Working with devices and guitar pedals and mixers and synthesizers is what I do, and I prefer people not focus on that because it's kind of distracting from what the point should be. At least for me, it's to have the primacy of aurality in the experience of that evening.

I'm trying to find a way to make music work as a living. People used to make their living selling albums. Those days are over! It's kind of an odd time. I guess it's kind of like writing.

You start to think, when you're finishing a record, in twelve- to fourteen-minute chunks. At a certain point, you do write to the format. It's not a coincidence that most albums are between thirty-five and fifty minutes. It's kind of like the 98-minute film. It becomes some paradigm for human attention in the media.

People still talk about sampling as this new, progressive problem in music. There are technologies now where you can glean the polyphonic information out of a sample and then put that back in and then score it for five instruments. You don't need digital audio to sample; you can rewrite things.

I really support criticism as a craft and as a vocation. People who devote as much time to thinking about sound through writing as I do practicing and forming it, the whole system of journalism seems to not yield rewards sustainable as a craft. So few can spend enough time to be serious about it and approach it with confidence and a kind of depth. And that's good on one level, because you have some leveling, that's kind of maybe leveled the petty fiefdoms of undeserving people but it's also made it hard to make a living as a writer.

I found all my reading and writing informed my music in subtle ways. Ravedeath came out of studying the pipe organ, going to New Jersey - the world's loudest and biggest pipe organ.

I've got Ph.D. just because I enjoyed reading and writing and didn't know what else to do. It was something fun to do. Like it seems self-evident that I'm a musician now, but it's a really hard path. It's almost impossible.