Kenny Goldsmith from Ubuweb describes himself as an amateur archivist, and people can download files from Ubuweb - it's not a streaming service. But it's a miracle that it's still online and they're able to make it work through the donations of server space and volunteer efforts.

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.

For me, it's good to have those dissimilar modes of songwriting sit side-by-side on a record, because they yield such different results.

I recall improvisational drummer and composer Michael Evans telling me a story of someone who had the opportunity to meet Cage and give him a record, and John Cage just smiled and said, "You know I have nothing to play this on?"

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.

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.

In eighteenth-century England, there was a practice of hiring a picturesque hermit who would inhabit the beautiful ruin on your estate. To me it rhymes with certain kinds of pop-music entertainers and eccentrics - both touted and tolerated.