So first off, you're in Tokyo right now. Are you in the middle of a summer touring thing?
We were doing the Fuji festival here, and a show in Korea, but I stayed on to be with my family, taking a time out from our touring.

So, a mini-tour, but currently you've got Art Jam going on in the States. Is Art Jam something you've been taking with you? Or is it only in New York?
We did a big one in Tokyo last year at the Oblivion Ball, lots of bands in a big venue, and put up a cinema with big movies, and a 7 by 50 meter wall which myself and other artists did and that was picked up by the Jacobson Howard Gallery in New York, which she invited us to do when we come for All Points West.

Part of the work is stuff you're involved in, but a great deal of it appears to be up-and-coming artist. How do you find these people, are you and Rik art world nerds?
Well, John wyker(?) is our long time collaborator and fellow founder of Tomato, he has art world connections which allows us to invite people to join us, which we like to do, whether it's art or music. Rick, John and I are keen to promote other people on the web, through our radio show, making links to other artists, to invite artists to join, and we use Underworld to point people in their direction.

It's a pretty selfless use of your name, which you've built up over the years. And you've used that strength with Tomato, which has been around for almost 20 years years now. Was that something you always would have tried to do, even if you didn't get this big?
Yes, it was, because in the 70's, Rick and John and myself read that Robert Fripp article written about a small mobile intelligent unit. He foresaw this time when small groups of people would share their skills and give each other support, and we kept that idea alive until the internet appeared, and then it came true, and that's what it is for us. Underworldlive.com is more what we do, more than our music, we can share our ideas, our support, we can be given support and point people into what we do in similar situations. And for us, it came from radio. we'd listen to John Peel, he'd play radically different music - jazz, blues, hard rock - and we'd find out about other kinds of music. As a punk, learning about things other than that, we grew up doing that, and when the Internet came, well, it's that simple. If people have a myspace or website, we put them on our site and they get all these hits.

Speaking of using your name, you're involved with Songs For Tibet, is that the first time you've loaned your voice to a political cause?
I'm not personally involved in that, Underworld is more my deal, Rick and our manager are more directly involved, I'm not capable of representing it.

Oh, interesting! So everyone in the Underworld brain trust can do what they see fit with the name and its influence?
If someone feels really passionate about something. This was something Rick really wanted to do, our manager Jeff has been devoted to these causes before we met him, 20 years ago, and we always put a link to the Meridian Trust, which is a valuable archive he helped start, and we discussed the Tibet deal. We thought, "Yeah great, go ahead," felt strongly.

Do you find it odd that, when you came up, music felt more explicitly tied to art and vice versa, whereas now their paths feel more divergent, and music is this increasingly solipsistic thing for so many people?
Not at all, we've been outsiders always. We felt outside of movements. Every time we're locked in with trends and movements, we've packed our bags and moved out. This goes back a long way; I studied as an artist, as John did, and I learned in an American system called the black man's in college(?) where artists who have different disciplines within the arts work with each other - Merce Cunningham would work with John Cage, who would work with a painter like Franz Cline - and this is normal, and I could be educated by someone like John Peel, this cross collaterallizing of disciplines is what we've grown up with. So in our first group, freur, John Warwicker was playing video screens onstage, in 1982, and he was signed to CBS as a video artist and it confused the hell out of everybody, causing trouble in the early days. But it's natural to us.

Would you say that music is one of your central focuses? Doesn't it have to be, out of economic necessity?
Speaking only for myself, in '79 in Bristol I did an exhibit. I love galleries - and I come from a working class background, so to be in the arts is a weird thing, but i love, love, love art galleries - but I felt like I was part of an elitist group of people, and my regular school friends were intimidated to go into galleries because they weren't well versed enough in what's good and what's bad. I was telling them, "Whatever you like is good, whatever you don't like is not good, who cares what anybody thinks, it's what you want," and I really felt that as an artist if I wanted to communicate, music and radio were the least intimidating ways of doing that, communicating over a medium that was un-intimidating, and we tried to fuse the things that John Warwicker was doing, we tried to fuse the visual and audio, blurring the lines, we tried to go outside the box more. And when Tomato formed, we started to work in galleries and do exhibits in Tokyo, where we would do visual sound installations. In Germany, in Paris, in London, and in Munich particularly, kids who had never been in galleries in their lives were coming out because Underworld was involved, and that was it for me, when the connection started and the circle completed and people are coming to a gallery because the music was involved, it was great, it was what I wanted.

Yeah, it's almost visionary, because it's what people talk about doing a lot now. Lets talk more about art, and music that can be for everybody: in the past ten years, thanks to software and stuff, it's so much easier for people to make their own music now, but at the same time, it seems like it's spurred this reaction where people are getting tired of upstart artists. Do you think the music and art worlds are getting cluttered or overcrowded?
It's difficult to comment on why people would say that. As I said, since the 70's, we've always held close to our philosophy of people being able to work outside of the mainstream way of working - which is frankly stifling to an artist, the scheduling, the time for music, the way things are packed, packaged, priced and it's demeaning - it controls the shape and dictates it. With people who work outside, we feel more kinship to people working outside, even though we work in more populated areas, really by default, with this group we tried unsuccessfully to avoid pop star fame, and if any of our success in a mass market is looked at, it's totally by default, not done by any kind of effort on our part to be that, our feelings have been with the outsider, and it feels like home to us.

Pretty much since the beginning, your band has insisted upon - and had - complete control of its musical and artistic output. Do you see that becoming more of a normal thing now? For example, Radiohead released their album for "what you want," Nine Inch Nails did the same this same...?
Those are two groups we admire for the things they're doing, for sure. I believe many of us look to the Grateful Dead. We do, I know much larger bands who have said the same, have a kind of admiration and respect for what they achieved as outsiders who were able to choose where, when, and what. It has been a huge inspiration to us, I think some of us choose to go the route which is provided within music industry and some of us choose the road outside. Mostly we're in one day and out another. We just want to be happy making the music about the things we want to make. If we can see ourselves doing that, and feed our families, we've done it. We need to give things away too. Every day for eight years there's been a word, or a download on our site, the promo for our next album, a new song bit, as well as links to physical things, it's the freedom to choose and that feels right to us now. In 2003 we were coming to our end of our contract, and we thought, "Wwe've got enough money to go it alone for a while," and things started to work outside of the box, it didn't feel right to do album, tour, album, tour, we wanted to live more interesting lives, and we established what we're doing now. It seemed bonkers at the time, and some people thought we just couldn't get a record deal [laughs] It's not like that at all, we had to get out then or else we'd be stuck in the loop forever.

And ground down, too. It seems like an issue of getting your art dictated by outside sources, and that can probably grind you down, did you feel worn out at the end of the tour?
We had money in the bank, we were more successful then we'd ever been, we'd just sold our biggest record, and it was scary then having no deal it all, no schedule for our next record, and mostly scary because we would have to see how our career was going to pan out, for the rest of our lives, it was not a fun place.

Name three things you hope you can accomplish before you decide you're retired from everything, or three things you'd like to say you had a hand in doing.
You know, my concerns are never big, grand and global. I want to die doing this. I'm an artist and born that way, driven to make and publish things and make them available to people if they want them. I think Rik and John feel the same way too, so you know, for me, if someone comes into a gallery having never been there, who'd previously just listened to music, great. If someone listens to the music, who'd previously only gone to galleries, fantastic. If someone buys someone else's art or music and we like them, then great. If we can do that till we drop, we'll be happy doing it.

Underworld's New York Art Jam will be exhibited at New York's Jacobson Howard Gallery until August 14. As Karl said, the band's website underworldlive is updated almost daily.