Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I tend to panic and fear on a low-grade level every day, but when something really disastrous happens, I kick into super high gear; a kind of transcendent, save-everybody mind-set.
There's this kind of robust confidence that I had as a teenager that became really constricted and slowly, like, weighted down by sensory experience by the time I was in my mid-20s.
It took me a while to warm up to smartphones. I just reached a point where I was like, 'If I continue to be a luddite, I'm just going to fall so far behind and become really bitter.'
What is the consequent effect on a society of beings looking for themselves in the myths on the screen? It's safe to say that they have failed us, but I can't help it... I love Movies.
We live in such an isolating time with technology and social media and I think that creates this feeling of having to connect, of having so many ways to connect but nothing's connecting.
I like to keep things deceptively simple, but hard-hitting. You can reduce everything to the perfect, essential harmony. It's what used to be done with earlier music like Gregorian chants.
I don't exclusively talk to people on social media; I don't meet people through Tinder. I try to keep it face-to-face, and to be aware if my phone is sucking me away from the rest of the world.
The times I've had in Vegas have been very memorable and very strange. I find it to be a weird, kind of hyper-reality city... everybody I've met who is from there is usually really interesting.
My dad was a real working musician in the late '70s and early '80s. He had a band that was signed to Elektra/Asylum and they would perform at like Madame Wong's and Whiskey A Go Go all the time.
A lot of church music really inspired me. A lot of ancient music that's made for God. If you get really into the history of music, inevitably you're going to have to get into sacred religious music.
My parents are musicians. I was listening to the radio and recording songs off the radio on cassette tapes and playing guitars and pianos. Just emotionally responding to music from a very young age.
If you're an evil company who's casting minorities to be in your commercial to get the politically correct card, it's like putting a band-aid over a bigger problem. But I think it's an incredible start.
Absurdity is my favorite brand of humor because deep down inside, in our subconscious, it's all surrealism. It's all abstract. The world is the surrealism, the absurdity, the humor - it all just overlaps.
Seven Words' is a wanderer's tale, a well-worn subgenre in the tradition of farewell songs. The tune itself is trying to evoke the familiar act of leaving somebody in order to save them, or continue seeking.
I grew up with a lot of compassion and empathy. I notice when I meet other friends of mine that were raised Christian sometimes we have similar model of sensitivity, whether to our advantage or disadvantage.
Enya is a very matriarchal musical force. Her music is very feminine and she layers her voice a lot. It leaks into my music secretly on the side. There's a lot of lush layers of my voice hiding in the cracks.
It's important to me to create archetypes of human experiences and make them so that the song has a sense of purpose when you experience those emotions. You know, just making people feel like they're not alone.
I'm a big fan of horror films, particularly 'Friday the 13th.' It's one of the only genres that weaves abstract experimental techniques into the mainstream; having to be spooky requires a little more creativity.
Our desire for interconnectedness, our desire to be seen, our desire to be acknowledged, our desire to be liked - these are all deep needs, these survival instincts we've evolved to function in a tribal society.
Everybody kind of has to learn the same lessons. You've got to learn how to get over your first love. You've got to learn how to forgive people that emotionally abuse you. You've got to learn how to let go in a lot of ways.
R. Murray Shcafer is a Canadian composer with a twist. Aside from writing incredibly ethereal music, he is also an acousitc ecologist, fighting for the sonic space on this planet to be beautiful - a rare and shamefully underrated cause.
I feel like women are so specific and special, that there's no point as a woman to emulate somebody. If you shoot for a masculine direction but be yourself, you're going to get something completely new, because your femininity will show up.
In our culture the way women have been represented in American film had a pretty big impact on my self-esteem and I'm sure it did on a lot of other girls. I think they have a greater psychological impact that anybody's willing to talk about.
Good singing is learning how to transmit learning musical information with your voice in a way that everybody can relate to. But as a woman you just get a lot of criticism because everyone sees you like a raw lump of clay that needs some help.
I really like Adam Curtis' 'Century of Self.' It's about how artists have failed the general public by being so exclusive, like being in an echo chamber. I was definitely more like that in my early twenties - my music was completely inaccessible.
My parents were a little more on the hippie spectrum of Christianity - they weren't liberal Christians by any means, they were pretty conservative - but they preached mostly about love and caring for people, so I grew up with a lot of compassion and empathy.
Water represents to me, the beginnings of life, it is where we come from in our most primordial sense. It relates to some of our deepest subconscious thinking - it's a force we can't really see or understand, we just get glimpses of. But it's a part of us all.
