The human heart pumps approximately 1.25 gallons of blood through the body every 60 seconds by way of regular, forceful contractions of its four chambers. These contractions are triggered by electrical impulses that originate in the sinoatrial node, a specialized group of cells located in the heart's right atrium. Normally, each thump of the heart produces two beats, one triggered by the upper atria and one triggered by the lower ventricles. Any prolonged disturbance in this otherwise efficient pattern, however, yields a potentially life-threatening condition: arrhythmia. The irregular beating of the heart.

The arhythmiA collection represents the sonic embodiment of this cardiologic phenomenon. Created by Nine Inch Nails drummer Jerome Dillon and sound designer/remix artist Keith Hillebrandt, arhythmiA is a master class in rhythmic and textural irregularity. Each 24-bit, multi-loop session is replete with amorphous drones, sub-aqueous bass, frenetic polyrhythms and unmatchable tone. Moody, elongated waveforms become synthetic monologues, while staccato, low end tones inject bounce and flair into any compositional situation. Played individually, the components cover many emotional bases — sadness, suspense, agitation, deviance, reflection… They can bite just as easily as they can soothe. Layered, they create a high fidelity sensory assault, perfectly modeled and expertly programmed by two musicians who know a thing or two about innovation.

In the following interview, Jerome and Keith get deeper into the production specifics of arhythmiA, as well as expound upon their own creative processes and their earliest experiments with sound. We hope you enjoy this incredibly unique and highly progressive collection.

How do you feel working within the 24-bit realm helped in the creation of arhythmiA?

Keith Hillebrandt: The previous CD-ROMs I've done have all been 16-bit, and the reason I went with 16-bit was more bang for the buck; give people more sounds. At the tail end of my time in New Orleans — probably the last year or year-and-a-half — everything was going 24-bit. We were going for ultimate fidelity. When I did my first CD-ROM after leaving New Orleans, I did it 16-bit. I just didn't feel like there was enough presence of frequencies there, especially since some of the sounds are distorted and manipulated in such strange ways. 24-bit was the best way to capture these sounds, and everything I'm doing now is 24-bit. Hopefully in the future, as space permits, it would be nice to have everything at 24-bit/96kHz, because the quality is so superior. James Brown, an engineer I worked with in New Orleans, was commenting on the fact that when you work at such a high resolution, it's a lot easier on the ears. It allows him to mix for longer periods of time. The point is, if you're going to create these sounds — sounds that, at times, can be so harsh — don't make it draining on the person who's using them. It's something that I'm evolving into because when I started out, it was all low-res, which sounds great, but can grate.

Jerome Dillon: At the end of the day, it doesn't matter exactly how crisp, clean and clear everything is going to be. If you're working at 24/48, it's going to go down to 16-bit once it's put on a record and sent to anybody. There's no way around that. But Keith always takes that stuff into consideration, and he's very meticulous in terms of what we can and can't get away with sonically. At points, he would address certain things with me. I'd ask why we couldn't run the snare drum through another fuzz pedal, and he was always the voice of reason. "Well, that sounds great in theory, but that's not going to work, and let me explain to you why it's not going to work."

What do you feel are the primary differences between arhythmiA and your Useful Noise collections?

Keith Hillebrandt: One of the biggest differences is that there are actual loop performances on these discs. A lot of the Useful Noise things are one-shot sounds. If there are melodic tones, it's just the tones, not actual melodies. The nice thing about the way I approached this collection was that I got to actually play things in, as opposed to just coming up with the sounds and going, "Okay, you're on your own." I could have different kinds of bass lines, from old, crackling blues to pure tech bass. As far as melodies go, instead of making them in the Depeche Mode style, they're more ambient melodies; melodies that don't necessarily need to stand out. One of the things I've been doing on my solo record is creating melodic parts, but smearing them so that they're not obvious melodic parts. When you walk away from a track, you hear the melody, but it's not this big pronouncement in the song. I tried to take the same approach in creating this collection. There are so many different ways you can bury a melody, just so long as it serves a function — that it creates some sense of drama or tension or whatever you're trying to get across.

Why describe your sound as useful noise?

