Paul began realizing his own music and style producing numerous soundtracks, collaborations and projects. His first solo release, Future Primitive (Wildcat/MCA) received high critical acclaim in 1994. It contained heavy beats, multi-ethnic colors, European sense of melodic structure mixed with American sense of pop-music production and featured the distinctive vocal talents of Nona Hendryx. Next came World Without Rules (RGB) which embraced diverse worldwide musical traditions. There was also a video for the title track that became one of the first pieces shown on MTV¹s AMP. The latest CD Score (RGB) takes the listener through a labyrinth of musical expression and emotions. It explores new aspects of Trip Hop, Jazz, Rap, New-Beat Percussion and Electronica. It also features lush orchestral passages and the silky smooth vocal styling of Julianna Raye.

I had the opportunity to catch up with Paul one evening to find out his sources of inspiration and philosophy for making music.

ON: What was the deciding moment, experience or factor where you knew that you wanted to be a musician or dedicate your life to making music?

Haslinger: It's natural when you grow up around the age of 13 at least half the people dream about starting a band, and I was just one of those 50% who started and got stuck with it. Music was a nice way at the time to escape from school and all the other boring things I wasn't interested in, it actually almost got me through school at that point. It was something I could look forward to, school was a job and music was fun.

ON: Are you self-taught then or have you had formal training?

Haslinger: I was originally self taught, around the same time 13 or 14 a music teacher heard me improvise somewhere and she insisted to my father that I should take some real lessons so from 14 to 18 I took a crash course in piano and composition. By 19 I was able to pass the entrance exam at the academy of music in Vienna and started studying music there. I did some work as a session player on the side and it was pretty much 50-50 studying music and session playing.

ON: Have you always had an ear and did you prefer to study theory or pick things up on your own?

Haslinger: I was never really good in performing other people's work, I would rather make things my own. If I was arranging songs for artists or bands, sooner or later I would turn it around so it would become one of my projects. Being a session player you have to jump into all kinds of situations and just fulfill that role. For me I always preferred making it my own piece.

ON: Was this conscious or did it just happen that way?

Haslinger: It came out that way and was a long development, in the early Tangerine Dream days I was initially hired as a session player and a live player. I gradually grew out of that role and became more of a composer. Today, I think that it really is the idea that counts, no matter who comes up with it, player, composer, producer... in the end, if someone had a great idea, you'll end up with a great piece.

ON: How did you first get involved with Tangerine Dream?

Haslinger: They were starting a UK tour and they were looking for a replacement for Johannes Schmoelling, who didn't want to tour at that time. A friend of mine in Vienna referred me to them. I was about a half year away from graduation so I had to decide whether I was going to graduate or if I was going to go with Tangerine Dream. It was a pretty easy decision. Actually, Wolfgang Lehner, who referred me, happens to be the arranger and producer for the string quartet I recorded with for my latest album. It was the closing of a big circle, he initially got me to TD and we kept in touch over the years and we worked and collaborated together for Score.

ON: What are your best memories or experiences from being in Tangerine Dream?

Haslinger: Being on the road. It was the most wonderful way to get to know the world, especially at my age at 23 being able to travel around and play music. It had a strong effect on my musical and personal perspective in life.

ON: Since you have moved to LA, what inspired you for Future Primitive, World Without Rules and your latest CD Score?

Haslinger: Music is always a direct expression-translation of life. It is life circumstances and time circumstances that contribute to what comes out of you musically. I went through a wake up process in LA in the sense of understanding what was really going on in music. I always wanted to be in the middle of things. Growing up in Austria I had the feeling that I was outside of it, a satellite outside of center. Coming to LA and living here, granted, I was shedding some illusions about LA, like anybody else who moves here, you go through those and you come to a realistic picture of what it is like to be here. Then you find some grounds and based on those grounds I developed my own style.

I think style development has more to do with elimination than with building up. In a way if you listen to all the albums you will find Future Primitive is the fullest, then there is a little less with World Without Rules and even less on Score. Hopefully it will continue like this so that I can eliminate even more, clarifying and simplifying my musical message.

ON: What would be the best way to describe the style of music you do?

ON: Do you have an idea in your head, the way you want something to sound and then try to find the sounds in the real world or can sounds inspire you to do something and work a certain way?

Haslinger: For me all it takes to write a piece of music is one good sound. You go through millions of source sounds, sampling CD's, instruments etc. You start with a sound and you get a pretty good feel or idea what will work. What happens is that I start off with a sound thinking that I will go direction A and end up going in direction S. I always end up somewhere different from what I originally planned, that's the fun of it, it can lead you to another place and you have to have enough guts and intuition to follow it in the right direction.

One thing that I really learned is that music works both ways, one way is the old way of creating a melody, playing a melody, and doing something with it and the structure. The other way is to see music in a way like you see photography. When you see photography you basically have a stream of incoming data, meaning images and you click at the right point, which is comparable to what music is these days because you have so much material to choose from, so many options, because it is all available that is also like a stream. If you are doing a performance you select rather than originate. The ability to click at the right moment, and say that's it! has traditionally been the producer's role, but I think it is all one now. The composer has to be a producer in that respect and that's where lots of musicians can get hung up when they stick to their performance linear kind of thinking where as on the producing side you have a different approach, much more photographically oriented.

ON: How do you approach or compare making music for a CD versus making music to film?

Haslinger: It is simple because on the film side there is a clear objective and a clear frame given whereas on the CD side you have to make the frame yourself.

ON: Are you trying to capture the mood or feelings the characters or actors are experiencing?

