I download music just like anybody else, but it's a weird relationship when you're a musician.

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'm not an anti-online person. I get what the modern world's about and I understand that that's the nature of music dissemination.

I try to structure albums in a pattern, like in a way where there's a motif that runs throughout or some kind of conceit that informs it in a general way. Maybe it's in a harmonic key. I like to go metastructural sometimes, like look at more than the three-minute passage and how that interacts with other pieces. And I've been increasingly interested in false starts and fraudulent beginnings, and things that don't reach their implied conclusions. I take an album and I kind of start moving things around like Jenga.

I'm not a peak oil person. I'm not a biohazard apocalyptic kind of freak. I don't have a supply of weapons or gold bars under my house.

I definitely road test music. I'll drive in the car and look up at the sky and that often makes it more clear, like what's good and what's not. Driving in darkness is amazing, because you really feel the energy and what has presence, spirit to it, and what doesn't.

There have always been people making music. On their porches, playing folk songs. Playing piano in quiet salons. You don't have to listen to every MySpace page, so what's the difference? It's just noise that you filter out.