Bill Laswell has a superheroic work ethic.

According to a Japanese discographer Laswell knows, the almost absurdly-prolific producer, bassist and raconteur has worked on some 3,000 projects since 1978, when he played bass on a vinyl single ( “Scoring Power” b/w “It’s a Lie” ) by Michael Blaise and Cheater, an act long lost to the mists of time.

In the past six months, Laswell has released more than a half-dozen albums. These include Jahbulon and Incunabula by his reggae unit Method of Defiance; the delayed Profonation (Preparation for a Coming Darkness), which his experimental funk-metal ensemble Praxis recorded in 2005; and Mesagna Ethiopia, a live album that Ethiopian singer Ejigayehu “Gigi” Shibabaw recorded in Austriz, who Laswell also happens to be married to.

But that’s nothing compared to more prolific periods in the past – particularly during the ‘80s and ‘90s, when Laswell seemed to be remixing the sonic fabric of New York City’s cultural and racial diversity into a bigger, better and faster version of itself.

Where does this prodigious urge to record and perform come from? “Good question,” replies Laswell. “There was always a certain amount of discipline in everything I did, but I don’t know where it comes from.”

Bill Laswell has good stories about most things he’s produced. I like the one about former Sex Pistol singer John Lydon mistaking studio visitor Ornette Coleman for John Coltrane during the recording of Public Image Ltd.‘s Album. But Laswell doesn’t rest rest on his considerable laurels.

During the hours we spent together in the back room of the Chelsea restaurant that’s functioning as his conference room this evening – a Russian promoter and actor/producer Hugh Jackman are scheduled after me – Laswell returns repeatedly to his plans for assembling a base of operations in Ethiopia, where he performed several days earlier with Gigi and the latest iteration of Material, the constantly evolving rockish band he formed in 1978.

Gigi herself left Ethiopia prior to the release of her 1998 album One Ethiopia – an influential hit, according to Laswell – and had not performed there since. Because of this, and because of her success abroad, much anticipation surrounded Gigi’s prodigal-daughter reappearance. For the gig, Material included jazz drummer Hamid Drake, trumpeter Steve Bernstein, saxophonist Peter Apfelbaum, P-Funk keyboard linchpin Bernie Worrell and, of course, Laswell, who declares the concert an unqualified success.

Like so many other musical visionaries, Laswell has long been – as they say – big in Japan. “I’ve been to Japan like 300 times,” he says. “It feels like home. I got addicted to Tokyo but now I’m totally into Ethiopia.”

If the stars and funds align, the city of Addis Ababa will serve as the next outpost of M.O.D. Technologies, which he’s released his recent albums through. Laswell describes M.O.D. as a “collective” consisting of himself, his longtime associate John Brown and Giacomo Bruzzo, who Laswell characterizes as a “hedge-fund mathematician” who “loves music, puts his money down and helps a lot of people.”

Since the music industry’s skyscrapers have crumbled, Laswell is keen on seeking financial angels elsewhere. “All it was ever about was getting enough money to make a record,” he says. “In the past, I knew how to grab it from a major label. But they don’t exist anymore, so you have to work with people who have the funds to make things happen. It’s not easy. The majors are pretty much gone – and that’s good,” he continues after a sip of white wine.

“A&R people have hopefully moved on to better jobs at Kinko’s and grocery stores,” Laswell says. “You’ve gotten rid of all the middle people and the people at the top level who didn’t know what they were doing. They were in the way. They were OK when they signed the check, but that was about it – and those days are gone. So it’s an incredible time to build an international cultural and financial exchange.”

Bill Laswell has been hustling, scrambling and generally busting his ass as a musician since he was a teenager. His father worked on oil rigs and the family traveled a lot. A quiet, attentive kid – from what he’s been told – Laswell was born in Illinois in 1955 and later picked up his gentle drawl in Kentucky. His father died when he was eight, and he and his mother moved to Michigan. They resided in Albion, not far from Detroit.

A music-loving high school teacher took him to see shows, including a particularly memorable triple bill consisting of jazz singer Nina Simone, Miles Davis with Wayne Shorter, and headliners Sly and the Family Stone. Laswell picked up a guitar around age 14 and switched to bass when it became apparent that a good bass player could always find work. He was covering R&B, country and rock hits in working bands by age 15 and spent the next several years paying dues and touring as far south as Key West, Fla.

