Three state-of-the-art notebooks, a large metal box of unknown origin with a light and a tiny camera hanging over it, some mixing and DJ equipment – all of this impossibly tangled up in multicolored wires. This was the stage setting. At 11 p.m. on Nov. 17 two Englishmen – Andy Turner and Ed Handley – stepped up on the stage and turned on their computers while their video operator, a man by the name of Bob, sat down beside them. The three stayed in this position for an hour and a half, each occasionally turning a dial or clicking a mouse, never looking up to see what was happening around them and each totally concentrated on his own stream of 0's and 1's.

This is what a modern electronic-music concert looks like. And this time it was a very pretty event, indeed. The interaction of beeping melodies and video art projected on a screen behind the musicians was stunning, gripping and enlightening. Abstract forms, a black-and-white distorted video of the two musicians at their computers or popping up neurotic questions stimulated the full sensation of an audio-visual experience.

This was how Plaid – one of the world's foremost experimental-electronic music wizards and widely considered to be one of the genre's pioneers, presented their view on music in the packed club Sixteen Tons Saturday night. Plaid is one of the main symbols of the influential Warp Records, the U.K. label promoting intellectual electronic music. The group has worked with various artists, including Bjork, and gained considerable recognition here in Russia.

Just before the concert, the group gave an exclusive interview to LifeStyle. "It's a bit freaky to play our electronic music in a place that has an English pub downstairs," Ed commented straight off. "None of us had been to Moscow before, so it's all totally new to us. Having studied James Bond films in great detail, it wasn't what we expected."

Are you recording anything new now?

We have these last two gigs after Moscow in Istanbul and Tokyo, and then for three months after that we'll be back in the studio. But we're playing some new material tonight –around 50 percent of the concert actually.

How does the creative process work in computerized music?

The music comes from your tastes, probably. It's just a matter of choosing what you like, choosing sounds. We collect sounds, and sometimes they suggest melodies. Sometimes we start with a piano sound and write just a melody and change the sound.

What has been the most unusual sound you've used in your music?

We did a track of just a tap running. Every bit of the track was made out of an aspect of that sound, obviously processed quite heavily. That's not really that unusual a sound, though. But we're not obsessive about original sounds really. It doesn't matter if the sound has been used a thousand times before. We can even just use synths or a really cheesy piano or something like that. However, even just browsing through the Internet you get the most bizarre sounds. There's an Internet site I found called Vocal Cord Surgery – I really like it.

You guys don't use vocals too much though?

No, but you can take vocals and twist them and make something percussive out of them. You can stretch it or do whatever you like. In the end it's just a waveform.

What about non-electronic music? Does that influence you?

We didn't grow up listening to rock or indie music; we grew up listening to electro and hip-hop, so it's quite a discovery for us to hear rock music that's good. That's quite interesting, because the music is alien to us. But actually we just listen to anything. I'd get really bored if I just listened to computer-based music.

How do you want the crowd to react at your concerts?

Well, hopefully they'll dance.

But your music isn't exactly dance music?

It is when we play live. We go for the more dancey tracks and mix in the beats and bass louder. So our music played live is quite different from our albums. We've played gigs where people don't move at all and that's kinda awkward – you don't feel like you're involved with the audience. And plus this is a club, not a sitting venue.

What's different between your music at concerts and on CDs?

At the concert some tracks are improvised on a little bit. Some randomness is brought into the environment and the programming. The computers crash occasionally. And even prearranged tracks can be sort of worked about. But yes, you're right, I guess we could just have a CD playing for most of the tracks.