It's okay to not be working all the time and to be gentle on yourself when you're not. When it feels like you're losing that inspiration - or you're in a rut, not making stuff, and your head gets all weird - be gentle on yourself. Just ease into things naturally. But you still have to ease into it: you still have to sit in the chair.
I love my Fender Rhodes. It's been a part of my family since that keyboard came out, and I've had it reworked so that it's in the best condition it's actually ever been in. That is my baby.
I feel like my music has a reputation for being pretty serious or whatnot, but I like having fun.
The first beat that I ever made that I thought was actually worth a damn was called 'Toilet Paper Nostrils,' and I made it when I had a cold. I had the worst cold ever. And I had toilet-paper nostrils making music, but it was really reflective of how I felt. It was a really sad trumpet sound.
I like Philip Glass. I think he's made some really great contributions to his field. I love his style of playing - it's very loop-style.
'Cosmogramma' is basically the studies that map out the universe and the relations of heaven and hell.
I don't have a great story, but I love Boards of Canada. I didn't get into it when it was happening; I got into it later on.
I go through phases when I'm super into my anime stuff.
I feel like part of my journey as a filmmaker is to tell different stories, whether they are just a black perspective on things that aren't necessarily hood movies, or Tyler Perry movies or Ava DuVernay movies. Love all those people, but that whole thing has been sowed up already.
Truth be told, I think jazz is a mind-set. It's not necessarily, like, this guy picked up a horn and did this or whatever.
It's the old-school jazz mentality that I connect with the most. I dig the idea of the seeker, the guy who's always trying to figure out why he is doing music and trying to understand and make sense of his instrument in a world which deals with rigid instruction.
Before saying, 'This track is so dope; it's gonna go on the album,' I like to take some time away from it and see how I feel about it in a few months. If it's gonna get released, I gotta love it - it's gonna have my name on it forever.
I actually really liked the music to the 'Friday the 13th' Nintendo game. I still listen to it all the time. I sampled it in a couple records, too. It's hypnotic and dark but also really pretty.
I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, which doesn't feel like L.A. It's a bit different. It's still L.A. County, but it's not the same, it's not the kind of place where they embrace you for being a weirdo. You were just left alone with your Nintendo, and that was my life.
I wish I could write music notation. Even if I couldn't play it, I wish I could just write it.
I had a little Walkman, the worst Walkman ever. It was the yellow one, that underwater Walkman. Like you need to take a Walkman under water.
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.
When I was in middle school, that's when I first started making beats. I was maybe 14, 16, something like that.
It's tough when you're an artist because you get to go around the world and make a lot of friends, but guess what? One day, all these people that you love are going to die, from DJ Mehdi to DJ Dusk to J Dilla to Austin Peralta to DJ Rashad.
I always feel like the past informs my present musically.
