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.
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.
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.
I'm like soft Ray Manzarek. I think of the keyboard as almost like a bass or a lead.
I've made my most horrible inhuman tendencies work for me.
I need my 'art work' or 'entertainment work' or whatever to have empathy for or connection to the way I experience the world as a person.
I have a hard time making a linear-idea song, because that's not the way my thoughts work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
John Martin was a great, complex folk singer, and later on, his music became more and more melancholic as he went through a separation with his wife.
Science fiction to me is the ultimate art form, because it speculates on bodies and worlds that don't exist.
No one is mediating aesthetic choices on an OPN album other than myself.
I think I'm a person that's very pessimistic about, like I'm not a luddite but I don't think we need to crack the code of technology and bring forth a future techno utopia.
I'm predisposed to believe we live in a complicated, enmeshed reality. There's no authentic or organic.
I'm not much of a crier, actually. You know, I tend to cry and get sappy on planes.
I am not an egghead in the least.
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.
