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.

I'm what they call a 'non-black person of color': NBPOC. It's easy and seductive and common to mobilize around these identity issues, but often that's done at the expense of considering structural anti-blackness. That puts everything in a slightly different light for me, especially because of where I am and why - where I am in the world of the arts, where I live, in Harlem - and the music that I've been able to make, whom I've been able to make it with, who has nurtured me. It's not just about solidarity. It's actually about debt.

Resonance is a physical process through which similarities are highlighted.

What I've learned from my gurus is that when you hear music, you hear a person, or you hear people, and you hear everything about them in those moments. They reveal themselves in ways that cannot be revealed any other way, and it contains historical truths because of that. To me, that is the most important thing. It shouldn't be a footnote, or the last chapter. It should be the complete thesis about a book on listening.

You figure out how to create opportunities to make music, and then, if you take care of the music, audiences will come around. They also might leave. What matters is the moment: the moment of making music, with and for and among others, and what that offers to those people in that moment. They might never see me again; they might never learn my name. But it might still be something they carry with them.

In the 1990s I got to play in a group that played in prisons in California. We would play in maximum security wards. It was infuriating. Those kinds of situations stick with me. We got to come in and play music for them because that's a way of caring, just offering something, a gift, basically. They're basically the most grateful audiences I've ever experienced, because nobody's giving them anything.

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