Implant interview: Len Lemeire on ‘The Kinematics Of Doubt’

Implant mainman Len Lemeire discusses ‘The Kinematics Of Doubt’, his fifteenth studio album as the long-running Belgian EBM project, in a new interview with Side-Line. The record came out on Alfa Matrix on October 30, 2026, in digital and CD editions, led by the single “Underneath The Neon Lights.”

Lemeire named the fourteen-track album after kinematics, the branch of physics that studies motion without asking what causes it, a frame he uses to talk about songwriting as a series of decisions: tempo, key, sound, arrangement, hook and lyrics all pushing a track somewhere else. In the interview, he talks about the title’s origins, the political uses of doubt, a guest vocal he recorded for Aiboforcen, the physics behind track titles such as “The Observer Effect” and “The Insider,” the EBM scene’s old suspicion of trance, and mastering work for other Alfa Matrix artists.

Implant shares a double release night with Llumen at mOtown in Sint-Joost-ten-Node on November 20, with interactive visuals by Pieter Coussement.

Implant interview

Side-Line: In physics, kinematics describes movement without asking what causes it. Why borrow that frame? Is it also a refusal to explain why you make the music you make?

Len: Kinematics is, quite literally, the study of motion. What attracted me to the term was the idea that composing is also a process of movement. Every decision pushes a track somewhere else: the BPM, the key, the sounds, the arrangement, the hook, the lyrics. At some point during the making of the album, I started to see this almost as a dance between doubt and decisions that worked. That is where “The Kinematics of Doubt” came from.

So I would not say the title is a refusal to explain why I make the music I make. If anything, the reason can probably be traced back to a kind of reverse childhood trauma.

My parents were actually very open-minded when it came to music. I could play almost anything at home without much reaction. But when I discovered Front 242, that was apparently the limit. I still remember my father standing at the bottom of the stairs shouting: “Turn that noise off!” And, well… the rest is history.

Side-Line: The album also has a track called “The Observer Effect”: in physics, measuring a system changes it. Kinematics, observation, are you writing a physics album about people?

Len: Haha, not really. Choosing an album title is always a long process for me. Once I have one, though, I do tend to start seeing connections around it and building on it as I go.

“The Observer Effect” is a good example. The track was originally called “The Hawthorne Effect,” after the psychological concept that people change their behaviour when they know they are being observed. A very simple example would be sitting at a red light with a police car next to you: even if you are doing absolutely nothing wrong, you suddenly become much more conscious of how you behave. The lyrics take that idea into relationships. Couples often develop a certain way of behaving when they are together, and I find it fascinating how different people can become when their partner, the “observer” in this case, is no longer there.

So no, I did not deliberately set out to make a physics album about people. But the record is very much about human interaction, and in hindsight that is actually quite an interesting thing to look at through the idea of movement as well: how people influence each other, change direction, adapt, react and pull one another into different patterns. I genuinely enjoy it when someone discovers layers like that in the music, even when they were not consciously designed that way. I always hope music can carry ideas as well as sound, so if it makes someone think beyond the immediate track, I take that as a compliment.

Side-Line: What were you certain about in 1996, when “Fun” came out, that you’ve since let go of? And what are you still unsure of today?

Len: When “Fun” came out, I was 26. I am 56 now, so inevitably the things you are certain about, and the things you are afraid of, change quite dramatically.

I recently did a guest vocal for Aiboforcen about the period when I first got to know Seba and Benoit. One of the lines goes: “We were young, a bit naive. We fought the demons in our minds.” I do not usually like explaining lyrics too much, but that line probably says something about the difference. Back then, we were singing about our fears and our demons, but we were also incredibly naive. At 26, a lot of your uncertainty is directed towards the future: what will happen, whether things will work out, whether you will become the person you think you are supposed to become. At 56, the uncertainty is different. In some ways, the fears become less selfish because you have children and there are people whose future matters to you at least as much as your own. They also become more concrete. You start seeing people around you disappear, slowly but inevitably, and time stops being an abstract concept.

