After 25 years, Alan Wilder's Recoil finally hitting the road

In 1994, he married former Miranda Sex Garden member Hepzibah Sessa, with whom he has two children, Stanley Duke and Paris.

"I have done two shows recently with Recoil, though," Wilder said. "It was to test the waters in a way. We did a show in Austin and a show in New York City earlier this year. But the last real touring I did in the States was with the Mode in '93/'94 which was a massive tour."

Organizing the Recoil tour has gone well, although it has been a job, he said. Thanks to a "good agent," Recoil has been able to secure nice venues for what he calls an "eclectic presentation."

"It's not like a rock 'n' roll band," Wilder said. "We wanted to try to find the right kind of theater where we can put up a big film screen that we use and all that sort of thing. To find those venues available and also on the right days and all that sort of thing, it was tough to do -- tougher than Europe, I'd say. I think we've managed to put a nice tour together. So it's working out. In this day and age, it's tough. It's not easy selling concerts in America at the moment."

The jaunt is in support of Recoil's two-CD collection of songs called "Selected," which includes new and exclusive remixes.

"The 'Selected' album is [a] compilation of my favorite tracks really put together in such a way that it's not a selection of hits," Wilder said. "I haven't got any hits. It's a continuous piece of music that I've put together from all the best bits of Recoil to try to make a new thing in a way."

The tour is an extension of that CD, Wilder said. He has adapted those mixes to work in a live context.

"They're a bit more minimal, a bit more geared toward people being on their feet rather than being at home listening," Wilder said. "Then we match it up with other bits. There's the occasional Depeche Mode bit that comes in, and it's a sort of amalgamated long piece of music. I commissioned four different filmmakers who have all put footage together to go with that music specifically, and that runs through the whole show. What we're doing is fairly restrained compared to the visual side of things. We're there with our laptops making it happen, but there's no band."

That reflects the beginnings of Recoil, which Wilder created as a way to kill time in between Depeche Mode albums.

"I didn't want to just do nothing, so I thought I'll just do some music on my own," Wilder said. "That initial release ('1+2') was really just demos that I played for Dan Miller at Mute. He said, 'Why don't you just put this out?' 'It doesn't sound too great.' 'Well, redo it.' I said I can't really, because it was done on this strange sampling equipment with unusual loops. It was kind of a one-off thing. 'Go and master it,' he said, 'tweak it a bit and we'll release it as it is.' It has a kind of charm to it. That was the birth of the project. It's only once I left the group I thought, 'Well, there's no point in stopping what I started, I might as well carry on.'"

Wilder is still on speaking terms with his former Depeche Mode bandmates. In fact, multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Martin Gore will guest DJ at the Santa Ana, CA, gig on Oct. 24.

"We've never been super close," Wilder said of his fellow Depeche Mode musicians. "But in more recent times, we've had more communication. I've been speaking to Martin recently, who's, in fact, coming out for one of these shows to DJ as a guest, at one of the California shows, Santa Ana. Fans are very excited about that. I also speak to Dave [Gahan, singer] fairly regularly. He's a man of three-line texts. He's quite good at that. He's not on his computer banging off e-mails every five minutes like the rest of us. He's a bit more distant than that. But text is the way to get him. We're good friends. We've always been good friends."