Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've always dreamed of having an album. The problem is that it's just very difficult to make an album nowadays because through technology, music shifts so fast, especially electronic music. Once you make five songs, the first one you did is already old and you wished you would have put it out right away. So that's kind of the difficult part.
I could do another tour, make a record that's very similar, do similar venues. Or I could make a different record, do different venues, and grow. It's exciting to take it to new places, but it's never been my intent to be the biggest thing in the world. That's not what my drive is. I want to make what I want to make, and make a living off it.
Experience is the best teacher. But in our day and time, what we need is wisdom, because wisdom overcomes experience, because experience is wisdom, but there's a level of wisdom that overcomes the experience, and that's the experience that's already lived by others. I'm not trying to repeat the histories. I already learned from what they did.
Usually, companies, when they approach other people to do VR, they're like, 'We're gonna offer a virtual reality experience' - to me, that usually means they're gonna put a bunch of 360° cameras in a room, film something, and wrap the video in a sphere so you can head-track and look around. To me, that's not virtual reality. That's 360° video.
I'm not thinking about the next record really yet. I kind of want to do a bunch of stuff with Jonathan Zawada, the guy who did the album art. I'd like to do some crazy art installations and design some weird synthesizers and work with other people and make some fun stuff for a bit. Maybe tap into virtual reality stuff or maybe write another record.
I struggled with the pressure of having the successful record after the first record. Second album syndrome. I'm living proof; it's very real. It was like a psychological battle to be creative. I used to never feel pressure to be creative; it's always just been a fun thing. And then suddenly it's my job, and people are asking, 'Where's the record?'
Artists are all giving so much of ourselves to the work and the people and the press and the media and Twitter and all that now. For me, being able to create from a genuine place is really difficult lately because there's so much going on all the time, but when all that stuff gets quiet, you can explore your ideas without any ego or mental chatter.
Mavericks and its talent deserve this innovation and respect. Now is the time to harness its power for the world to experience. These athletes amaze me with each wave ridden; I am honored to take on such an empowering responsibility. I look forward to celebrating these artists of big wave surfing through showcasing the most important wave in history.
I try to convey this feeling of being innocent in a mystical state, being in a place that's new, seeing things with brand new eyes, for better or worse. I just imagine this little kid floating on a beautiful king-size bed over the city at night, seeing all sorts of crazy stuff happening in the world. To me, half the fun is all the stories other people have.
One thing that definitely did calculate properly for me was the mathematics that makes sense every day, no matter how I look at it, I can't get around it. I try to get around it, I keep trying to find one plus one is not two, somehow. I can't. People can talk about string theory, parallel realities, different dimensions, it's still one plus one is two, baby.
Have you ever been with a girl, you had an argument and you wanted to make up with her? As long as you say nothing, you can make up with her. If you say something, it's going to be another argument, you are going to get no pussy and you go to bed mad. But if you don't say nothing, it gets closer and closer, y'all make love and it's all expressed through love.
One of the greatest things that ever taught me a super lesson was when I seen a baby come out of my woman's womb. The head and body - you know, a baby's born inside a woman's stomach, you know all that. But to watch this thing come out and fight for life, yo, and to see the woman's risking her life at the same time this thing is fighting for life, you know what I mean?
The word "knowledge" itself, we like to break it down into two different words, "know" and "ledge." You've got to know the ledge. Know the limitation of things. Know where they go, know where they start from. We say knowledge is the basic foundation of the universe. But everything is first based on something being known. Then, when it's known, then it can be manifested.
When you feel this knowledge and this spark in yourself, you've gotta continue feeding it. The best thing is to spend time around other wise men, that keeps it burning. That keeps it in every degree sharp as steel, but make sure you absorb enough to find out how it sparks from yourself, how the self starts the self. Once you've got that you should be free. That's freedom, to me.
I believe there's more than this - that maybe when we die our brains conjure up some kind of shutdown experience, and that's what people try to sum up as the afterlife. But yeah, I think something else is going to happen and it's going to be crazy and confusing and weird, and we probably won't know what it's all about. It'll just be another place where we're trying to understand why we exist at all.
I'm not going to be like, "I gotta get this idea out of my head." It's like, "OK, here's a clean slate, and I've got all these paints, and all these brushes, and this is what I'm going to do with it." It reveals itself, and you take a step back and say, "What's happening here? Where are we going? What does this mean? Do I need to break it open? Does it need to just be what it is? Should it end now?"
One of the greatest things that ever taught me a super lesson was when I seen a baby come out of my woman's womb. Seeing this war that could end with both lives being lost, or both lives being made, gave me an enlightenment of life itself. It sparked my whole mind to a whole other level of living. And if I never would have seen it, I never would have understood life. I never would have appreciated life.
