Nuclear family

"In the future, a lot of music will be distributed this way," Tim says. "It's already becoming more common in Europe. At first, record companies were scared of the Internet, but what they didn't realize was that they could use it to let people hear the music, using some sort of watermark so that it can't be directly recorded, and people will go out and buy the CD. In the video-game industry, it's called 'heroin-ware.' Like [the video game] Doom. The first version was sent out totally free, and everyone got hooked on it. So then when the second version came out, it sold millions."

For most musicians, the promise of free music over the Internet is somewhere between a blessing and a curse, a promise and a threat. It offers unlimited freedom, the ability to make music without label interference...and, most of the time, not a single penny. In an instant, the entire world can hear your music...and then forget about it once the computer is turned off. Sound quality seems to improve every day...but Real Audio and Real Video more often than not turn your $3,000 computer into a $2.99 transistor radio or a busted Watchman. On some days, the future sounds a whole lot like 1974.

But Sanders considers the computer the ultimate weapon in his fight to liberate rock and roll. He and Jacqueline (who plays bass) were founding members of Code 4, a defunct industrial rock band, but Tim is also a bona fide wizard in the studio; and his gig with Audionet, which broadcasts dozens of radio signals from one end of the earth to the other (want to hear a country station in Japan?), provides him with a box seat to the revolution. "Techno is the punk of the '90s," he says, insisting it offers the ultimate in D.I.Y. satisfaction.

"It's punk for people with hope," he says. "I'm constantly having to battle the musician's voice inside my head that says, 'No, you can't do that,' and say to myself, 'If it sounds good, yes, you can do it.'"

In his cinematic adaptation of his novel Trainspotting, Scottish author and unabashed technophile Irvine Welsh forebodes that "music is changing." It's no coincidence that Terror Couple sample those exact words on the track "Morph Out." And just to emphasize the point, Tim adds in his own subversive voice, "Throw all your records out and buy new ones"--which, he probably knows, ain't gonna happen anytime soon. After all, what would he have left to sample?

Jacqueline offers another theory about evolution in music--though this one has nothing to do with technology. She says that after years of testosterone rock, the pendulum is finally swinging back to the feminine side. "Femininity in music is basically about subtlety," she offers, "instead of that in-your-face kind of stuff."

Boosting Terror Couple's sound and image is former Spot and Enablers sideman Davis Bickston, who was born-again to the techno revolution after Tim and Jacqueline took him to see Portishead awhile back. Bickston was amazed to see the DJ acting almost as a percussionist, dropping beats from side to side. Keyboardist Semaj Wilson rounds out the foursome, especially during rare live performances, but in the end, Terror Couple is just that--a duo, a husband-and-wife team who can make their music at home, any time of day or night. Often, on Saturday mornings, they will dig through old vinyl and throw everything against the wall to see what sticks. Tim says there's a power in partners, like Chemical Brothers and Crystal Method, that's hard to beat.

"Jacqueline has the ear," he says. "She's the one who can listen to a stack of music and pick out the one beat that's cool and sexy."

Sexy--they seem to like that word, and they use it often to describe their music, as well as the process of how it's made. "Like when you get into that perfect groove," Tim says. "Because that's what good sex is all about--communication. It's about being able to say, 'Yeah, that's good, do that!' or 'No, that's no good, let's try this.'" Or just maybe, the family that plays together is the family that stays together.

Terror Couple perform May 29 at Trees.