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.

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.

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.

Vinyl's just a fun endgame step. I work with analogue signal chains too, but the mp3 is the way I listen to music.

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.

It depends on what kind of minimalism you're talking about, of course. I love both those artists - Brian Eno and William Basinski. I would say my minimalism references are early American minimalists from the 70s.

I did dance music for a short period of time but I felt like the fruit for me was in the outer dance world so I stopped doing overt techno and I think, in terms of rhythm, I enjoy things that feel like they're falling off, like they're just barely holding on.