“I kept doing it and doing it,” says Laswell of his early days as an itinerant bassist, “and somehow it brought me to New York around 1976. I was lucky. I just stepped into a bunch of things that were moving along. I made contacts, paid a lot of attention and listened. I followed people around but I never had any mentors. Coming here, I thought it would be interesting to talk to people like Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis, and I managed to do that early on.”

One of the people Laswell followed around was Brian Eno, who finally hired him in 1979 for early sessions of what would become My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a seminal polyethnic collaboration with David Byrne. Laswell arrived at the studio with a cheap borrowed bass sporting a Devo sticker, since someone had stolen his own ax the night before following a gig at CBGB with Ornette Coleman’s drummer son, Denardo.

In 1980, Laswell began a long, productive association with Celluloid Records, for which he worked as house producer. Founded by Jean Karakos in 1976, Celluloid was as sketchy and inspired as the wildly eclectic New York scene it captured. Jazz, funk, rock, R&B, salsa, reggae and hip-hop were all thriving at a high synergistic boil and Laswell was just the guy to mix it down.

In 1983, Laswell struck gold with a Herbie Hancock tune that he co-wrote and produced called “Rockit.” Laswell has said that Hancock spent as little as five minutes on the track, which featured the young turntablist known as Grandmaster D.ST and sold like hotcakes. It also made Laswell a very hot commodity and earned him production gigs with the likes of Mick Jagger, Yoko Ono, PiL, Motörhead and Iggy Pop.

Laswell always saw these lucrative jobs as a way to pay for the music that he really wanted to produce. So in 1990, with Celluloid in financial shambles, Laswell bought Greenpoint Studio in Brooklyn and launched his own label with the help of Island Records’ Chris Blackwell. The Axiom label was a cosmic version of Celluloid.

In addition to harboring his own increasingly arcane experiments in improvised punk-jazz, dub reggae and future funk, Axiom gave Laswell the latitude to branch out and record the music of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Music is all about mixture and collision for Laswell, and Axiom became a Hadron Collider of disparate sounds.

Formed in 1992, the funky-aggro avant-rock group Praxis was one of the more popular creations to issue forth from Laswell’s sound factory. In addition to Laswell, Praxis’s core consisted of the pseudonymous guitarist Buckethead (so-called for the KFC bucket he sports onstage above an expressionless white Japanese mask), Primus drummer Brain and keyboardist Bernie Worrell.

Released this past March, Profonation (Preparation for a Coming Darkness) is the group’s fifth studio album. It sounds no less timely and hauntingly pissed-off today than it must have at the height of the G. W. Bush’s presidency (at the center of the album’s intricate and psychedelic cover art is a molten black hand descending upon the White House). One of Laswell’s more intensely rhythmic concoctions, Profonation features inspired apocalyptic raps by the late hip-hop pioneer and performance artist Rammellzee along with one of Iggy Pop’s finest vocal performances ever, on “Furies.”

“It started as guitar-bass-drums structures,” Laswell says. “We reached out to what seemed at the time to be a lot of up-and-coming drum-and-bass people. They gave me loops and structures and we played off of that – not so different from how you’d make a hip-hop record.”

Laswell says that Profonation took longer than usual to complete due to the number of guests involved. But similar guest performances spice up and lend celebrity cred to countless Laswell productions. I imagine a revolving door at the entrance to Orange Studio (the West Orange, N.J., facility that he moved to after the Greenpoint one began to attract too many hangers-on). And I envision John Zorn skulking in as Wayne Shorter strides out, with Pharaoh Sanders trapped in the middle.

The Orange Studio scene, however, is more prosaic – especially in an era when musicians can file-transfer their parts from anywhere on the planet. The only real problem, Laswell says, is the desperation that comes when he can’t get the right guy for the gig simply because they’re already booked.

“And that happens a lot,” he complains. “When people are good, they’re busy; that’s how you know they’re good.” Does he have any “best practices” for negotiating with all the egos involved in making as many albums as he does? “We just improvise,” he says. “And dealing with people in the studio’s easy: If somebody’s a problem you just fire them.”

Biggest asshole?

“Buddy Miles was a little tough.”

Photo by Guy van de Poel

With many albums of hard-core dub to his credit, including his pair of depth-charged Sacred System releases, the hypnotic bass rumble and pinging atmospherics of classic roots reggae flavor much of his work. Fantasizing heady late-night sessions and shadowy chambers well-stocked with smoke and mirrors, with visions of dub deity Lee “Scratch” Perry in his Black Ark Studio skanking in my head, I’d initially suggested to Laswell’s publicist that the producer and I might hang out at his mixing deck sometime.

