I hung around hippie-ish kind of people and, first of all, they never made any money. If you never make any money, you never have to declare any profession!

I'm not afraid to be a Russian Jewish romantic in my approach to anything, even in my animal divinities, or anything about the feeling.

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.

around 1977 I became very ... negative, I began to do things unconsciously that I didn't understand, and they were very sabotagistic and I didn't know what I was doing. I was pissing everybody off, I was breaking my bridges. I was hostile to people, I was doing performances and insulting people there - I was doing whatever I could to destroy whatever world I had created ten years before, without knowing, really, why

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.

There are some people who love being a something, but I also got the gist in the 60's when I grew up that you could be, in the art scene, very diverse.

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