One of the most unexpected releases for many a year was N-Soul's recent remix album of Jesus Music legend LARRY NORMAN. Mike Rimmer spoke at length to the man who almost single handedly invented Christian rock music.

"Independent thinking is a really important thing. By trying to figure out things, many discoveries have been made in the world of science. I discovered how to play music by having a ukulele that my father didn't want and having him saying he didn't want me to take music lessons. I had to discover for myself what a chord was by putting my fingers down on different strings. Some positions sounded terrible and some sounded pleasant, so I would draw where my fingers were on a piece of paper and try to remember that position. Then I began to feel relationships between different finger positions, not knowing that they were chords or part of a certain key. I taught myself to play that way."

It's amazing to remember that a musical career that has spanned five decades began in such a simple way. These days the process of making music is a little more complicated. For the last year, Larry has been working on a follow up to 'Stranded In Babylon'. He comments, "I think the new album will surprise people just with the way we approached the sound. You wouldn't call it a dance remix album. You can make up rules for a song like 'I will only use sounds that I find on the Internet' and then go to different countries and pick up static and random beeps; you can build a track that way. It takes hours; you can have the lyrics and a melody but then only choose things that you find, like sound art. Another thing, like I've said, is to record with people in other countries and let them add on their instruments. Another way is to take a sound you have and to send. it out on the Internet and then recover it so that it has a broken quality to it so that it's not pure but that it's travelled into cyberspace and then you pick your guitar back up and it has a very interesting tone to it - like a ghostly quality."

This sounds...urn, a little unusual Larry! He responds, "How many albums do I have to make the traditional way? Why not have a bit of fun? The reason the album's taking so long is because we're doing it completely different than we've recorded before."

While Larry Norman fans have been waiting for that new album, the void in the release schedules has been slightly compensated by two projects in the last year. ForeFront's multi-artist tribute album reminded many people of the debt that CCM owes to its founding father whereas a more recent album has brought the man's music skipping and jumping into the dance beat obsessed '90s.

It is an adventurous recording artist who surrenders the master tapes of his music (some of it over 25 years old) to a bunch of young remixers half his age to update for a new generation of music lovers. But then Larry Norman's entire recording career has been a series of surprising and bold moves. He's made a virtue of unpredictability!

Believe it or not, a pre-release of 'Remixing This Planet' was the main in-car entertainment for my wife and I during our honeymoon last summer! It was a curious musical experience to hear familiar and favourite songs re-interpreted and re-recorded in such a diverse and creative fashion. Back at work, it wasn't long before I donned my Sherlock Holmes deerstalker and set off on the arduous search for the talents behind this fascinating release.

I wondered how Larry felt about other people interpreting his songs. He explains, "I thought they had quite interesting readings of different songs. It was interesting to hear the different styles of the groups performing them. I think the ambience of the songs was true to the meaning of the message to begin with. I like all the songs and I think everybody did a good job. It was different from how I imagined it would be because I've bought tribute albums in the past and not liked the way they've sounded. I don't feel that way about this album, maybe because it's better or maybe because it's my music, so I can't have that objectivity."

Larry continues, "I wasn't involved in the ForeFront tribute album and I wasn't directly involved with this one. It's fun to listen to the choices that were made on the album. Somebody else would choose different drums to layer on top of the vocal track. If you gave one song to 10 different mixers there would be a lot of variables. In our studio we've actually done a lot of remixes. We haven't taken the dance approach - we've taken a remix approach to different sections of the song. I think my next album will surprise a lot of people just with the way we've done the record."

'Remixing The Planet' has been a big enough surprise for a lot of Larry Norman fans. Scott Blackwell describes how the project was initiated. "Larry called me about two years ago after I'd done some DC Talk remixes. He was out doing some gigs with them on the road. He said it would be a cool idea if we could get together and maybe try to remix some of his music. I presented the idea to our distributor over here and asked them if they thought there was a market for it. After talking about it we decided to go for it. Larry lives in Oregon, which is about two hours on a plane north of LA. I flew up there, we filled a station wagon full of old master tapes, went to a local studio and I made a DAT of about 25 songs. I made source tapes for the other remixers involved and gave them the direction we wanted to go in."

Blackwell sums up the direction of the album: "We didn't want to do all house mixes. We wanted to do a really wide variety of remixes. In some of them we kept the live rock element and just replaced the tracks, which is what we did with 'God Part 3' and 'Why Should The Devil Have All The Good Music'. I wanted those to be straight forward young, aggressive rock."

I wonder what Larry thought of the end result. He ponders and then replies, "I think they did a good job on 'If The Bombs Fall'. That's a song that I've never released officially. It was released once on a limited edition album but not on a major album. A lot of people don't know it, but I thought that even if they were unfamiliar with it, it comes across quite nicely as a song in its own right."

He is less sure about the rock tracks on the record. "The song 'Why Don't You Look Into Jesus" doesn't sound like a remix; it sounds like a rough mix track that I'd created to begin with. Maybe you could say that the drum sounds a little deeper here and there, but it's not really a dance remix. On 'God Part 3', the guitar is the same. It's still quite frenetic, which is fine because it was meant to be in the first place. It has a nice final effect to it. They did a good job!"

And is there anything on the album that Larry definitely doesn't like? He points to "Fly Fly Fly" but not because he thinks it's been badly remixed. Explains Larry, "Oh, I never liked that song anyway! That was just a B-side I recorded under duress. I would never have recorded that, but I think that by the time 'Only Visiting This Planet' had been out and sold its majority of sales, MGM was quite worried that somehow this Jesus rock was not only offensive, but it also wasn't very commercial. So they tried to make 'So Long Ago The Garden' a little less religious and a little more general. As far as the remix version of 'Fly Fly Fly is concerned, it's pleasant. I think it even had other lyrics on the remix version." Larry Norman anoraks (and I confess to being one!) will spot that the vocal is taken from the rare "Australian' version of the song, not the ones found on 'So Long Ago The Garden'.

One song on the album stands out as being a little different from the rest and that is "UFO". When I originally listened to the album with Admiral Cummings, we played a game of guessing what the songs were before the vocals started. With "UFO" we were more than halfway into the song before we could identify it. It is clear from talking to Larry that he too is puzzled by the remix, as he explains, "I didn't understand the remix of 'UFO'! I've listened to it several times and I don't know what idea they had! It doesn't have any lyrics and it doesn't go anywhere particularly musical."