My day job finds me in a double-bind often, and it's an ideal position for anyone interested in becoming highly reactive.

A lot of the projects I've allowed myself to get involved with over the past few years have made me a bit unfocused. It's just so ridiculously easy to do things here; if you're part of the scene, in five minutes you can wind up with two gigs within three days of each other. There's too much going on here and that's a bad thing, to me. Unless you want to jam, and then it's good.

My day job finds me in a double-bind often, and it's an ideal position for anyone interested in becoming highly reactive.

For instance, we have the largest Polish population of any city except for Warsaw, and the largest Lithuanian population outside Lithuania. More Italians, Greeks, Irish, Latinos, Serbians, and Croatians than you can shake a stick at. Chicago has it all, I don't know why I'd ever leave.

I've liked music since I can remember and the guitar was always the most attractive thing about music to me at that time. I played guitar in a high school band. I played guitar in various other bands up until I was 20, but nothing too serious. From time to time someone would ask me to play with a group, but I stopped playing with band-oriented projects as a whole soon after.

Even back then I really didn't enjoy playing chord changes, riffs, and solos when I was young. The only thing I enjoyed playing were these Robert Fripp-type double-picked loops that no one wanted to hear, including me; I just liked playing them.

The latest thing that has caught me by surprise is Maryanne Amacher. I like sound that affects the listener physically. Traits such as complexity or simplicity don't really become a factor then. It's just the sound that I pay attention to.