You know we're in a planet surrounded by certain kinds of frequencies and noise. The earth's magnetic sphere makes weird sounds. The sun you know the heart of our solar system makes noise. Even interstellar phenomena like black holes. You know people have studied them and a black hole can emit sound in like the range of 20,000 octaves below B flat.

So Bach, Beethoven, Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk, these are all people who would sort of rearrange or take riffs from people. Same thing with rock, if you look at the Rolling Stones doing a cover of Otis Redding or you know if you look at literature James Joyce is pulling fragments of text from other people.

What I'm going for with the string arrangements for my Antarctic symphony is a pun here.

The easiest thing I can say is simple, but paradoxical in this era of total sampling: Be original.

I have to deal with some dumb folks. It's a real drag.

When I was a kid, I looked at art as a way of blending everything. One of my favorite composers is Wagner - who coined the term "gesamtkunstwerk," or "total art work." That's what was going on in the 19th century, and the 20th century just kept it going.

Geography is crucial for my work. I went to Antarctica and took a studio to several of the main ice fields to make field recordings of ice to create a symphony - acoustic portraits of ice.