Keith Hillebrandt: Anyone can bit-crush a sample, the thing is making it useful. I've seen people do some crazy things with plug-ins and outboard processing, but can you use it in a musical environment? Can you use it in a film environment? A whole lot of things you can't. Not all these sounds are distorted and not all of them are bit-crushed, because those are easy ways to do it. If I were to downgrade a sound, it would be a lot more interesting for me to grab one of the transistor radios I've modified and put inputs on it and record it through that. Anybody can run it though low-fi in Pro Tools, but not everyone can run it through an old AM radio. You're not going to get anything that's typical, but at the same time, you're not going to get something that's so weird you're not going to be able to use it.

What are some of the elements you used to achieve that aesthetic?

Keith Hillebrandt: I collect transistor radios, but some of them have died miserable deaths or haven't survived moves. I'd basically take them apart, put them on a board, and turn them into mini-processors. Run something through one of those, record it with an interesting mic, and it creates more of a unique, downgraded sound that you can't get with a plug-in. Granted, I'll use those plug-ins when I'm making my own music, just because it's so quick. But when I'm designing sounds for people to buy, you want to really make them as unique as possible.

What specific pieces of gear did you use to create the majority of these sounds?

Jerome Dillon: It was pretty bare bones. We took Keith's entire rig down to my rehearsal space for about two weeks, set the mikes up at different points in the room, and tried out different things. Then we took all the sessions back to his place. We knew that we wanted to try a vast array of sounds, but we also wanted to run the gamut from 62 BPM all the way up to 225 BPM. Once we got back to his place and heset up his laboratory, we started manipulating things. That's where the programming end of it came into play, which was basically him putting up a loop of me playing live drums, or maybe two or three loops of me playing live drums around the same tempo. Then I'd start programming polyrhythmic stuff around it with either samples that he created himself or just drum machine stuff that had been run through a whole batch of effects.

Keith Hillebrandt: I used the Arp 2600 a lot to create envelope loops where I'd trigger noises with drum loops. It creates the amplitude of a drum pattern, but with noises that come from elsewhere. I use the T.C. Fireworks a lot, just for real ambient sounds and drones. Then I'll use the SP-808 and the SP-606 as processors for drums, as well as the Nord Modular for drums and drum loops. That's where a lot of the sounds get processed. I'll still use old programs like Turbosynth, which is still one of my favorite amplitude modulators. There's a module in there that's the best amplitude modulator out there. I can't get rid of my Rolands or my Arps. I've been through a lot of synths, but there are certain ones I've had, like the Super Jupiter, since I was in high school.

Do you keep those old machines around for sonic or sentimental reasons?

Keith Hillebrandt: Between my two Jupiters — the Super Jupiter and the Jupiter 6 — the Super Jupiter has a certain low end that I can't get with anything else, and it's great for creating kick drum sounds. The 6 has a real delicate sound for a Jupiter. Even when you try and make it nasty it's still a delicate nasty, which fits really well if you want to add a little nasty texture to something that's ambient. As far as the Arp goes, if you listen to the remix of NIN's "10 Miles High," a large portion of that was run through my 2600. Once you get it running through analog circuitry, you have all these different stages of gain, and you can just tweak things to the point of self-oscillation. The 2600 is still one of my favorite processors. It's one of the hardest ones to use, but when you get the right sound, it's also the most gratifying.

In what ways did working with Trent Reznor and the rest of the Nine Inch Nails camp affect the way you approach sound design aesthetics?

Keith Hillebrandt: The biggest thing I learned from Trent and Alan [Moulder] is how to be a professional; how to approach recording and sound design and music making as a professional — detail-oriented. What you learn from Trent is that there are really no limitations on creativity. When Trent would throw any one of us in the studio a remix, he was challenging us to be as creative as we could be. It wasn't, "I need a four-on-the-floor dance mix of this track." It was, "Make this as unique and as interesting as you can." It wasn't about limits. A lot of the stuff I got to do there was a lot more creative than what I could do at any other studio.

Jerome Dillon: Trent has an incredibly unique slant on creating music, but even more importantly, it really all boils down to the basics with him: groove, space and melody. As far as he takes things in terms of technology and in terms of really pushing the envelope, he never gets away from the things that are most important in making good records. That's the thing that I've taken away from him more than anything else. When I've been in the studio working on my stuff, I'm more in tune with the mistakes that can be made on the ground floor; things that can keep a record from ever getting to a point where it sounds full and complete. That can mean any number of things. In the time that I worked with him, I also noticed his attention to detail. An entire song or group of songs can get scrapped if he feels they haven't achieved the level that he wants them to be at.

