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.

I wouldn't say that I'm a consummate live artist. Album work is kind of just like quilt weaving or something. But live music is just like a method of emptying out the mind through volume. Volume as a form that allows you to do different things. And that doesn't really translate to recorded music, like how do you listen to that, on Spotify or in your car? It's not the same kind of effect. I would say that the loudness is a huge part of what I do live.

There's a limit of any form of representation; it's the same about writing about visual art. I still think it's useful for people to think through things in a deeper way, and use adjectives even if they're not sufficient, you know? I always find it interesting what terms they use to refer to the work. It's always different, and that's kind of intriguing. Sometimes it's clichés, but often it's really creative ways of paraphrasing or reformatting what to mean seems something else. I like that, personally.

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 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.

Sometimes it's a fraught, kind of laden world of performance that I think can be really dubious, but it's also super fun to almost desecrate an instrument that for 500 years has been associated with God.

I work with digital audio, which is like sculpting, a form of chiseling down metal or wood. And I take audio and move it back and forth between the analog and digital realms and work with it almost like a plastic art until it takes forms in different shapes. And I use those figurines that come out of that type of work.