The planet isn't improvising, it's creating dynamic tensions between complex living systems in a planetary choreography, a balancing act between physical, chemical, biological, environmental, and human components.

I'd say most of my work is just trying to make sense of the disorienting and overloaded world that we inhabit. We're bombarded with sound at every level.

In my book "Sound Unbound" we traced the guy who actually came up with the main concept for the graphic design of the record cover sleeve. His name is Alex Steinweiss. And one of the things in my book that we really tried to figure out was the revolution in graphic design that occurred when people put images on album covers.

It's strange to think that culture is simply a matter of millions of files flying around, but we now think in terms of networks for everything.

Randomness has an incredibly powerful place in our culture. If you think about it, you can see it driving the algorithms that run our information economy, patterns that make up the traffic of our cities, and on over to the way the stars and galaxies formed.

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

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.