What are your thoughts on working with MIDI?

Keith Hillebrandt: I've really started getting away from it. Playing with someone who's as good a keyboard player as Trent really exposes the flaws of MIDI. I use it, to a certain extent, for controlling, performances, and real-time sound tweaking, but the bottom line is if I record a MIDI track, the next thing I do is bounce it back into Logic and fix it. With soft synths, that's taken out of the equation. They're so tight now that you don't get the obvious latency that was so prevalent when all your gear was running over your MIDI interface.

Which do you prefer: modeled dsp or traditional analog synths?

Keith Hillebrandt: I use it all. For instance, I still have an open-reel, two-track tape deck. I had one song on my record that had a 4AD feel to it, and it had to go to tape. There's a certain sound you get on tape that you can't get with plug-ins. There are certain things — a lot of drum loops I create, for instance — that in order to make them sound a little more alive, running them to tape is the prefect solution. I should know, theoretically, why it does that, because my first job out of high school was for [tape deck manufacturer] Otari. It just gives it a live sound. At the same time, if I wanted to take that same drum loop and give it an alien type of environment, I'd have to use some sort of plug-in that would do that kind of processing.

How did you manipulate Jerome's drumming for arhythmiA?

Keith Hillebrandt: Jerome's got this mind for rhythm that I can't figure out. His approach to polyrhythms, his approach to different time signatures — I wish I could play drums or even program drums like that, but it's so beyond my way of thinking about rhythm. That was the whole impetus for doing arhythmiA. Jerome and I were working on a couple of things for his record, and I just approached him and said, "Let's try and do something like this in a CD-ROM capacity." Jerome's approach is hard to pinpoint because it's so unique. He can take a simple four-on-the-floor pattern and just start building additional loops on top of that, and before you know it you've got this eight-bar loop that has six different rhythms over the top of it. The approach that he takes is unique among drummers that I've seen. He's also not afraid to use technology. A lot of the drums in arhythmiA were programmed — a lot of the electronic stuff in particular — with just him playing on the keyboard. It was fun because we didn't put any limits on it. We just created a library of loop sessions. There are 40 or 50 different sessions there that you can apply to any number of instances.

Jerome Dillon: Keith is a really, really gifted guy. I think he's got a great ear for frequencies. He can listen to an entire mix and be able to pick out one small thing he feels is holding it back sonically. He's one of those guys that can really see through a mix that isn't that transparent and find things that are wrong with it. There's absolutely no doubt he had a lot to do with The Fragile. A lot of the sonic assault on the senses came form Keith. He was a big part of the direction of that record, and I'm sure Trent would agree to that.

How many of the sessions used live, miked drums?

Keith Hillebrandt: There are a couple of miked sessions, one with a fully miked drum kit and another with just two SM-58s — a real garage session. We actually ended up using that one quite a bit. What we tried to do with each loop was have at least one live sounding element. If somebody was using these loops to create a song, it had one particular beat that would really kick it in.

How do you feel you complimented one another in the studio?

Keith Hillebrandt: As extreme rhythms as Jerome was coming up with, I always had a way of processing and tweaking the sounds into each other. Jerome would come up with a rhythm, and I'd tweak it and tailor it into the other loops that were going on at the same time. On top of that I'd set up kits with different types of sound set-ups that he'd be able to come right in and play. Like, "I've got this collection of trash can hits here. Play these." He'd come up with something that would compliment the sound, so it was nice going back and forth.

Jerome Dillon: I got to see a completely different side of music than I ever would have seen without working with Keith. I could see how he goes about creating all this unbelievable sonic texture with all the things that are at his disposal. It could be any number of things. He could be using rack gear or he could be setting up a mic and throwing a piece of glass across the room. I've never worked with anybody like that before. I thank God that I spent the time I did watching Alan Moulder in the studio when The Fragile was being mixed. There were points where everyone else was going out to dinner or going to a movie, and if I knew Alan was mixing, I would ask him if I could sit behind him and watch him work. There were times I'd sit and watch Alan work on a tambourine track for two-and-a-half hours to make sure it was sitting at the right place in the mix.

What were your earliest experiences recording music and sound?

