I had already been a young singer. And once, as a profession, I was a young singer, what you would call a soprano in England, but I was an alto in singing Jewish music in bar mitzvahs and weddings and synagogues throughout New York City because, after Israel, New York is probably the biggest Jewish community in the world.

I found so much fun in the light shows and the multimedia shows of the hippies. That was when I was a student in the 1960s, and I was in New York, so I learned how to deal with writing, recording sound of other people, performance art - because that was a new territory, and I liked everything that was new and provocative. That interested me more than becoming anything specific.

People never heard bells in Western music sounding really cataclysmic. You hear that more in Russian music or in Asian, Indonesian traditions.

For Jewish people, salmon has a special meaning, not just because it's a flavor we've had all along our diaspora. Salmon also have this special return-to-their-roots desire. At the end of their lives, salmon try to swim back to when they were born. Even if they can't, they have this obsession. We as diaspora people love that a lot about salmon.

My music education was oral. I was resistant to scores and things like that. In Jewish religious music, there are no scores. You learn everything by rote, by ear, by repeating.

I actually started as a singer in Brooklyn, and I lived in a community. To get out of the ghetto of my community, I was a musician.

I never made any money from my music. I don't make that much; I make it flip-flopping between five and ten different disciplines.