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 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.

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

You can't be sure there's not a God, so why live your life in hatred or the denial of that. It's better to be open to the possibility of it. Just because the whole conceit of scientism... is that our world is explained by two atoms smashing, right? Our green planet came out of that. But I just don't buy where the original line comes back to, those two atoms. The explanations aren't fully in yet.

I've always said my records are these failures of not getting where I want them to go, they end up detouring somewhere else, so on one level it's partly a disappointment, and on another level it's being comfortable with surrendering to that kind of state of becoming or whatever.

I love vinyl, but I'm not a 'vinyl person'. I still collect, but most of my stuff is digital.