So perhaps what I have let go of is the certainty that there will always be enough time to figure everything out. What am I still unsure of today? Probably most things that really matter. The difference is that I am much more comfortable with that than I was at 26.

Side-Line: Doubt has become a political tool: manufactured uncertainty about science, elections, facts. Does the album separate the doubt that frees you from the doubt that’s used against you?

Len: Doubt has definitely become a political tool. It can be a very effective way of creating division, although I would argue that doubt itself is often only the weapon, polarization is the broader strategy. A lot of political communication today is built around defining a problem in the strongest and clearest possible terms. But being very good at identifying a problem does not automatically mean you have a good solution for it. I think we sometimes confuse those two things. If someone describes a problem in a way that strongly resonates with us, we become more inclined to trust the solution they offer as well.

The problem is that a powerful diagnosis often benefits from simplification and extremes, whereas actually explaining something requires nuance. And nuance is much harder to communicate. There is a difference between naming a problem effectively and genuinely explaining it. But that is quite different from the doubt on “The Kinematics of Doubt.” The album is much more concerned with doubt as part of movement and creation: questioning a decision, changing direction, trying something else and eventually arriving somewhere.

For me, that is almost the opposite of manufactured doubt. Productive doubt opens possibilities. Doubt that is deliberately used against you usually tries to restrict them. At that point, it stops being curiosity and starts becoming manipulation.

Side-Line: “Information Systems” is built entirely from spoken samples about the mythology of computing. Which myths did you want to expose and why open with voices instead of a beat?

Len: “Information Systems” basically functions as the introduction to the EP. I wanted it to open with something that was not immediately a beat-driven track, but that created a context before the music really started moving.

The subject also comes quite naturally to me. In everyday life I am a university professor, and one of the subjects I teach to first-year economics students deals with the role of information systems in organisations. But I am at least as fascinated by the role computers have acquired in our everyday lives. We hardly notice most of these systems anymore, precisely because they have become so deeply embedded in how we live.

That fascination has become even stronger with the current discussion around AI and ideas such as “human in the loop.” There seems to be a growing tendency to regard computer involvement itself as problematic in certain areas, particularly when we talk about creativity and art. I understand where that discussion comes from, but I also find the contradiction interesting. We may strongly object to an algorithm interfering with art, while being perfectly happy to let another algorithm tell us where we can buy something for the lowest price.

What interests me is that underneath all those different applications, the basic principle remains remarkably simple. Computers perform computations. AI may appear mysterious, intelligent or even threatening, and an online recommendation system may appear completely mundane, but both ultimately emerge from enormous sequences of calculations.

That is why one of the samples in the track, “computations are carried out,” is almost the key line for me. There is a mythology surrounding computers because we tend to focus on what their output appears to mean rather than on what the machine is actually doing.

And that is also why I wanted to start with voices rather than a beat. It works almost like a small lecture or statement of intent before the EP begins. The rhythm comes afterwards; first I wanted the idea to enter the room.

Side-Line: “The Insider” asks how much of what we call fact is really interpretation. Who’s the insider in 2026: the expert, the algorithm, or the person who leaks?

Len: “The Insider” is really about the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. I don’t think anybody truly has “inside information” unless they are actually involved in shaping the thing itself. Experts are not necessarily insiders. They may understand the structure extremely well, but that is still different from being at the origin of it. An algorithm is something else again. Most of the time, it is a mechanism for supporting or automating decisions: who gets shown which music, what the next word in a sentence should be, which information reaches which person. It does not really “know” in the human sense; it classifies, ranks and predicts. And the person who leaks information is different again. That is often somebody who was close enough to help shape something, but who may no longer agree with the shape it has taken.

