You know you don't really need the band or the singer/songwriter in the same way, so you look at everything as part of your palette.

There is a complexity and layering that goes on with this kind of thing, so the music is slightly repetitive and when I say repetitive it's in the same tradition as people like Steve Reich or Erik Satie or even WC.

The idea of a visual icon that gives you a sense of information very quickly and that you can easily just say "That's what the style is."

I wanted to do with Antarctica was say let's hit the reset button on that and see what happens to your creative process. Let's go to the most remote place that you can imagine, set up a studio and see what music comes out of it.

Watching 40 mile chunks of ice break off of Antarctica will change your life forever, but realizing that driving a car, or flying a plane, or having a nice steak, or drinking from a plastic bottle all contributed to the destruction of the environment - it's a bit complex, but music needs to pave the way for getting people to think about this kind of complexity. I'm just doing my share.

Downtown New York, I'm within certain styles of music and I'm also within certain cultural, you know, and literary context. So DJ Spooky was meant to be a kind of ironic take on that. It was always meant to be kind of a criticism and critique of how downtown culture would separate genres and styles because it was ambiguous. You couldn't fit it into anything and that was the point.

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