Everybody is constantly putting themselves under a microscope in terms of their productivity and their financial success and this whole idea of 'Picture Me Better,' like picture me, you know, who I'm supposed to be versus, you know, just accepting who we all are.
The bedroom is an archetype. To me it stands for a lot of the silliness of our modern culture where the kind of things that we worship in our sacred spaces are based on media and movies because we don't really have much else in the way of myths, if that makes sense.
As we become more codependent with technology, it's not necessarily based on our desire for the technology but our desire for interconnectivity and wanting to stay connected, which is a natural human instinct. The technology itself is kind of emotionally manipulative.
I have a lot of respect for people who really work on their life - they've got this great apartment and a good personality, they write the thank-you cards and bake birthday cakes. That's who I wish I was. When I see people cultivate their own life like that, I admire it.
In high school no guys wanted to be in a band with me unless I was going to play bass or play grindcore or be in a scream-o band, so it was fun to finally have that experience of having my songs backed by a drummer and a bassist who were just as excited about it as I was.
As a teenager, I really loved Catherine Ribeiro - extremely powerful, wild, improvisatory voice. I loved old psych-rock bands, and Michael Hurley, and Harry Nilsson. And then later on I discovered the famous European singer Demis Roussos, who used to be in Aphrodite's Child.
Being in a first-world country, it's like we have a first-row seat to witnessing humanity, but we're not really witnessing anything. Despite all the new technological tools we've been given, we're still powerless, watching everything happen like it's a theatrical performance.
This record was kind of, like, innocent. It's called 'The Innocents.' So it's the concept of being young enough to not really understand the implications of your decisions and then kind of feeling the weight later and being, like, but I was innocent. Like, did I deserve this?
I had this instrument that I built in high school. It was a huge, six-foot-long stringed instrument, and I started playing with that amplified and singing through power electronic stuff. I played those shows, and it would blow the lid off of everybody, and everybody would flip out.
The only outlet in mainstream culture for classical and more experimental music to be heard is through movie soundtracks, and they're such a wonderful display of emotion. I think the guy that did that best is Stanley Kubrick, working with Wendy Carlos who is an electronic composer.
I think all human beings have a propensity to believe in things, and to have hope, and I think as a child especially you have a lot of hope and you believe in a lot of things, and your bedroom is a safe space and an imaginative space where you can escape and go off into wherever you want.
It's important to me to not stay too confined to any specific sonic space. There is something really magical about straight folk music - it's not that I don't like it, it's just that I like so much music, I hear so many different things, and I want to try more. I don't want to be confined.
I've always had gender confusion. I had two older brothers, and I've been predominantly male influenced. I really always looked up to my dad, really always looked up to my brothers... I had a lot of male friends growing up. It didn't help that in my town, where I lived, there were no female musicians.
I love essential oils - there's one for every problem. It's kind of like nature's answers for what to put on your skin. I had acne when I was a teenager, and I did a pretty intense tea tree thing. You dilute it in a base oil, like carrot seed oil, which is good because it gives your face a little glow.
We haven't evolved as loners, we need each other. It's easy to believe in the illusion of technology bringing us closer together. But if you were to protest that and say, 'I'm not going to use a smartphone, I'm not going to use email, I'm not going to use social media,' it's like you're no longer a part of humanity.
I have my own cosmology that's kind of like an esoteric mix of a lot of different things that work for me and that to me, are worth exploring. There is a little bit of the archetypal Christianity that I've kind of reconciled because when you're raised that way, inevitably that infrastructure will persist into your adulthood.
Climate change is often the first thing I think about it in the morning, and the last thing I think about before I go to bed. It is not something that escapes that my mind, so inevitably, I had to kind of express that existential terror through art and music. My hope is to channel that confusion and energy into something good.
When I was a little kid, I was a huge fan of 'The Kids in the Hall.' They were like my boy band. I was obsessed with sketch comedy. Being raised Christian, I was somewhat sheltered from the more radical high-art world. So to me, comedy was where people got to express themselves in an abstract way. It was a big part of my growing up.
You know, around 14 or 15 I rebelled against Christianity pretty hardcore. I was reading a lot of other esoteric Eastern philosophy and getting into everything that wasn't dogmatic Christian. But I will say that it did kind of prime me for a more spiritual lifestyle. I didn't walk away with bitterness, even though there was some condemnation.
When I was about 15 I had already been recording on my four track in my room, but I couldn't find anyone in my town to be in a band with me. I was in a band very briefly with a bunch of guys and they kicked me out because they wanted to play grindcore. I think they didn't think I could tread hard enough or something. So I started playing solo.