If you connect those three to doubt, you actually get three completely different forms of it. The expert doubts the nature or interpretation of the structure. The algorithm replaces doubt with classification and probability. The leaker may doubt whether something should remain hidden in the first place.

But the song itself is less about those three categories and more about the person who knows one fragment of the picture and then starts behaving as if they understand the entire artefact. That is the kind of “insider” I was interested in: someone who possesses a piece of the truth and mistakes that piece for the whole.

Side-Line: The record circles control, obsession, surveillance, manipulation, identity and truth. EBM grew up on images of uniforms and factories. Is today’s control more intimate than a boot on the street?

Len: The record is indeed very much about human interaction, and I think observing human interaction only becomes really interesting when you start looking at the boundaries. Almost every subject you mention, control, obsession, surveillance, manipulation, identity, truth, exists somewhere on a borderline. And human behaviour has a tendency to test those borders, to see what happens on the other side.

For me, EBM has always done something similar. It is a genre that probes boundaries. And the most interesting modern forms of EBM are crossing boundaries with other musical styles. I think that is also part of its origins, although the imagery traditionally associated with EBM, uniforms, factories, discipline, machinery, has not always been entirely consistent with what the songs were actually about. When I hear Nitzer Ebb sing “if you smile you can’t take it back,” for instance, I also hear an observation about human behaviour rather than simply an industrial aesthetic.

Control itself has also become much more complex. We have found ways of scaling up very personal forms of control through social media, algorithms and visibility. What used to happen between individuals can now be amplified to thousands or millions of people. Jimmy Carr, one of my favourite stand-up comedians, once made the joke that socialism is the redistribution of wealth, while social media is the redistribution of status. There is quite a lot of truth in that. Status, attention and visibility have become things that can be measured, distributed and manipulated.

So yes, I think control today is often much more intimate than a boot on the street. It can sit inside the way we present ourselves, the way we compare ourselves to others, the information we receive and even the way we start adjusting our behaviour.

Side-Line: “Transaction Failure,” “Beyond The Code,” “On TV”: money, software, media. Are those the three machines that manufacture doubt today?

Len: They are certainly machines that can produce doubt, but they are not the only ones. Doubt itself is not necessarily something negative. In many ways, it is fundamental to both science and religion. The most intelligent people I know usually leave some room for uncertainty in what they know, not because they distrust their own knowledge, but because they understand that very few things come with complete answers.

That is where it becomes interesting. The moment someone claims to have the complete solution, I become suspicious. Very often, certainty is also a form of power. If you can replace doubt with belief in one clear answer, one system or one explanation, you will always find people willing to follow that story. That is also why science can be frustrating. Science spends enormous amounts of time trying to reduce uncertainty, test assumptions and eliminate alternative explanations. Creating doubt is much easier than producing certainty.

So yes, money, software and media can all manufacture doubt, but the more important mechanism is perhaps the promise that doubt can be removed completely. That promise is often much more powerful than doubt itself.

Side-Line: Trance is back in the mix. Around 2000 the industrial scene looked down on it. Did the scene owe trance an apology looking backward?

Len: There are definitely a few trance ideas on the album, even some Goa influences, but also techno and melodic techno. I have never been very interested in treating genres as fixed territories. Those categories can be useful to describe music, but they become limiting very quickly if you start treating them as rules.

So does the industrial scene owe trance an apology? Maybe a little. Around 2000 there was certainly a tendency to look down on certain styles simply because they belonged to another scene or carried a different aesthetic. Looking back, that seems rather pointless to me. If an idea works, it works. All those boxes are there to be broken down anyway.

Side-Line: You master a lot of Alfa Matrix releases. Does hearing everyone else’s work up close make you more doubtful of your own or more confident?

Len: Mastering is quite a technical discipline, and I really see it as something different from writing or producing music. I always consider it a great honour when somebody trusts me with the final sound of an album or EP, because that is an important stage in shaping the end product. My job is to make the music come across as well as possible without imposing myself on it.