Keith Hillebrandt: That's where my transistor radio thing comes from. When I was a kid, I used to love being able to play the knob on the transistor radio — just the fact that you could spin this knob and have the sound change so much. I guess it was probably after organ lessons and a brief flirtation with guitar. By the time I got to junior high, I bought a Korg MS-10, which I still own, and an Elka string machine and started playing keyboard. That's where all of this took off. Once you start getting into bands, you start experimenting with sounds, but once MOTU Performer came out, it was like, "Wow, I don't need a band anymore!" It changed everything, especially the sound manipulation possibilities. I know I can read wave forms better than I can read music.

Jerome Dillon: My mom was a classically trained pianist, so I started around five on the piano. Then I got to a certain point where I really wanted to move to drums. I don't know whether it was expression or aggression or just to drive my sister crazy, but I really wanted to go to the drums. Unfortunately, my mother got stricken with rheumatoid arthritis really early on in life, so she sold the piano to buy my first drum kit. From that point on, the deal was, as long as I was practicing or rehearsing, I didn't have to work a job.

What bands or artists have shaped your taste in music?

Keith Hillebrandt: Early electronic albums I used to buy when I was a kid, like Tangerine Dream or Roger Powell — real electronic tweakers who were surrounded by strange gear long before four-on-the-floor hit in the late Eighties. Minimalist stuff like Suicide, Soft Cell, or Larry Fast and Synergy. I've always liked that kind of thing, especially because a lot of that was real sequencer-based music. And it wasn't so much about flashy playing. I like a lot of those albums that created those great electronic rhythms and pulses. To this day, you can put in a Tangerine Dream album, and once they get one of their pulses going, you know it's those three German electronic tweakers in there going crazy. I think that's where a lot of that came from. After that it was all self-imposed. Once I started getting into Ministry and Nine Inch Nails, I wanted to figure out better ways to tweak sounds. After I built up a big collection of samples, I hooked up with this company called OSC, which put out the Poke in the Ear CD-ROMs, which were well before their time in terms of odd collections of real unique sounds. I think "No French Horns" was their motto.

Jerome Dillon: I listened to a lot of R&B stuff growing up. I was more influenced by people like Prince and Marvin Gaye than I was by specific drummers. I was just inspired more by musicians that were responsible for everything around them, in terms of a center omnipotence. But Prince was a huge, huge influence on me in terms of rhythm, polyrhythm, and textures. I think he took it to another level more than anyone else before him had.

How do you feel sample libraries contribute to the creative process?

Keith Hillebrandt: There are certain techniques I use that have found their way into the Nine Inch Nails legacy that people want to hear and use. I was a starving musician at certain points in my life as well, and couldn't afford certain pieces of gear or afford to upgrade my computer. It's nice to be able to spend a small amount of money and get this great collection of sound that ordinarily, you probably don't have enough gear in your home studio to make. Either that or you don't have the time. Most people work jobs. They're not able to sit on the floor and play with the 2600 all day, or dial in something on the Kurzweil for two hours.

Were you familiar with loop CDs before this initiative?

Jerome Dillon: Keith was the one that came to me and said, "We should get together and do something like this." He kept saying, "I don't know of anything out there on the market like this in terms of texture and sonics that's really pushing the envelope." He played me some different CD-ROMs by different drummers; drummers that I really respect and I think are great. A lot of them are legends in the business, but the sounds of them in the studio were totally lifeless, and the grooves they played were really unimaginative. It all seemed to be very lowest common denominator. When he and I started, we wanted to do the exact opposite, and see how far we could push things rhythmically. Arrhythmia is a malady that I actually suffer from, but it's something that explains the way a steady pulse will be affected by any number of things. What we kept trying to do was see how far we could push the session in terms of polyrhythms and textures. If you play everything together — each one of the parts of the session at one time — it's just completely assaulting. But if you take a session, dissect the individual parts, and play each one on its own, it'll totally stand alone.

Did anything end up on the cutting room floor?

Jerome Dillon: I believe everything we created ended up on the discs. I remember at one point there was a song I had worked on down at my rehearsal space with a dobro and a drum beat, but it was so backwoods sounding — like a Tom Waits thing — and you couldn't really hear the dobro. But Keith…the way his mind works is God's own private mystery. I took it to the studio and he grabbed a really long section of the loop. Ten minutes later, he had isolated, from a stereo track, the dobro from the drums, and was able to manipulate each one individually. It was crazy. I could see that there weren't really any limitations to working with Keith. He really knows his shit to the point where I could bring him anything and something cool was going to come out of it.

