarious. They had a lectern in the middle of the stage and had TV screens, lasers and rocket launchers mounted on it, and it revolved. It was on a motor so it could spin ‘round and the rocket launchers and lasers could spin ‘round like Catherine Wheels. So you had those spinning ‘round and the whole thing moving circular on the floor as well. And they had this spoof news presentation of, "Hi, I’m blah-blah-blah and this is EBN News." And then their tunes were quite topical; they were about gun control or about sex or about social issues. But it was brilliant because they were constantly running live video in the background, which was totally related to the tunes, and mixing in prerecorded stuff and triggering stuff live as well. So when they were out on the road they were constantly going to video shops and seeing what they could find and lifting bits out of old movies and doing computer-generated stuff as well. It was a really cool show, and this was five years ago. It’s a shame that I know of has taken it any further than that yet. That theatricality was really fun and really made a show spectacular.

MG: That’s exactly the kind of thing that could work for electronic music show and I think we’re all just looking for more of a theatric element…. Well, maybe just to kind of wrap up here, what are your touchstones within this culture, within the rave or electronic culture–what do you resonate with? How would you critique it–where would you like to see it going?

TM: A lot of the time I don’t really feel like I’m part of the whole dance culture and rave culture. I don’t go clubbing these days. Like I said, I can’t stand most of the music so it drives me mad. So sometimes I don’t really see what my part is in all of that and a lot of the time I think I’m considered quite irrelevant by most genres. But a lot of the psychedelic trance stuff and I suppose the trance and of this is the one area I do feel somewhat at home and it’s kind of nice. Down at the ACA Festival, Medicine Drum were there and loads of DJs from the UK and all sorts of people. It’s kind of nice to be hanging out with people who do loosely similar stuff, feeling like there is a community there. Back home I was talking about doing some stuff with platypus a while ago and Simon from Hallucinogen lives not far down the road and I’ve got a lot of respect for what he does. But I wouldn’t say I feel part of those scenes even so. What I listen to is anything from Fat Boy Slim to Underworld to some psychedelic trance stuff, and not most of it.

MG: Selective.

TM: Yeah.

MG: There seems to a thread, a spirit that’s wanting to express itself, come out. I guess the Earthdance project that Chris Deckker from Medicine Drum has headed up is kind of a manifestation of that unifying spirit. And I do think that you as an artist, I think that the ethnic tie-ins that you’ve brought into your music have been inspirational for a lot of people. I would venture to say that you’re considered one of the spiritual inspirations within the trance scene.

TM: I suppose I’ve been doing it for ten years, you know–there’s not that many of us that have been doing for that long now. It’s funny, last year when I realized it was that long I said, "How can it be ten years?" It feels like I’m only just starting. And then I remembered back to the old days and well, who did we used to play with who’s still going? And there’s Underworld and there’s Orbital and Eat Static. And then I start struggling to think who else is around now that was around then. I mean it’s not good or bad that people keep going, as long as the music stays good, it doesn’t really matter one way or another. But I can see how that would mean you’ve got people who, some of the stuff they first heard might have been my stuff, so it takes on significance from that point of view. I’m a little wary sometimes. In the same way that I think by about 1971 or 1972, some of the idealism of the ‘60s just turned into a kind of fashion, I think there is a lot of fashion in the dance world as well, and a lot of fake spirituality, if you like. I think Earthdance is really cool and what Chris and people and doing is really, really valuable and really important and I’m really glad it’s kept going. Year by year it gets stronger and stronger because at first I wasn’t even sure they could pull it off at all. I remember the first year I remember thinking, "This sounds like a great idea but you’ll never make it work." And they did. And now it just goes from strength to strength–it’s brilliant. But I have a friend, for example, who’s into psychedelic trance and he likes having psychedelic hangings on his bedroom and he’s got a collection of books about every religion and spiritual system you can imagine. But he never actually reads them.

MG: Right, right, right.

TM: He goes to a club, he gets off his face on drugs, and dances a lot and that is a spiritual experience. And to me that is no more valid or meaningful than going to church every Sunday and eating a little biscuit. It may be important people–I think people should keep it in perspective. Sometimes people get a bit carried away and say, "This is a really spiritual experience for me." It’s not. If you’re getting off your face on drugs, it’s not necessarily the same thing, especially these days, the drugs aren’t necessarily that good.

MG: [Laughs]. I think that’s very well put and I think that’s a very significant point to make. "Spiritual materialism" was Chogyam Trungpa’s term for that, when our egos take on this spirituality mantle…. Anyway, I want to just say that we’ve all been fans of your music and on behalf of all your other fans would like to thank for the great output over the past ten years. And thanks for visiting with us here in San Francisco.

TM: My pleasure. Hopefully I’ll keep doing it for another ten or twenty or thirty. The day I start turning out mediocre rubbish then shoot me.

MG: [Laughs]. All right, well, we’ll look forward to seeing the live show.