I definitely didn't have a lot of money. I had been fired from a record store. I was just trying to get by. I was on unemployment. I didn't have anything going full-time.

Around the time I dropped out of college, I decided to start taking what I liked about short stories and apply it to writing songs - to make these things that would change and keep going.

In a lot of African music, the singers are just singing whatever they feel at the time - because the instrumentation is repetitive, they can come and go as they please. That's how we approach it. Not verse-chorus-verse.

An important meeting point for me was realizing the similarity between a DJ set and a Grateful Dead set: I grew up listening to how the Dead would take a song and just jam on it, and then transition into another song.

I'm not against being proud of where you come from but I feel like sometimes the divisions are a little too bold and it hurts us more than it helps us.

I definitely didn't have a lot of money. I had been fired from a record store. I was just trying to get by. I was on unemployment. I didn't have anything going full-time.

It's not so much a philosophy as much as it is a pace. We need to be personally involved with every aspect of the records including the artwork, we want everything to have a similar aesthetic.