"Salt Peter" was recorded entirely on computers, but it still has a warm, organic feel. What was your approach to making it?

RANKINE: "We didn't sequence anything. There was nothing sequenced or programmed per say, it was like we recorded onto a computer instead of a tape machine. Everything was played, all the different parts, and we didn't tidy up any messy bits, really. It was just the same as any other album that would be played live into a tape machine."

Did the technology have any impact at all on the way you wrote?

RANKINE: "It's more to do with editing. The computer with ProTools that we used was most of the time used as an editing tool. We recorded on it straight down, linear live recordings. But then the editing aspect is brilliant. It doesn't make you work faster, it just makes you far more anal and far more experimental. You can grab that tiny little snippet of sound and change it and put the stereo out of synch and just screw around with it much more than you can do on a tape machine. That's the way the Beatles recorded their albums, with massive tape editing. We don't need to do that anymore, we donšt want gabs of extra tape lying around the studio. So was just do it on the computer."

Did you have any concrete ideas of how you wanted the album to sound, or was the way it turned out the result of experimentation in the studio?

RANKINE: "When you go in to make an album, I don't think anything should be concrete. I had a lot of elements and ideas, and so did Mark, and we spent as much time talking about the album and philosophizing about it what it's supposed to represent to us as we did actually making it. A lot of it was experimenting and screwing around with sounds, although there were definitely some elements that I wanted to include in it, like the low, soft, crunchy that give it a lot of atmosphere and a sort of sense of humanity and a certain spaciousness and a great dependence on melody and music written around the vocals."

Does the editing power present a danger of overdoing it?

RANKINE:"You can totally go up your own ass, but eventually it comes time when the record company phones up and screams at you or you run out of money and that's when you stop. If you have far too much money and you're kind of stupid and you don't know your own limitations or you don't know when something's finished then you could go on working on one album for the rest of your life. But what's the point?"