I have a commission to do a piece in a place in California, Oliver Ranch, which has an eight-storey structure called The Tower designed by the visual artist Ann Hamilton.

I'm thinking of the audience as being ambient, meaning not sitting focused but being in the space and exploring it while listening to the players.

You invent things like algorithms to take care of some of the changes you want to make. The changes aren't detectable. There's all kinds of things happening as I play.

My first tape piece was made with that Sears Roebuck recorder. I modified sound using cardboard tubes with a microphone in the end to filter the sound. I had a wooden apple box with a Piezo [contact] mic and little objects that I could amplify on the box. I used the bathtub for reverberation.

I have a variety of ways that I make music, but I'm working with the Thingamajigs in a particular way, which is: They are bringing to me their performance skills and their unusual instruments, which I'm relishing. They're really beautiful. The other thing is improvisation - these players improvise and they do it very beautifully, as a matter of fact.

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.

Before that, an 8-bit recording was pixelated; it was really bad. It didn't serve what I was doing, which was recording live sound and delaying it and feeding it back. This is essentially what the EIS system is: a bunch of delays.