My music is always called "cerebral." It is a way of saying I'm Asian, and therefore everything I do is brainy.

It is one thing to be a virtuoso, but a different thing to play with compassion.

There are records I'll listen to one time and zero in on what's happening, and then I'll listen again to something I didn't notice the first time. The art of making records is something like this: you want to provide a multiplicity of experience in a single object, which is to say you want layers so that people can revisit and have something revealed to them that wasn't apparent the first time. We often will listen to the same music over and over again, and that tells you something, too.

This is the last sentence of my dissertation: "What is soul in music if not powerfully embodied human presence?"

With electronic music it's often a little more hidden - the relationship between gesture and sound - which makes it confounding for audiences. But the ingredients of electronic music are the same ingredients of nonelectronic music.

I find myself skeptical of music that forces you to have a certain experience, emotional reaction, or specific constructive arc of experience. But performers should still take care of that, to a certain extent - how does it add up? What you want from performance, because we're all in a room together, is that somehow we've gotten somewhere at the end, together. You could call that a sense of narrative, but it's not so obvious how that happens. One way it happens is by everyone caring about it happening.

What we call music is what reminds us of ourselves. And sometimes electronic music helps lead the imagination to a space that seems outside of ourselves. But it never really is.