I noticed you could monitor the recording that you're making, but you could also monitor the playback head. There's a little distance between them and so you get an echo, right? If you change the amplitude of, say, the playback and play with that, you get different qualities and different sounds. So I was very interested in that phenomenon.

The sound and just the fact that it was different from the piano, yet it still had some familiarity [made my fascinated with accordion].

I heard a lot of different kinds of music. I heard country music, I heard jazz, I heard symphonic music, opera, everything you can think of except very modern music.

In the '60s my friends were interested and we were hearing electronic music coming in on community radio from Europe, so that's where it started. And I had a tape recorder and started making things with it.

We think about sitting in a space and hearing some music by having our ears pointed forward towards the musicians sitting opposite us. I'm really not following that paradigm at all.

My writing has always been a rather non-linear process. I've found if I get something down, I can listen to it and other things start to come.

Maybe I'll start from the initial idea, what motivated me to do that. In 1953, I had access to a tape recorder. Tape recorders were not widely available. There was no cassette tape back then. It was a Sears Roebuck tape machine. I put a microphone in the window and recorded the ambience.