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.

Because I refuse to perform my music in a traditional sense of instrumentation, I don't have an amazing live stage spectacle to provide, and I don't want to go there. I don't see how the music would stay true to the spirit of the work.

I've always thought that each album would be my last one, and then I would be out of ideas and I would move to photography or something. I thought it was transient and it's not because of this entrenched career stubbornness that I've done it for so long, it's just something I enjoy doing, and it's the most direct way I can express something.

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 don't feel like music is getting more intense; I think generally the channel for deeper harmonic saturation is not just a sine wave - but a really crunched sine wave. The trend in music is towards a harmonic saturation. I wouldn't say I'm reacting against that. It's just a personal choice to move into some weird space. This also allows me breathing room in the future. It just felt like the right thing to step back on.

Once you have MIDI information - I mean, it's a bit technical - that's your paint. You can slow down, pitch up, change notes within a different key. That's the foundation in which you can write things.

I've been playing music all my life. I wasn't really fostered in a musical family, it was something I did despite the kind of limitations put on me. It was a series of misshapes and failures and things that didn't work out and other opportunities that kind of presented themselves. I just followed a journey.