NEWCLEUS: Hi. We’re Newcleus and You're watching Gearwire.Com.

YVETTE “LADY E” CENAC: Um, yeah!

BEN “COSMO D” CENAC: Hey. What’s up. This is Cosmo D from Newcleus, and we’re on Gearwire.Com, and to my right is Lady E.

YVETTE “LADY E” CENAC: Yes. I’m the Lady E from Newcleus.

BEN “COSMO D” CENAC: And to my left is Chilly B.

BOB “CHILLY B” CRAFTON: Hey. How’re you doing there?

BEN “COSMO D” CENAC: And to my other left is Al “T”.

AL “T” MCLARAN: What’s up [INDISCERNIBLE]?

BEN “COSMO D” CENAC: We way back, we started before MIDI, so a lot has changed from our like first album. The first album, there was no such thing as MIDI. Most of the sequencers we had to play live, and we were poor. I mean we’re still poor but back then we were dirt poor, so the only instruments we owned was a Roland RS-09 which is an organ/string little compact thing, TB-303, TR-808, everybody knows what those are so I don’t have to say Roland but I said it anyway, a Sequential Circuits Pro 1 which is that bass line, that dope bass line on “Jam On It”. The 303 is the sequence, and that was it. That was all the instruments we had for most of the first album. Most of our hits, all of our hits, the big hits from the first album were done with just that.

And like I said, we didn’t have -- there wasn’t any such thing as MIDI yet, so all the sequencers were manually put in and painstakingly programmed on the 303. Now, as the rest of the song goes, the computer age is now. Well, now we’re deeply ensconced in the age of computers, computers all over the place, and our studio is computer based. I work in Logic completely. I have Logic 8 but I’m still in Logic 7. I’m sticking to that and we still have outboard gear. I have a couple of Wavestations. Let’s see, a Planet Phatt. Let’s see. Let’s see. Let’s see. A JD-990, Roland JD-990, aJV-2080, Roland JV-2080, and a Kurzweil K2000. But what I find myself mostly doing now -- oh and a Roland R-8M. What I find myself mostly doing now is using them plugins. And I know a lot of people frown on plugins because they say it’s not real analog but we’ve never been wants to care. We care about the sound. We don’t care, “Oh it’s not analog so it’s not fat.” Nonsense! You make it fat! You know, and the plugins that are coming out now are so vicious you can do so much with them stuff you couldn’t dream about back in the day. I’d be damned if I’m going to be prejudiced and not use them! Especially since they’re -- most of them are quite easy to test, you know, before you buy [LAUGHING]. So, that’s -- we do most of our stuff on that now. We still use outboard, the hardware, but more and more, I’d say it’s about 75 to 80% plugins now.

Well basically what we do is the studio is in my house. Chilly B lives way on the other side of Brooklyn and we don’t get together as much as we should. Luckily, Lady E is married to me so I can force her downstairs to come lay some vocals.

YVETTE “LADY E” CENAC: All the time.

BEN “COSMO D” CENAC: But for the most part, what it is is -- I mean it’s pretty similar to the older days though Chilly B and I work a lot more together then, but I’ll come up with a groove, bring him over, he’ll lay parts, you know, or he’ll come up with an idea but I do most of the brunt of the work simply because that’s the convenience of it.

We have a new album called “Return to Earth” that’s about half done. We’ve been working on it for two-and-a-half years. Everybody in the world is upset because it’s taking so long but we can’t put out crap. It’s got to be right, you know, so that’s what’s taking all the time, but we’re hoping, I’m praying it will be out this summer.