When I perform, it's definitely about duration. I don't play any kind of time signature known to man.

I really like accompanying. I like working with vocalists, I've worked with a lot of poets.

I'd been collecting different ethnic instruments here and there, and then I started making little bell type stuff, looking for weird little sound toys.

I started working with synthesizer players, and I had to find new instruments. I needed a more complex sound, so I went to a surplus place and got a bunch of hard plastic stuff and stainless steel stuff, and that stuff worked. So from that point on, from the 70s on, I've made instruments.

In L.A., I called every scrap yard and surplus place that was listed, about 50 or 60 places, and only at one of them did the owner get intrigued and let me go around the yard to find stuff. Because the insurance regulations are such that you can't go into the places anymore.

You have to be loose enough so that when you listen to what's coming, you can follow it. In that sense I am improvising, but I don't think I'm experimenting. I have a problem with the whole term "experimental music."

A lot of the people that I play with are electronic-based, so there isn't a direct physical analogue between what they're doing and the sound you're hearing.