“Oh, I never let people into the studio,” Laswell informs me when I wonder out loud why we’re sitting in this restaurant rather than digging his secret unreleased Miles Davis sessions together across the Hudson. “We just work in the studio and every second counts. Some people never leave the studio. But I arrive about noon and never work for more than four or five hours. Everything is focused. And if something isn’t working, I might leave after an hour and rethink it at home. I never work late at night and I never work in the morning. We never eat or drink in the studio. We just come in and do it – boom! That’s how it’s always been. I really don’t think I’ve been in that studio past seven o’clock in like five years.”

Still on the topic of studio etiquette, Laswell mentions that he’d recently recorded a new album with the aforementioned Perry. “People say he’s a maniac, that he’s crazy,” says Laswell. “But he was totally professional – and totally straight. You’d expect trouble, but he really gave everything he had. I paid him, of course, and in this business when you hand somebody money, they usually do their job.”

Although he long ago eschewed production and mixing for hilarious onstage chicanery, Perry remains one of Laswell’s primary role models. Like Perry, Laswell works quickly and intuitively, never second-guessing or overthinking his decisions. “If I do something, it’s done,” he says. “I never go back and redo it, no matter what.”

The evidence of his two new Method of Defiance albums, clearly suggests that there isn’t a honky on the planet who is making better reggae albums than Bill Laswell at the moment. Where Jahbulon is a more or less orthodox album of songs featuring various vocalists, Incunabula is serious next-level instrumental mischief. A third album, Dub Arcanum Arcandrum, will consist of remixes by dub giants Scientist and Mad Professor, while a still-untitled fourth album will deliver what Laswell simply refers to as “weird instrumental stuff” and “remix playing.”

Incunabula’s title signifies “beginning,” or “return to the source,” and Method’s music reflects that intent. Jahbulon, meanwhile, condenses “Jah” for God of Israel, Jahweh, “bol” for the Christian demon Baal, and “on” for the Egyptian god Osiris. “It’s a secret code word in Masonry,” explains Laswell, whose titles and album art are thoroughly saturated with icons and symbology borrowed from thousands of years of esoteric lore. Laswell is a serious and wide-ranging reader, but just how seriously are we meant to take this encyclopedic mash-up of codes and imagery?

“It’s camouflage, chaos, fun and it throws people off the track,” he replies. "Sometimes we mean it and sometimes we don’t. But information – that is, exposing people to different potentials – is key. I like to include random themes, metaphors and predictions, but none of it is philosophical.
“To me it all comes down to two points,” he continues. “Existence lies in the tonal universe, where everything is understood and harmonically correct. And then there’s the nagual, which is the unknown. I tend to hope I’m based more in the nagual because I prefer the unknown. A lot of these things drift in from the research of people like William Burroughs, Gurdjieff and Aleister Crowley, and I always hope it’s not too overbearing.”

I try in vain to draw Laswell out about some of his favorite and most embarrassing recordings, if only to save myself the trouble of filtering out his greatest hits myself. He doesn’t take the bait, though, so I ask if there was ever a golden period in his career when he felt everything was just right.

“Every second,” he says simply. “It’s all the same. Any regrets?” he continues, predicting my follow-up. “When you’re young, you say, ‘No, I’d never do it differently.’ But as you get older you say, ‘It’s all regrets.’ You coulda done it all better. But when you’ve done as much as I have, it doesn’t matter.” At the end of the day, he says, it’s all about “integrity, quality and dedication.”

Although he certainly looks healthy today, Laswell’s cosmic assembly line nearly came to a screeching halt in 2008, when he was diagnosed with a serious bone infection that made it difficult for him to walk or move around much. But it was the medicine rather than the disease that almost brought him down the following year.

“My immune system kind of collapsed,” he recalls, “When that happened, I started taking painkillers and got addicted. They say you shouldn’t drink alcohol when you’re taking painkillers, so I stopped drinking. Then I started again. The only thing going through my system for awhile were painkillers and alcohol, so I almost died. But everyone almost dies, and then they finally do die, so…”

I’m sure that I’m not the first to point out that one of Laswell’s more extreme noise bands, a fiercely uncompromising collaboration with John Zorn, was called Painkiller.

“Every superhero needs a theme song,” he replies with a grin.