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Q: What is the mission of music today? What is the mission of composer and what are the embodiment of its receiving effects?

Steve: Missions are usually projects where the end has already been decided, and we don't think like that. Music has the ability to enrich the moment, to potentiate and dramatise the feelings of the individual, and sometimes to create channels of communication, exchanges of energy. It's a form of communication, it's a mutational form, which alters in relation to the listener's being. The bottom line is that many artists don't really know why they do what they're doing, they might have some conscious aims but, honestly, they are often tagged on after the fact. It's a primal force in human nature, to create symbolic representations, worlds anew, abstractions and patterns pulled from life experience, making a feeling into a sound or a picture. It's basic, we have a drive to express and construct alternative realities, to change our reality through the game of art. To what end, I don't know, a manifestation of the desire for transcendence is my best guess. Sometimes one can feel disheartened or transfixed by a feeling of meaninglessness, where the functional aspect of what you do feels like a kind of neurotic affliction, just as some people compulsively check that the gas is switched off, or like rats on speed exploring their cages repetitively over and over and over. Drugs and sex are mediums for exploring altered reality, but music has this instantaneous transformative power too. If you are listening to the radio and after a string of dull or idiotic records they play something good, you feel your heart lift and your whole body registers the change. Radiohead's "Pyramid Song" was released here as a single, and although it didn't get much radio play, when you heard it among the dismal fluff and drivel of daytime commercial radio it felt like a radiation from another world, just the opening bars would shift you from the mundane axis and into a transformed state of reality. Radiohead complain a bit too much about being trapped in big business medialand but they're headed in the right direction, I think, and it's just a miracle these days to find a band who sell lots of records who have the genuine wish to experiment.

Simon: The mission of most music today is to create a sound that is already so familiar that people will like it the moment they hear it, so we have our modern day Beatles and Rolling Stones, our new Kate Bush, Syd Barrett etc etc... It's all a karaoke wasteland. For us music is about surprise, it's about bafflement as well as discovery, i.e. not being able to understand a composition but enjoying trying to. Music that escapes definition but excites the mind when you try for it.