Haslinger: It is always different and scenes speak differently to you. It also has lots to do with how the film is edited. In some scenes there are hardly any edits and it is all the person, usually they tend to provoke some kind of harmonic or melodic response. Then there are scenes that are cut and edited very rhythmically, every editor cuts to a certain rhythm. It's this coincidence game that you are playing and you find the rhythm that matches. We are very used to synchronizing down to the frame, so for directors if you don't show it to them in this way they get freaked out easily.

ON: How did you first get involved with Graeme Revell and how do you work with him?

Haslinger: A friend introduced me and recommended me, through him I hooked up with Graeme and I started working with him.

ON: Had he heard what you had done in Tangerine Dream?

Haslinger: No, he didn't. Graeme comes from a different background, the industrial scene, and it was from the recommendation, basically as a programmer and writer. At that point he was changing his team and I fortunately fit right in. Nowadays, composers form teams consisting of orchestraters, programmers, music editors, music supervisors, people that they work well with and can rely on. I am working with him mostly in a function as a music programmer and additional arranger.

ON: How does Cubase play a role in all this and the way that you work?

Haslinger: It is the blank piece of sheet music that I write on, the scoring sheet that allows me to interact with it. That's how I always wanted it that's how I always talked with Werner Kracht (Steinberg Programmer) about what would be most useful to us and he did it with Cubase. I've been working with Steinberg since Pro 24 which had a very different interface, Cubase was and I believe still is the most straightforward sequencer on the market. I have a database which logs all the cues I have written and it is around 3600. It just shows you how much I'm using it day in day out.

ON: In which area of the program do you spend most of your time?

Haslinger: Editors, there's a clue you could take from the DJ side. If you look at the more original DJ's like DJ Shadow and Aphex Twin, you will see tremendous amounts of work that go into microscopic editing. That's why I am so into the editors because whether it is beat tweaking or orchestra manipulation it all happens in the editor. Playing and coming up with stuff is fairly trivial. Just like what I said about producing and composing being one, it comes together in the editor. Those little time relationships make all the difference in the world.

ON: What would you like to see in Cubase that would make your life easier?

Haslinger: One thing that all synthesizer and software manufactures should realize and be very aware of is that since we're working so much with the stuff the reliability should be more of a concern. If you are driving a car somewhere, you want to get from point A to B, if a car breaks down on the way it's not going to be a good a car.

Second, I think Steinberg started a great thing with ReWire. I hope that they push that further along for direct integration of computer based modeling with digital interfacing into Cubase. Something that should not be limited to a drum box and that should leap into all kinds of territories. In the end hopefully you will get sound generation and sound processing with direct input into Cubase.

ON: What are some other things you are interested in or would like to see in the future?

Haslinger: The audio handling is tremendously enhanced in 4.0 with stereo, which is wonderful. Also things like the Lexicon Studio, which I am thrilled with. The question is if Cubase can become a professional recording environment or not. To become professional, it would have to be twice as good as anything else out there. I see the hardware there I see the software there, it would be great if it were doable with something like Be OS or some other things that could help development. Ultimately I want to replace all my digital tape machines. I'm looking for a platform that I can do this with. At the moment none of the computer-based platforms are reliable enough and none of the hardware-based platforms are flexible enough. So we're caught in the middle. Ideally, maybe in conjunction with a hardware manufacturer, it would be great to have an OMF capable recording and playback box.

ON: Are there any other more esoteric features or things that could help with composition?

Haslinger: What really helps is to be able to process sounds, I did a lot of sound processing for the new album directly in Cubase with plug-ins.

The other thing is music documentation in general if we are both orchestrating something or for example beat production, you amass a lot of information and arrangements. Folder tracks are something that already make it so much easier to group or sort out stuff, but there still isn't really a documentation system. Documentation now consists of a window where you could write a note for the arrangement and that's your documentation. The inspector has gotten better but there still is room for improvement on the documentation side.

Another example if you had 2 different instrument setups and you have 100 compositions in an old setup, and you want to open them into the new setup, it would be a big headache, so a simple import export translation routine would help.

ON: Maybe more track classes?

Haslinger: Yes, or ways to sort information, kind of like a database, the more complex we get the more we need tools to handle it somehow.

With the tools we have today it is possible to do many variations of any sound, which is what we will do, then you end up with many sounds, where are you going to put them? The problem with all those fantastic possibilities is how are you going to manage them. I want a system to be efficient and the technology to be reliable simply because I don't want to spend time on it, I want to be able to manage it well, I don't want to spend time figuring out where I stored what at what point in time. The main challenge for the future is to find ways to handle all the data and whoever has the best system in handling all the data with his or her personal artistic vision, will come up with the most interesting stuff.

ON: What about the future, do you want to do soundtracks and a CD every other year or so?

Haslinger: Working on an album can take 2 years, for a movie you have 6 to 8 weeks and it is on to the next movie.

ON: What is next for you, what's the next project you will work on?

Haslinger: Just finished a movie with Graeme Revell called Idle Hands for Sony Pictures, already started the next one: Pitch Black, a Sci-Fi feature for Polygram. Under my own name I will score a documentary for Sony Pictures (The History of Computer Graphics), another CGI title with Jan Nickman called Infinity's Child (sequel to Planetary Traveler), and I'm also working on a new Coma Virus album tentatively titled Sub Rosa. The new (Haslinger) album has reached the top 20 in the CMJ RPM charts, which means I may do some touring later on this year. Lots of collaborative work and sound gathering missions planned, looks like I'm going to fill up my frequent flyer accounts in the next few months pretty good ...