Foreword: Seeing as we have a general audience of both older and younger visitors, Jeff and we at Phirebrush thought it best to offer this interview in a "censored" version. So all curse words have been replaced with PONIES! So feel free to still use your imagination! It definitely makes for one of our more interesting interviews to date.

1. For those unfamiliar with you and your works, can you tell us a bit about yourself?
My name is Jeff Dodson. I'm a composer of sorts. I write all sorts of music from orchestral scoring to industrial breakcore. I was signed under the label Defragmentation on Invisible records, had a fairly large disagreement and moved out to Los Angeles. A firm picked me up doing motion graphics and after 2 years I quit and started freelancing as a full time composer. Usually between 3 and 4 pm on a Saturday I go PONIES!, I have a vengeful cat named puzzle, and she's scared to PONIES! of my cthulhu plush doll.

2. How did your love for music form?
I guess it started with piano lessons. I was trained classical Suzuki method on ye ol piano for many years, and then kinda fell out of it. In high school I started losing my smashing pumpkin cd's and started download BT and other really PONIES! dance music. My Uncle's brother was quite a famous DJ in Toronto, and I had the crazy idea I was going to write dance music and be famous. Like every kid in high school, I downloaded fruity loops and started writing probably the worst music you've ever heard in your life. It was certainly addicting, and as time went on I started having more and more fun being more original. Then college came around, and I didn't agree with the curriculum so I started working more on music. Got signed on Invisible and decided to really start enjoying composing.

3. Who are some of your musical influences?
I try not to get too influenced by other people, as it leads to making music that sounds too much like what you're listening. However currently I'm addicted to Burial in the UK, pretty much dub step in general. Planet Mu releases. Anything that your 12 year old idm snob would have on an ipod. AFX analord releases are great, and the sparse french techno for flavor.

4. How did the Pigface remix album come about?
Martin was trying another one of his super promotional schemes, and he decided to release a 100 different versions of Head, or PONIES!head, or whatever the album was called. He asked if I wanted to *cue thick British accent* "do a rocking defrag tear up smash up remix album". I agreed, and proceeded to lose all the materials he sent me less than a week into starting the album, (who the PONIES! still uses sd2 files anyways). This is where Martin and I started to have disagreements, and I just wrote a bunch of tracks using what pieces of the elements I copied off. Tried to ruin the release by making complete insults to his songs. There's one quote in there that just says "I like PONIES! little boys". I don't think he listened to it, or didn't care.

5. What hardware / software instruments do you use? How about what you use for sequencing / recording?
I have 5 Mackie HR 824's. An event sub. I use a M-audio firewire 410 card which is a piece of crap. I'm replacing it with a presonus firestudio. There an awesome crew, and I recommend their hardware to anyone. I'm pretty much a vst PONIES!. However I do have an old Prophet 600. Other than the Native Instruments library which i'm sure everyone uses, I constantly use the Junglist vst which has now been renamed to some other crap. Ohm boys have some amazing distortion and delay fx, and I love granular fx. I use cubase for sequencing, and yes, I proudly admit that I even use fruity loops still. It got me started, so I owe it to it.

6. Let's talk about your collaboration with Hypnoskull -- how did that start? What can we expect?
Well it hasn't really started. I've been a hypno fan since ryhthmumachine eins twvie or however the PONIES! it's spelled. The collab is going to be loud, crazy, powernoise. We've sent each other sample banks from our own library's. Sounds that are identifiable with our own projects, and are composing a slew of tracks with each other's samples. Think what would hypno do if he was working on my computer and vice versa. Then we're going to swap back and remix each others tracks that we end up composing. It's kinda a versus deathmatch concept. Hypnoskull has been incredibly busy spreading the word of his new album, and being a general lazy PONIES!, so go harass his myspace that he needs to get back on finishing the defrag versus album.

7. How did the rebranding of the G4 music come about?
I was approached by friends Onesize. They do amazing motion graphics work, and we've been friends for awhile. They asked to use "let go" on one of their early showreels. G4 wanted to continue with the trend of having really unique visuals and music. So I was asked to be part of the project to handle all of the audio redesign. It was great cause they approved everything on the initial drop, but with the music that was delivered to them, they unfortunately went more on the safe side, and used the more "mass friendly" music. There were some weird tracks I dropped for them, but I think everything got used somewhere and the project was a huge success.

