I've put live performance in a lot of spaces. Part of what I want to do is take over the takeover. Another way that someone put it is, you climb over the fence and you cut a hole in it, and let everyone else in. That's kind of what this is. The museum is a repository of great works, but there is certain work that no one ever calls great. This is an insistence on directing their attention to other stuff that's great, that never gets to be in a museum.

The sense of having to be the best at everything gets in the way of anybody doing anything. I put all that aside; it's not worth thinking about when I'm there. My agenda as an artist doesn't go away when I teach. It actually gets intensified.

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.

I make a lot of music with other desis - that's hugely important to me, but it can't be the sum total of who I am and what I do. It's not accurate; it doesn't reflect my life experience.

Resonance is a physical process through which similarities are highlighted.

Electronic technology has been a part of music making and music listening for a century. We always treat it like it's new, and cutting edge, but it's actually omnipresent, so we should just treat it as part of the arsenal today.

The phrase I use is 'easy camaraderie.' Non-western immigrants of color and their progeny like me - my parents came here fifty years ago and I was born and raised in Rochester - whether it's Teju Cole, or Rudresh Mahanthappa, or Himanshu Suri, or Miya Masaoka, or Barack Obama, we all have that in common. And that's different from being descended from enslaved African captives. I am very conscious of that difference, and conscious of how easy it is to forget about it. I find myself always coming up against that.