Brian Transeau

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Image:BT ozonic.png Brian Transeau (born Brian Wayne Transeau on October 4, 1971 in Rockville, Maryland) is an electronica musician who records under the stage name BT. When recording with other artists he has used the aliases Kaistar, Libra Dharma, Prana, Elastic Reality, Elastic Chakra, GTB and, in collaboration with DJ Sasha, 2 Phat Cunts.

BT is a highly influential electronic musician. His techniques are frequently groundbreaking and trend setting. He is very well known in production circles for his signature technique, the stutter edit aka the BT stutter. This technique consists of taking a small sample of a sound and then repeating it in a musical as well as mathematical way. He is also one of the direct pioneers of time correction techniques. Time correction is where the producer takes a series of samples with random occurrence (such as rain) and time corrects each individual hit according to a rhythmic and mathematical grid- much like the BT stutter. The result is the seemingly random pulses take on a rhythmic form as well as a developing pattern, but retain their chaotic unpredictable character.

Transeau claims to have an IQ of over 170.Template:Fact (As a comparison, the value estimated for Einstein's IQ is between 160 and 180.) He has been playing piano since the age of 3 and attended Berklee College of Music for one year before dropping out and moving to Los Angeles, California.

Transeau's music was not well received in the United States, so he moved to Europe where his music was discovered by Sasha, a British DJ who introduced BT's music to the club circuit. Instantly popular, BT's 1996 album Ima helped shape the future of the burgeoning progressive house scene as it merged with, and later came to define, the trance music style. While Ima was comprised solely of the "progressive" sound, 1997's ESCM was more experimental (although it still produced several big records for the electronic dance music scene). BT's 1999 album Movement in Still Life continued his experimentation outside of the trance genre he helped to define through his more adventurous work and the more structured, commercially viable tracks. This album also featured a strong element of nu skool breaks, a genre he helped define with the classic Hip-Hop Phenomenon, in collaboration with Tsunami One. 2003 saw the release of Emotional Technology featuring more vocal tracks than usual, including six with vocals by Transeau. He also provided vocals on the DJ Tiësto single "Love Comes Again," and recently worked together with David Bowie on the song "(She Can) Do That," recorded for the movie Stealth (2005), which BT also composed the score for.

In recent years, he has also moved into film scoring, including Go (1999), Under Suspicion (2000), Driven (2001), The Fast and the Furious (2001), and Monster (2003). He recently completed the score for Stealth (2005), as well as the score for Underclassman (2005).

Unlike many artists working in electronica, Transeau frequently performs his music live. In 2004, he did a very popular "last night of summer" concert at BT Tower (named for British Telecom).

He has a young daughter, Kaia. He lives and composes his works in his Los Angeles home studio.

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Musical Progression

The variety of BT's music is considered one its most notable qualities. In the early portion of his career (roughly 1995-2000), he was generally referred to as a trance artist; or the more ambiguous term of DJ, prompting the motto I am still not a DJ. He has been consistently experimental in his music, making it impossible to classify him, as an artist, in any one genre.

In 1997, BT released ESCM, which featured more complex melodies and more traditional harmonies along with a heavier use of vocals. The tone of the album is darker and less whimsical than Ima, the individual tracks being much tighter and cohesive. The album, as a whole, is much more diverse than BT's debut album. While Lullaby for Gaia and Remember (both featuring Jan Johnston) are code trance music, other tracks find their way into the canons of other electronic sub-genres that were emerging in the mid-nineties. Love, Peace, and Grease is breakbeats, Firewater and Orbitus Terranium are considered house, Flaming June (probably the most famous single of the album) and Nectar are examples of hard trance. The most experimental track on the album is Solar Plexus which is easily divided into two parts. The first part is dark and suspenseful with a raging crescendo chorus, and features gritty vocals that proclaim "I burn!" in the chorus. This half of the song has been featured in numerous film trailers, including Blade 2 and Hellboy. The second half of the song is slow and introspective, with a single piano and slowly building electronic accents. The vocals in the second half are clear and quiet to the point of obscurity. The mystery of what the lyrics to Solar Plexus actually are has been a sort of in-joke among BT fans since the album's release.

BT's third album, Movement in Still Life, moved into less experimental music and was somewhat worrying to some fans on the artist's message boards. The strong hip-hop influence on Madskillz-Mic Chekka and Love on Haight Street was the cause of this worry as hip-hop and trance are essentially complete opposites in style. Smartbomb provided the missing link between BT's previous work and this new rap-infused work, as it bore a strong resemblance to Solar Plexus Part 1 and included a lyric sample from Love on Haight Street. The album hits a spectrum of genre-work. Shame, Satellite, and Running Down the Way Up lean towards the alt-rock, while Godspeed and Dreaming fall into classic trance ranks. Never Gonna Come Back Down (featuring vocals by Mike Doughty) was the most popular single from the album, and appeared on the Gone in 60 Seconds soundtrack in radio edited form. Mercury and Solace, while failing to achieve the commercial success of Never Gonna Come Back Down, is the most commercially remixed song from the album (http://folk.uio.no/ulfb/odd/btdisc.htm). Jan Johnston sang vocals on this track and others, with Kirsty Hawkshaw also making significant vocal contributions to Running Down the Way Up and Dreaming.

Shortly after Movement in Still Life BT raised the production bar with 'Pop', a collaboration with N Sync. An instrumental version can be heard/viewed here.

Emotional Technology succeeded in being BT's most experimental album, to the great relief of fans. While the album opens with the hip-hop infused Knowledge of Self, the rest of the album features hooking riffs with an almost excessive amount of electronic accent. Superfabulous (featuring vocals by Rose McGowan) is the least of the songs in that respect, and yet it breaks in the middle of the song for a brief spoken word conversation about Rose flipping off someone at the Getty Museum. The big single from the album, Somnambulist, draws heavily from the breakbeats and new wave dance of New Order and Depeche Mode, whom BT has cited as major influences. The rest of the album fairly escapes genre labeling, from the dark guitar work of Circles, to The Only Constant is Change which is reminiscent of Satellite, the album blends genres, changes genres in mid-track, and never fears the atonal.

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Discography

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Albums

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Compilations

  • R&R (Rare & Remixed) (2001) - A collection of BT's remix work.
  • Still Life In Motion (2001)
  • 10 Years In the Life (2002) - "Best of" album.
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Remixes

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Film appearances & scores

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Video game appearances & scores

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Sample CDs

  • Breakz from the Nu Skool (2002)
  • Twisted Textures (2002)
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See also

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External links

cs:BT (hudebník) ja:ブライアン・トランソー sl:Brian Transeau de:Brian Transeau

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