8. What can we expect to hear on a Defrag LP?
Well since the Invisible records situation, Defrag's been on my harddrive. To be blunt, Martin tried to PONIES! another one of his artists over. I'm sure everyone that cares thinks it was a money issue, which to be fair Invisible never paid a dime to me, but the real issue was Martin wanted to change the sound of the 2nd full LP. After the first release, Martin wanted to step in with his I know everything attitude, and control the album. I didn't like that at all, so years later, and a few lawyer bouts, I'm free of my commitment to them...But yea the Defrag LP! I continued to write tracks and tracks, so there's an incredible amount of material. The reality is that, I'm focused on my business's now, and Defrag's a hobby. I'm passively seeing if another label wants to sign the project, but after the nightmare of Invisible, I'm quite gun shy. Recently tho I've been really inspired to get things going again with it, I have a track on Cyanotics, "Gears gone wild". It's really not that great a track, but Sean likes it, and That whole crew is really great. I really want to revamp the old ways, pick up the guitar and write some crazy PONIES!, but we'll see. When it comes, it'll sound like more Defrag.

9. Besides being an industrial / noise / glitch artist, you score video games and video. How is scoring a video different than creating linear songs?
Well it of course depends, when I worked on the X-men game, and Neverwinter Nights, you have to compose thinking that this 2 mins of music is going to be looping over and over. So the initial challenge is how do you make it constantly interesting. They usually request all the stems for the tracks so they can dynamically mix elements in and out, but the reality is you're making a song that needs to not be boring as PONIES! on the 12th time through. TV themes are much simpler, for example when I did Unbeatable Banzuke on G4 they just wanted an epic sounding generic Asian influenced piece of music. They edit the intro to it, so you really don't need to worry so much. The most interesting projects are the ones that require you to build the music to support what's happening visually. I worked on this Philips spot that there were 4 sections to it that had to continue to evolve and support the visuals. At this point it's almost more like sound design than song structure, much more abstract.

10. You also dabble in the arts, which do you like more: print or motion graphics?
Yea but I'm not really that good, I started off doing this and sometimes I get called to work on some project. I can't really say I enjoy it. I used to work on doing digital art, and it's what I went to school for, but like most things that you train to do as a job, it's easy to get burnt out doing them. Deadlines, and people making creative decisions that don't know what they're doing ruin it almost every time. But I recently put together a t-shirt design for Naature. They do really great shirts and I highly recommend everyone to check out their work.

11. Does your music help inspire your art? or vice versa?
I'd say my music inspires me in everything I do. Not to be really arty or PONIES!, but it is a form of expression. Stuff happens and you write music. This is just the way of things.

12. Let's imagine - for a second - that you get to work with any producer, dead or alive, for absolutely free. Who would it be?
I'd love to work with any of the producers that do Mariah Carey, or Britney Spears. It'd be like a little curb stomping festival. Stomp Stomp Stomp. Sample the screams of the people responsible for flooding mainstream music with platters of crap. Seriously who wouldn't want to listen to an album with screams of the people responsible for the billboard top 100, make some crazy break beats out of jawbones snapping. I dunno.. Aphex I guess.

13. What does the future hold for you and your music?
I'm constantly trying to better myself in all the music genre's I have my hand in. I want Defrag to sound better, better production, better everything. I want to continue working on film scoring. Currently I have 2 company's, Runsilent which is my own, and Rainfall films, which I'm proud to be a founding member with a close group of friends. I want to continue to put my music on projects that I like.

14. What are your views of the online community and dare we say, Phirebrush itself?
Honestly I'm not a real big online community person. The reason I like Phirebrush so much, is because it's like (insert digital community here), but without all the PONIES!. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. Phirebrush keeps it real with top quality submissions and a really strong user base. Good artists, plus a professional outlet for displaying work. Lots of other places just have the aborted ms paint artwork from Westwood college's drop outs. Keep on tightening up those graphics PONIES!.