POP / For the people, by the people: Todd Rundgren has re-invented himself more often than anyone can remember. Now he's at it again with a new name and a project that lets his audience control the music. Andy Gill met TR-I

Prince isn't the only musician to have changed his name of late. Like some android out of Star Wars, Todd Rundgren recently reinvented himself as an acronym, the catchy TR-I. It stands for 'Todd Rundgren - Interactive', and reflects his eagerness to become part of the brave new world of interactive media, or something like that.

Long-term Rundgren fans will not be surprised. In a career stretching back to 1967, when he formed his first psychedelic pop group, Nazz, he's tried out just about every option available to the questing modern musician, both solo and in bands. There was the pure-pop grace of songs like 'I Saw the Light', still his most famous composition; the art-rock synthesiser excursions of his band Utopia; the ambitious play- everything solo albums like Something / Anything? and A Wizard, A True Star; the a cappella album, made up completely of vocal tracks; and much more besides. Then there was the studio engineering and production work for people such as The Band, XTC and Meat Loaf, whose legendary Bat Out of Hell remains Rundgren's greatest success. And when music alone failed to satisfy him, there were other media to conquer, such as video (the second clip that was ever aired on MTV was Rundgren's 'Time Heals') and computers, for which he has written software including a colour-paintbox programme for the Apple Mac, and the FlowFazer screen-saver.

And now there's TR-I, whose No World Order is one of the first interactive-CD albums on the market. What this means is that, given the proper hardware on which to play the disc, listeners can build their own playing-order from the four-second segments into which the music has been chopped, developing their own listening experience from the amorphous database of musical information, or 'musical gene pool', as Rundgren calls it. To give listeners some idea of the possibilities, the disc also includes the versions constructed by famous producers such as Bob Clearmountain, Don Was and the former Talking Head Jerry Harrison.

The idea sounds more in line with European remix culture than American rock culture and, indeed, Rundgren admits that much of the inspiration for the interactive-music concept came from British acts. 'In particular, the KLF guided my thinking in some ways, by putting out an album that's essentially the same song in five different versions,' he says. 'That set me thinking: wouldn't it be possible to build something that would enable you to construct these new versions on the fly, rather than having to do them in the conventional manner and press them on to a disc? Part of the inspiration was to give people that remixing capability, controlling the way that the music can be recontextualised. There's an element of remix culture in there, but the idea is for people to be able to automate the process to a certain degree - to be able to describe what you want and have the machine go out and put it together for you.'

For those who don't have access to CD-i hardware, No World Order is also available as a common-or-garden, non-interactive CD of songs in the typically dense, multi-textural Todd style, with titles like 'Fascist Christ', 'Worldwide Epiphany', and 'No World Order' itself giving vent to the singer's political concerns, particularly as they apply to a post-Cold War America riven by competing notions of multiculturalism. 'The biggest problem is the lack of a unifying exterior force,' Rundgren believes. 'We don't have Communism to rail against any more, so we just rail against each other. There is this illusion that we're at the top of the heap: 'We won] Oh, what do we do now?' There's a general lack of purpose, and you could extend that to the world in general. And the degree to which other countries emulate America will be the degree to which they inherit America's problems.'

There's also a live version of the TR-I experience, playing at London's Forum tonight and tomorrow, which is equally reliant on audience participation. The show takes place in the round, without any barriers or even seats - 'you just take a crowd of people and drop the set right in the middle of them' - and the audience is encouraged to determine the direction of the music via a series of basic, straightforward controls developed precisely to simplify such interaction. 'Ostensibly, they could even become the entire focus of the show,' Rundgren surmises, 'depending on whether they're up to it or not. If you can hold the crowd's attention, I'll let you play my guitar all night long]'

Sometimes, though, things can get a little out of hand. 'At one point in New York City, the audience got so enthusiastic they pushed me off the stage, and I wound up in the crowd,' he recalls. 'I was just wandering about while they were geeking around on the stage. That's fine until somebody hits the keyboard controller and changes the groove, and nobody can dance any more - then I have to high-tail it back to the stage and take control again.' In a recent Amsterdam concert, meanwhile, the interactive idea was taken even further, with people connected via the Internet, contributing remotely to the show.

'We're open to all these kinds of experiments,' Rundgren claims, magnanimously. So if you fancy playing his guitar for the evening, or injecting your own special kind of chaos into the proceedings, go and get interactive with The Artist Formerly Known As Todd.

TR-I will be at the London Forum (071-284 2200) tonight and Friday

(Photograph omitted)