I've always been obsessed with the grain of the human voice. It's the ultimate instrument, there's this whole level of virtuosity and poetry, a sort of athleticism, of controlling your voice.
Oneohtrix Point Never
I really don't care if anyone thinks I'm special or not, I just want to be able to live my life without thinking about money all the time, or where I'm going to get it.
All of those 10cc 'Not in Love'-type synthetic choir sounds on 'Replica' are all from the Omnisphere. We used a lot of that.
Eccojams are a very simple exercise where I just take music I like, and I loop up a segment, slow it down, and put a bunch of echo on it - just to placate my desire to hear things I like without things I don't.
The dumber the thing is, the more excitement I get from imagining a very complex world of truth around it.
I love Ableton's vocoder and Operator for basic side subs and general low-end.
I'm not a scientist.
There's an arrogance of assuming that we can interpret the past - that we've left the right footnotes, that we're doing the right reclamation projects, that we're not overcorrecting. Actually, we have no idea where we're going. It's this Tower of Babel type scenario.
When I make music I try to be as honest as I can to how I experience the world. Like how you arrange a piece of music formally. I tend to observe a lot of chaos or whatever, the fragmentation and melancholy. That's the filter I synthesize my world view with. If I didn't formally have that chaos and it was really linear, it would make my skin crawl.
No one is mediating aesthetic choices on an OPN album other than myself.
I like explication of ideas, even if I'm wrong or even if it's a struggle or if it's a work in progress.
The problem with depicting what's weird and what isn't is that it's got to this point of near total oversaturation. There's definitely a threshold at which that language and experience becomes tedious. How can something be weird if everything is apparently weird?
My friends and I have often discussed the plausibility of a connection between qualitatively bad music and quantifiably successful music, often citing the example of Candlebox and their paradoxical influence on culture.
The films of Gregg Araki may not be classified as horror, but they have been known to horrify viewers.
I saw Double Leopards play at my school and realized there were other ways to approach noisy music that weren't necessarily aggressive. That became a very important concept for me as a musician. I don't think I would have been that interested in creating and performing my own music if it wasn't for this group.
Film work can be anything from just really hard and stressful and you're subjected to really weird deadlines to really draconian and weird and disconnected. You're working in service of the thing, and that can be really amazing for everyone involved, or be kind of just a waste of time.
The subject is missing from 'Replica' - it's about malleability of materials, and working with metaphor, and sculpting in time. So that makes a collaboration with another person who pushes sound in a sculptural way appealing, because you're like, 'Let's see what dimensionality is introduced from this other perspective that I might not have.'
I'm super into dudes like Megazord, Jon Rafman, Rasmus Emanuel Svensson, Tabor Robak, and Michael Willis to name a few.
I think nostalgia used purely for the sake of emotional reminiscing is extremely boring.
Yeah, I tend to tinker with things that I love. It's habitual.
While I absolutely love a great drummer and get tunnel vision listening to drums at a show, a lot of the time I feel like drum machine-driven music tethers you to a genre.
There are so many things that interest me more than standing on the stage of my own obsessions.
O.P.N. has always been about reaching for some kind of liminal state in which opposing aesthetic forces become entangled and confused and equal.
Kitsch is very important to me.
OPN is completely off the grid. Its like the slime underneath techno and other synth-oriented music.
I'm so into this idea that the Internet was this reservoir of mythologies and histories, and the architecture of it being linked pages that create hard connections and bridges between ideas that shouldn't be linked.
It's sad to me that the main stage of history is a story of how we became this visually obsessed, extremely narcissistic, extremely concerned about image, culture. At least in the West.
I wasn't always totally interested solely in music as a sort of visceral expression of people in unison and synchronized, a federated expression of a group of people. I loved it as a wallflower, as a fan, but when I was in it, I always felt like I wasn't built for it.
That idea of being so sure of what has happened, and what will happen, is the most idiotic human thing that anyone can do.
I was born in '82 and there were these bizarre wars, explained through mass media in ways that made no sense. I remember watching the Gulf War through night vision. That was sold and propagated as a showbusiness moment for the news.
For so many people, it's very hard to feel okay with success, because success is not cool. It supposedly tarnishes your thing; it ruins little pockets of scenes and the self-importance that comes from thinking you're the only people in your town that are doing something.
I need weird breakages to happen for music to feel true to life, and I think that also applies to good film scores.
When you're working in service to a big project, there's always the question of, 'Is there total freedom to do what I think is right artistically, or is this a job?' It's okay for things to be a job. I'm perfectly comfortable working. I don't need to sit around and quench whatever personal artistic thirst I have at all times.
I love thinking of music of this way to access some kind of illogical realm filled with all kinds of aberrations and weird stuff. It's not implicit in music to have a story, so it creates this incredible potential for vague stories.
I was always screwing around with music, but I really wanted to go to film school when I was in high school. I guess what happened was that I didn't get into Tisch, that's what happened. I got deferred. And I went to Hampsire and ended up making music like everybody else there.
I don't think I could make a good film, but I could definitely score a good film.
I realize that I've had Ian Van Dahl: 'Castles in the Sky,' the Ibiza jam, periodically stuck in my head for years, like years of my life. Every now and then 'Castles in the Sky' will just happen. Maybe that's some sort of indication that it's actually my favorite song of all time.
I'm basically like a dad; I've always been a dad.
That's a problem I have a lot of the time with humor in music, where it just kind of stops at the obvious level of: 'Hey, isn't it something that's in bad taste?'
There would not be Skaters or Emeralds or any of these bands if it weren't for Double Leopards.
My friend and I were in a band together and we used to always refer it it as 'floor-core,' meaning that we would sit on the floor and play stuff.
It's not like I actually understand the properties of sound.
Games is like hardwired plumbing in the house of pop. It's not pop itself, its sort of like the behind-the-scenes arteries and capillaries of pop music.
Games isn't really pop music, and neither is OPN. Both are part of the same ecosystem and both deal with exploring the undercurrents of pop music.
Generally my response to seeing something really symmetrical and perfect is... it's the scene with Jack Nicholson's Joker in the first 'Batman,' the museum scene. Him just spray-painting the Mona Lisa, and whatever, with his goons.
The thing that I've always been a little bit jealous of is a complete, a total giving to one form, like a genre, and just a mastery of it. My thing is very different. It's a complete embrace of something, but I've never been able to say, 'I believe in this.' The only thing I believe in is that I'm in this perpetual state of disbelief.
All my collaborators unilaterally said that I need to just stay on one idea for longer. And of course I understand that. I like to switch gears a lot, and I like this kind of sloppy attitude.
Yeah it would be really cool to disappear. Like Jack Nicholson in 'The Passenger.' Isn't that the final frontier? Being able to erase everything everyone knows about you and just be a stranger has become extremely seductive.
The promotional cycle's this staging area for failure. I hate it! Why bother when everyone's either gonna steal the album or copy it?
I just like cliches. I like tvtropes.com. It's pretty much my bible.