How do you know when a track is done?

Keith Hillebrandt: It's completely gut feeling. Before I started working on my solo record, I was licensing music out and writing about eleven tracks a week. For me that was unheard of because it was so many, but it really got me to get direct; to know what I want going in and attack it as opposed to sitting back, being passive and waffling back and forth. You don't ever let yourself get into questioning it. If you're confident in your skills, you know you're going to do something right. I think the worst thing you can do is question it too much, otherwise you'll never end up putting anything out. Through my life, I've known more musicians who own more gear than I do who don't end up finishing anything. I've got fourteen tracks done on my solo record, and every one of them I could spend another month on, but I don't know if it's going to be any better. I had these blitzes of two or three hours where I'd just created this whole great foundation. I could process all the bass and I could have fifteen different drum patterns going at once. Will that make it any better? Not necessarily.

Once you had created the entire library, how did viewing the material from a user's perspective — rather than a creator's perspective — alter your take on the sounds?

Jerome Dillon: When I sit down and write, I like to start from the very bottom and work my way up. But that said, I know a lot of people who really enjoy having an outsider's perspective on helping them get to the next level in terms of generating ideas. If you put one of these sessions up that's in a different time signature than you've ever worked in before, or maybe the drums don't sound like anything you've ever heard before, maybe it inspires you to play your instrument different. I think that's the thing Keith and I wanted to foster with this. We wanted to put something out there that wasn't your typical CD-ROM, in terms of having nice, pristine drums in a really clean atmosphere. The problem I had with all the other CD-ROMs is that even though these were drummers I respected, I could hear the surroundings. Every time I heard that snare drum, hi-hat or kick drum, I immediately saw the typical Los Angeles studio with the glass paneling and the parquet floors. It didn't seem like something that would be all that inspiring to work with. Maybe a lot of people wouldn't take that away because they've never worked in those environments, but I have, and I think it sucks. A lot of great ideas can get sucked out because you're in a sterile environment, but if you have something that's at the complete opposite end of the spectrum — something that's not all clean and clear — you really have to sift through it all.

Keith Hillebrandt: That's another great thing about the sample library. It doesn't come with instructions. You can use it any way you want. My normal reaction to something like a drone sound would be to hold down a note, assign some controllers, and tweak it over time. Some other person could buy this CD-ROM and go, "I'm going to play this like I play piano" or "I'm going to adjust the envelope and use it as a percussion sound." You don't have to use it in the way the designer intended it. You can't be bothered with limitations. I think having this large, expansive library gives you something to react to. One of the nice things about programs now is that you have so much memory in your computer that you can fire up ACID and load up 18 of these sounds. That's what I'd suggest. I'd say go in, load up a bunch of sounds, have them all playing at once, then start whittling them down. Eventually you're going to find a combination you like. It's a quick, instant inspiration approach to take.

Was there a point during the recording process where you realized you had imprinted the DNA of the collection, and anything moving forward had to assume the same vibe and aesthetic?

Jerome Dillon: It wasn't like making a record. When you're making a record, you very definitely have to be aware of not only thematic continuity, but also sonic continuity, but he and I weren't concerned with that. What we wanted to do was set ourselves up to fail every time. We wanted to see what it would be like if we got to a session where we absolutely failed and everything we were trying rhythmically and sonically just sounded like utter chaos or mush. That never happened. I don't think we ever got to a point where there was a session we weren't able to go back to and regain some objectivity. I'm not saying there wasn't continuity throughout the project, but we didn't look at it as a type of project that needed to have any kind of thread that ran through the whole thing. Each one of the sessions should have its own place within the big picture, and it should also inspire for a different reason. We tried a little experiment at the end to make sure that what we were doing would have a place in the market. So Keith took a couple of the sessions and I took a couple of the sessions. He constructed an entire song just out of the drums — not using anything else — and I did the same. Then we met up a week or two later and played what we had come up with, just from manipulating the things within the arhythmiA project; not using any other synths or any other guitars. That's when we knew we had something. It was what we wanted to achieve, which was a really useful tool that inspires and provides you with the opportunity to get outside of the box and play differently than you've ever played before.