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.

The instrumental pieces are compositions, certainly, although that's not the language that I instinctively use. They're not scored, and arrangements are often arrived at collaboratively. I always choose to play with people whose input I desire.

The word 'archive' seems so reassuring, but I have a lot ofconcern over the longevity of documentary materials.

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.

I found myself thinking about the distance between the 60s and today through certain moments. Like the Henry Flynt interview with Ubuweb founder Kenny Goldsmith, where he talks about how he was scarred by how proud John Cage was to be ignorant of popular music. Goldsmith says, "Nobody thinks twice nowadays about listening to everything!" Something that had seemed so uniquely, radically syncretistic in Flynt's day seems much more commonplace now.

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.

My experience that undergirds that observation comes from punk, where people might have scraped together the money to be in the studio for an afternoon to make a record. Punk isn't a music that you think of as chance-based, but exigency has a lot to do with it.