Some ideas appear from nowhere, fully formed in the brain. Others can take many years to come to fruition. Back in 1997, I had a story included in the Disco Biscuits anthology. Edited by Sarah Champion, this was the first real attempt to bring a fictional life to the dance music scene in Britain. There was a brief vogue for writers to do readings in nightclubs, and a number of us did a small tour of these venues to promote the book. It was an awkward time, really, with the clubs having little time or space for us, and the majority of the crowd not even knowing why we were there. They just wanted to listen to loud music, and to dance, which is fair enough. But there we were, nonetheless, about half a dozen of us waiting to take our turn on a makeshift stage. I can't remember the details exactly, but I'm fairly certain this incident took place in a club in Leeds. I was standing next to Sarah, watching one of the other writers do their piece. The management had turned off the music in this room, but there were other rooms next to this one, and the music was still playing there, a loud, throbbing beat coming through the walls. This rhythm was mixing in with the writer's words, and, as I stood there listening, a rather surprising idea came to me. I can remember turning to Sarah, leaning right in so that she could hear above the noise, and saying, "You could do a dub, of a story." That was it. Sarah looked at me with a puzzled expression on her face. She expressed some doubt about this, wondering how it could be done. Well, didn't know myself, to be honest. But that night, back at the hotel, I started to work out the implications of the idea. Three years later, through a long convoluted process, this sudden moment of inspiration evolved into the Cobralingus project.

That's one starting point. But really, to uncover the proper beginnings of the idea we have to go back another twenty years from the Disco Biscuit tour. Back to 1977. Manchester, England. The punk era. Remembered now as a time of snarled, spat out vocals and cheap, loud, fast guitars, the period's most lasting achievement was its willing adoption of another kind of musical energy entirely. It was the year of the Clash's debut album, on which the band included a version of Junior Murvin's "Police and Thieves". Like many people of my generation and culture, this track was a doorway through to that elemental unfolding of music known as dub reggae. We very quickly picked up on the original version of the song, produced by the great Lee Scratch Perry. DJs at the punk clubs were playing more and more of these rare, imported records. Quite apart from the value of the music itself, the most surprising thing about the dub concept was its approach to the act of creation. I was used to the idea of music being built up, track by track, piece by piece, until the final mix was reached. Jamaican dub producers such as Scratch and King Tubby reversed this process. The final mix of a song becomes the starting point for experimentation. Composing at the mixing desk, they punch holes in the sound; they let instruments drop away, only to return at some later moment; they add sound affects to the mix. Very often the track reveals its skeleton, the bass and drums; at other times even the bones seems to melt away, leaving only a ghost of the tune, haunting the mix.

This was the concept I now wanted to explore, as a way of manipulating language. After the Disco Biscuit tour finished, I went back home to carry on with Nymphomation, the novel I was working on at the time. I had already included certain passages in which the language gets broken down; I now had a kind of theory to guide what I was doing. Taking Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky poem as my starting point, I made a series of textual mutations from the nonsense rhyme. In the novel, these transformations are presented in reverse order, so that the reader gradually realises the original source of the effect. Very much, I was seeing this as a backwards dub of Lewis Carroll. In my next book, the Pixel Juice collection, I then refined, or expanded, this technique, using a more overt use of the dub concept. The novel, Needle in the Groove, allows the narrative to include, and be affected by, its own remix. In this work, music has quite literally become a liquid experience.

Over the years, we have seen this once secret concept enter the public mind as the idea of the remix. Music no longer has a final outcome; rather, it exists in a constant state of flux, in which many different musicians will be adding their own elements to the track. Even at the moment of performance, either live in concert, or at the hands of the DJ, the music is still being operated upon. This creates, I believe, a music totally in tune with the contemporary mind.

If we now turn to the world of literature, can we see any real evidence of equivalent techniques being used by writers? I would have to answer in the negative. I would suggest that writers are still, with some honourable exceptions, using storytelling techniques invented in the nineteenth century, or even earlier. This strikes me as being fairly ridiculous, especially as we enter a new millennium. We need to explore new ways of telling stories; new ways of allowing narrative to partake of the liquid experience.

Over the last few years, I've been listening to a lot of experimental electronic music. Some of this is allied to the outer fringes of Techno Culture, people such as Pole, Autechre, Oval, and so on. Other musicians place their music is a more avant-garde setting. But what all these musicians share is an interest in computers as a creative tool. Reading interviews with the musicians, I started to learn a little about the machinery used, and the techniques involved. A musical signal is sent along a pathway. This signal passes through various software gates or filters, each of which has a different effect on the music. These gates are called things like 'Decay', 'Reverb,' 'Echo,' and so on. Sometimes, diagrams of the signal pathway would be included in the record's sleeve design. I might well have been studying one of these diagrams, when the initial idea of Cobralingus came to me. Could a piece of text be pushed along a similar pathway?

I had already been experimenting with using musical processes such as dub, and the remix, to make a new kind of fiction. The novel, Nymphomation, was my first serious attempt at this, using a kind of reverse dub of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky poem. With the Cobralingus idea, I saw of a way of elaborating the whole process, of pushing it to the extreme. At the same time, the filter gates would give me a way of controlling the text as it moved along. Some of the filter gates, such as Decay and Overload, were taken directly from the musical software models; others were invented as being appropriate to a textual adventure. Initially, there were about ten gates chosen. Some of them, such as Randomise or Explode, break the text down to different degrees; others, such as Enhance, and Find Story, build the text up, again, to differing degrees. The whole process becomes a kind of waveform of language, breaking down, building up, breaking down, building up, and so on. The first piece I did was Exploding Horse Generator Unit. The reader can follow here, the exact struggle as I attempted to activate the process successfully.

A Cobralingus piece is not planned, not in any way. An opening text is chosen, and then a first gate is chosen. How the writer allows the text to be transformed by the gate is entirely up to the individual. This is not a mechanical process. It's a way of allowing the imagination to explore areas it would not usually enter into. Once a text is transformed, another gate is chosen. The process continues in this way, allowing chance to play upon the text. Eventually, and this always happens, a phrase or an image will emerge from the process, something that makes the writer sit up and take notice. This is the clue as to how the overall piece will end, and the process can now be pushed along in this direction. Again and again, doing these pieces, I was astonished as to how this moment arrived. I can only think that some hidden text has been brought to light, out of the original inlet. This I have described as the ghost, or unconscious desire, of the original text. Cobralingus, very like a Lee Scratch Perry dub mix, is a way of calling up these ghosts.