I definitely learned to communicate with other musicians better. I used to feel so intimidated by guys who can read notes, like, "Oh my god, they're gonna think I'm not even gonna be able to sit at the table." But I've come to see that a lot of these musicians don't know how to read music either, and that made me feel good. I could just come up with ideas or show somebody things and get the ideas across.
There's the 5% of the people that are wise and righteous and I'd definitely be amongst them, building, communicating, and continuing to try and figure out how we can awaken the 85%. The 85% are walking around [like] cattle, not realizing the things we do, the violence we do; you see people falling victim to all sorts of unnecessary things because they just don't know the way and nobody is showing them the way.
The Earth is the Lord. Everybody walks on the earth. And nobody respects the Earth. Everybody who walks on the earth, shits on the Earth. Spits on the Earth. Don't respect the Earth. So the Earth didn't like it. So the Earth call for a revolution. And the earth is fighting back. The Earth call for a revolution. The Earth call for justice. And the Earth get justice. 'Cause the Earth release ganja. The Earth release herbs.
There's strong men of wisdom in many different fields. They say 5% of the people are wise and righteous and 10% are wise but use their wiseness for wickedness or to deceive others. It's like a magician: he knows the answer to the trick, but you don't. He has to keep you blind to the truth in order for the illusion to work. When you've got that kind of wisdom and somebody else doesn't, you can always take advantage of them.
I think most of my approach to life has been like that, to find order in chaos, to be in the middle of a bunch of things happening at the same time, but find focus. I strive to be like the sun sitting in the middle of the solar system with all the planets spinning around it - millions of things going on. It's just sitting there being the sun, but exerting gravitational effect on everything. I think man should look at himself that way.
Women have been oppressed for so long in any industry, it just takes time for a shift to happen to create more equality in any field, but I feel like it's slowly happening now. It's just things don't change over night. It's the same for racism, homophobia, xenophobia etc. If you think back even just 15 years and see how different people's mentalities were then, think how much more progress and equality we cab reach in another 15 years.
To be honest, I'm usually totally stuck in my own bubble when it comes to the music I produce and the music I listen to, so I don't often have much of an interest about what's on trend or find myself having those conversations. I do find it interesting though, and you definitely hear batches of releases that all sound exactly the same released around the same time, and you can tell that a certain distinct type of track does especially well.
I love writing, composing and producing music. It's what I enjoy doing most in life and I create so much material that crosses over so many different styles that it would be virtually impossible to release all under one name/project. That's mainly why I like to create aliases and work on production for other artists as well. It just make sense. I just want to be able to have an outlet for all the different styles of music that I like working in.
On Max Yasgur’s six hundred acres, everyone dropped their defenses and became a huge extended family. Joining together, getting into the music and each other, being part of so many people when calamity struck — the traffic jams, the rainstorms — was a life-changing experience. None of the problems damaged our spirit. In fact, they drew us closer. We recognized one another for what we were at the core, as brothers and sisters, and we embraced one another in that knowledge.
It's one thing having a great song, but I think for me if you take it to the next level... say you had a guitar and a vocal, and the song was amazing but the vocalist wasn't that great and it just was a guitar and vocal acoustic track, switching that to something like an amazing voice singing the exact same song with the instrumentation being really nice and lush or unique in some way and interesting and diverse... I think it's all about the instrumentation and textures in the sound.
My first album was more about me making a statement, as I felt like I was kind of stuck in the smaller scene of underground House and Techno when the music I produce actually spanned a much wider range of genres, including the more Pop/Trip Hop stuff and more song-based compositions. Comfort was to kind of show that I wasn't just about one thing. Working on Take Flight was my chance to step back and merge the many worlds of music I enjoy working in and showcase it all through a journey of 24 tracks.
The Boston Globe: The Woodstock Music and Art Festival will surely go down in history as a mass event of great and positive significance in the life of the country ... That this many young people could assemble so peaceably and with such good humor in a mile-square area ... speaks volumes about their dedication to the ideal of respect for the dignity of the individual ... In a nation beset with a crescendo of violence, this is a vibrantly hopeful sign. If violence is infectious, so, happily, is nonviolence.
I've never really found it that important to focus too much on the fact that I'm a female. I feel like if you make a thing of it then it becomes a "thing." For me personally, gender has always been one of the last things on my mind and I would much rather let the music do the talking. It was definitely surprising at the start to see how many people often got shocked that I would do the entire part of the composition/production/mixdown process on my own, but I don't think women are pigeonholed as much these days.
Everybody has their own approach to songwriting. When you're an electronic musician, the whole writing process just depends. Some people have a very live way of writing electronic music, very improvisational. They set up a lot of gear and do live takes. I'm concerned with having a specific kind of sound. There's not one second that I haven't put thought into. I put almost as much time into my live shows as I do into writing music, but they're two completely different processes. Some people think the way I perform live is how I write songs, which isn't true at all.