The warmest place I've ever been is my home here in Chapel Hill. It's an oasis of comfort and joy for me.
As much as early 2000s aesthetics are something I was pining for and very much love, I would occasionally struggle to find one singular image or one singular site that summed up all of my memories really well.
EDM is very functional. It's meant to make people jump up and down and go crazy and it's real good at that. I just think in terms of expression, it's very very limiting.
I wanted to do music that was a little more sentimental, emotional, and serene - completely different from the party music I was doing.
The thing that makes me want to proceed and finish a song is when it really touches me and makes me feel something.
My most successful song was 'Language' and I think partly because it's a nice, dancey record, but I'll see people cry in the audience to that song, and that's so much more interesting to me than making someone just jump up and down.
My relationship with my brothers... it's almost weird. We've never fought, we finish each other's sentences, but not in a creepy way. We talk about the things that we love and share music with each other.
I still play the songs I declared noncanonical.
An underexplored reason why nostalgic art is worthwhile is that it influences the way the past is remembered.
For me, the early 2000s stood for this vast, magical, electronic cyber realm - a time when the internet was so infinite, mysterious, and under-explored.
I'm not a huge movie buff and I don't watch that much television, but I've spent most of my life playing video games of one kind or another.
I played video games for years. I immersed myself in them. They're so beautiful. They have these gorgeous imaginary landscapes. And they were just very dear to me.
I wanted 'Second Sky' to be my way of recommending truly good music to my audience that I think is worthy of their time.
There's so many things that can go wrong, and if I'm merely playing and not hosting a festival, none of those things reflect on me.
I wanted to have a grander vision, something that I felt like I was really fighting for and I wanted to have a real idea and be authentic.
I do want people to have a sense of just the extreme level of meticulousness and care that goes into everything. I wouldn't expect anybody to catch all the details of what I'm doing. The level of obsession is so extreme.
I was trying to write new music, but there was nothing I was reacting against. It turned out 'Worlds' itself became something for me to to resist.
My original goal was to get into the Top 100. I listened to every song in the Top 100 every day. I knew them all - this is where the gods reside.
Star Wars Galaxies' didn't ever explain itself to you. It was horribly broken; it was glitchy in several significant ways. It was just this vast, expansive, beautiful universe with all these crazy idiosyncrasies.
It was more than enough, but I'm completely satisfied that 'Virtual Self' got nominated for the Grammy. That is a complete victory for the project in my mind and anything else is just bonus.
