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.

People still talk about sampling as this new, progressive problem in music. There are technologies now where you can glean the polyphonic information out of a sample and then put that back in and then score it for five instruments. You don't need digital audio to sample; you can rewrite 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 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.

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