Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm down for indefinitely chilling as long as I'm not self-aware during it. That seems like it could be torture on some level but a lot of people pray for that so who knows.
It's stupid and embarrassing that you can describe something to one person and not to another. Until I've solved that problem I'm not going to feel like I've achieved too much.
Far Behind' is a single from Candlebox's self-titled record from 1993. The record came out on Madonna's Maverick imprint and went quadruple platinum, regardless of how much it sucked.
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.
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.
The easiest way for me to tell someone what I do is to say that I'm a non-musician who practises and produces music. I don't have a theoretical language for music. I have this abstract dream language.
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.
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.
I had it calcified inside me that that was the ultimate state of composing. Being Brian Wilson. Being simultaneously a genius and sort of lost at sea - not really knowing what you're doing but reaching for the stars.
As a movie fan, I remember Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender and the sort of energy around 'Reservoir Dogs,' and the jump from 'Reservoir Dogs' to 'Pulp Fiction,' and how everybody was stoked on Quentin's career.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Especially in repetitive music, to make a long piece of music you have to be extremely skilled in your sleight of hand. Just to make long form music it's very difficult and you really have to consider what you're putting someone through.
I loved Alva Noto's 'Xerrox, Vol. 3' a lot. It might be my favorite of his records. I must admit, I was bummed to see him say he was surprised by how emotional the record came out, as if he was ashamed. But there's something perfect about that.
Thrillers rely on certain archetypes and our familiarity with them is quietly driving all of the tension. So it becomes an interesting challenge from the score perspective, to enhance that tension without being noticed, just like those archetypes.
Yeah, I guess generally I don't want things ever to be easy. While there's some danger of doing something that loses your personal stamp on things, I'd rather take the chance of doing that and do something slightly uncomfortable or hard for myself.
I definitely strive towards something I think of as a hallucination of music. That's always been the OPN vibe. I think of it as mostly a felt thing, and a koan of feeling that is shared between me and OPN fans. We know what it is when it gets there.
I knew my whole life that I had to make ends meet or I would be ashamed of myself. I had a lot of pressure from my parents. So that's where my vision comes from. It's not to be a great artist, it's always to be like, 'Dad, look, I didn't let you down.'
To me, 'Garden of Delete' is a way of describing the idea that good things can bloom out of a negative situation. All the traumatic experiences I had during puberty, ugly memories and ugly thoughts in general can yield something good, like a record or whatever.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
Film scores are complicated puzzles that you need to figure out and solve very quickly, or else you're basically fired. You're hired to enhance the film and you only have a couple tries to prove that you are capable of that task. I can keep trying to enhance my album ad infinitum.
Music that is considered minimalism - or post-minimalism music in general - things of that nature or that come from that tradition, or even drone, or non-western music, have a more subtle and more open-ended verticality to them that allows for your own mind and body to be involved.
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.
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.
Growing up, I wanted to write films and make films. Even as I took this detour and stayed in the music world, I still think in terms of 'What is in this room? What is the shot? Who are the characters? What is the conversation here?' My sense of pacing is very filmlike, it's not musical.
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.
We had a band called the Grainers. In our 12-year-old minds, this was like a double entendre for like being annoying and being a delicious donut. I got kicked out of the band for playing bass incorrectly. Like, I was playing it like a guitar. I was just so like twee and British, even as like the little 12-year-old boy.
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.
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.
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.'
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.