I don't write poetry for the page because my inclination in that area is satisfied by songwriting. "Ornamental Hermit" was a comparatively effortless song to write, which is rare for me.

As there are more online archives of improvised music, it becomes more like the daily practice of playing it. It lessens the idea of there being masterpieces of improvised music through benchmark recordings.

The question of art songs always came up with Gastr del Sol. I think Jim O'Rourke had it right in being clear that there's a tradition of art song - Ives being the touchstone for the two of us - and what we do doesn't belong to it. It wasn't important to advance those kinds of distinctions, but clearly he thought it was fanciful for anyone to speak of what we were doing as being in that tradition.

The danger of these collaborations across disciplines is in having too strict of a division of labor - in my case, of getting stuck doing the music. When I make an album, I write music, I write lyrics, I come up with the visual design, etc. I get to do all of that stuff.

Otherwise the history just gets completely flattened out, and people imagine that everything was always available and accessible. One of the things that struck me was the way in which the landscape of experimental music seemed different at different points in time, on the basis of where one was situated geographically, if one had access to live performances, and what was released at a particular time.

If the records that I make have one thing in common, it's that there is little recapitulation, and the idea is that it should end in a place very different from where it began, and that you've heard musicians undergo a change or be irreversibly transformed.

The word "archive" seems so reassuring, but I'm not sure about these things that are now being called archives. Is anything lost by the fact that the word has come to mean so many more things.