It's like the iPod playlist has killed the way we think of the normal album, so let's think of this as just saying you go into your record store and all those categories and all those different ways of segregating music have been thrown out the window, so the difference between myself in real life in that is that I'm the opposite.

For me, DJ culture - with its obsession with collecting records and archiving everything - predated the "cloud" concept with primitive material like the mixtape. Now we would call it "collaborative filtering" or something technical, but the impulse is the same - gather fragments, make something new. That is how you will bypass the climate-change skeptics: render them totally obsolete.

If you don't understand the past, the future won't make much sense either.

When you think about a composer you know like Wagner or Pier Boulez or something like that most of the issues a composer is working with are about discreet, notated music that someone else will play.

One of the main things that differentiates them [artists of 70s] from artists before is that they made albums based on the fact that they didn't care about the band as a thing in its own right. They cared about manipulating the recording and that became the album.

It's an essay that Sigmund Freud wrote about E.T.A. Hoffman's short story called "The Sandman" where someone mistakes an inanimate object for a living, breathing human being. And one of the things that Sigmund Freud really felt was that in modern life people assign qualities to objects around them that may not exist there whatsoever.

You'll get this kind of psychological relationship to the imagery of the music, but that idea is translated to iPhone apps. It's translated to the small, you know, kind of icons on your computer. You name it.