Compilations are slightly different. There you are often dealing with an overview of a period, a scene or a label, so consistency becomes very important. With an album or an EP, it feels much more personal because you are dealing with one artist’s complete vision.

Of course, listening to so much music that closely does affect the way I hear things. Sometimes I hear something and think, “Damn, I wish I had done that,” or “I should have tried that in a mix.” And sometimes I hear something and think that maybe there was more that could have been brought out of it. But to be honest, I have that with music all the time, even when I am simply listening in the car. Once you make music yourself, you never really listen in a completely passive way anymore. Whether you want to or not, part of your brain is always imagining the tracks in the DAW, wondering how something was built, mixed or arranged. So I would not say it makes me more doubtful or more confident. Both I guess.

Side-Line: You’ve worked with Front 242, Anne Clark and Noemi Aurora. What did a collaborator ever teach you that you couldn’t have taught yourself?

Len: Every collaboration has been unique, and I genuinely think I learned something from every single one of them. The list is actually much longer than those three, and every person on that list brought something different. Sometimes it was musical, sometimes technical, sometimes simply a different way of approaching an idea or making a decision.

What I probably value most, though, is the fact that music has allowed me to meet so many interesting people. Most of those connections started from a very simple place: mutual respect for each other’s music. I feel genuinely blessed that music has given me the opportunity to work with all those people and to build those connections along the way.

Side-Line: On November 20 you share a release night with Llumen at mOtown. Pieter Coussement also does Implant’s visuals. Does the image follow the sound, or does it sometimes lead?

Len: Pieter has programmed quite a lot for the visual side of the Implant live show. Some elements are prepared video clips, but there is always an interactive layer on top that he controls live. The visuals react to what happens on stage. Even when I play certain sounds on the keyboard, that can trigger an effect or a visual response and a sound. So the image is quite interactive rather than simply running alongside the music. Pieter also handles a few sound effects and additional elements during the show. All in all, it is definitely more than just pressing play on a laptop. The tracks themselves have also been reworked into proper live versions, so both the sound and the visuals are adapted for the stage.

On November 20, I would describe the show at mOtown almost as a preview or a try-out for that setup. Llumen also has a very strong new album out, so it felt like the perfect opportunity to combine both releases in one evening. And because Pieter is involved in both projects, there is a natural connection between them. We are hoping that the Llumen-Implant combination is something we can bring to a few more stages after that as well.

So does the image follow the sound? Sometimes, yes. But because so much of it is interactive, there are also moments where sound and image are really influencing each other rather than one simply following the other.

About Implant

Implant is the electro-industrial project Len Lemeire started in Belgium in 1996. That year’s debut CD single, “Fun,” credited Lemeire alongside Geert Machtelinck and was pressed in a numbered edition of 1,000 copies. Built on EBM sequencing, physical electronics and a recurring catchphrase, “did you have your Implant today?,” the project went on to release albums including “Implantology,” “Audio Blender,” “The Productive Citizen” and “Soft Flesh – Hard Steel,” alongside the EP “Fading Away.”

Lemeire released the free download single “The Drive” in December 2023, followed by the twelfth studio album, “The Chaos Machines Part 1 – No More Flies On The Windscreen,” in May 2024. The trilogy continued with the limited vinyl EP “The Chaos Machines Part 2 – Scratching The Surface” in September 2024 and closed with “Judging Sinners – The Chaos Machines Part 3” on February 7, 2025, a ten-track album again featuring Noemi Aurora. Lemeire has also recorded with Front 242 and Anne Clark, and mastered releases across the Alfa Matrix roster.

“The Kinematics Of Doubt,” Implant’s fifteenth studio album, followed on October 30, 2026, on Alfa Matrix, in digital and CD. Lemeire marks the record with a double release night alongside Llumen at mOtown in Sint-Joost-ten-Node on November 20, with interactive visuals by longtime collaborator Pieter Coussement.