Oneohtrix Point Never Magic Text

“NO” CONTENT

Magic I was like "Wow, this is what I heard when I first started playing guitar." I was Soundgarden. I was Kool Keith and all this stuff. I think my first Hotmail password was "Quentin." I can remember opening that up and there was like a stack of EBM and Double Leopards. And I was like "Oh my god, I want to listen to all ." Because the first ten minutes were just like just sitting around a bunch of keyboards. And then the characters kind of emerged, too. Like there's this interesting arc for Elena that develops as she sort of gets sucked into this really weird world of Elena being a musician and like sort of the tensions of, of, of being a musician in this weird world. But I'm just kind of hyped to get started. I'm just itching to get started.

It’s nice to just roam around and do stuff. It’s nice to just have fun. And then there was me working with Saadia on the music. She’s incredible. She’s amazing. And I’m sure she’s frustrated as well. [Laughs]  I remember trying to figure out a way to approach a CM sound without touching pads or anything. I played keyboards and [Steve] Jobs played an iPad. I played around with synthesisers an d string lights. Yeah. But yeah, Ferry’s voice. It’s like Lord of the Rings in space. It’s uncanny. Then there was me trying to think of an appropriate title for this record, and then all of a sudden, “Okay, this is it. I think I have a solid six months to wait for this thing to come out, and I am ready to go. I think I am ready to let go of this job, and , and settle down and start a family. Everything is coming back to me. If I were doing stand-up comedy, I would probably be an antagonist as well. I was walking down the street one day and this guy, a ‘good-looking’ guy, and he was talking about how he had just seen . I was like, ‘Isn’t that amazing?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, I have been making music this whole time.’ I was like, ‘Okay, what do you want?’ I’m happy to help you with whatever you’re trying to do. It wasn’t like, ‘Okay, I am going to chop up your music and throw it in a bin.’ It was more like, ‘Okay, let me hear.”

I took up boxing when I was 19 because I was bored with all the other sports. I loved Muay Thai, but I was also really into punk rock and noise. I didn’t really like EDM or production music. I liked beautiful melodies and strange chord progressions. I liked weird shit. I wanted to understand it. I remember stepping outside of my Bushwick apartment in 2009 and the ‘mix’ was BOC…children far away at Maria Hernandez [Park]. Is that a throwaway moment? Haha. No. I can’t remember my IM. Fuck. Oh—I saw . Had to score a sex scene. Had no idea how it would go. You think you know, but bowchickawow is not gonna cut it. Ligeti, but played on a Wavestation. Yeah. But everything is through reverb. Isn’t that what music is about? Yeah! Absolutely!

I was a clumsy kid during that time I was draftering a lot, and my first two sets of Diablo rules were these Frankensteinian tapestries of death and mutilation. I remember the in abomination and the w in mutilation, and I was like, “Oh, that's my flavor text. I want to see that in print. I want to replicate that in my games. I think at that point I was also pretty into punk rock and electronic music quite a bit, and I idolized [Eddie] Vangelis quite a bit. The first song I wrote was a Frankenstein-y synthpop rip off of [Jean Michel] Jarre. Like, we like to think that like Coca-Cola is this harmless thing that helps you feel better, but in reality it contains a ton of very harmful chemicals that could kill you.
I thin the music with stuff that sort of mimics that. Like when I’m not playing, I take a walk or two with my cat. And sometimes it’s just sitting there, and I just have this sort of oasis in my mind where I just crank the volume on Piranhas and whatever. Yeah. There’s some great moments on that record. You try things, you know? Yes! That’s the one. I loved it because it was simple and really pure, like a rock ballad. I was lugging my Juno-60 synth all over Europe with a bunch of loopers and delays. I don’t even really know why I did it. I think it was because it was my comfort zone to just kinda loop Juno stuff over samples. Yeah. And I had no mentor or anyone to be, like, ‘Dude.’

Maybe it was because Daria was so into horror movies and all that stuff. I can’t remember. Maybe it was because my imagination was blown. I remember feeling moved by a strange, atmospheric score, the sort of vaguely Celtic choral music, Then came the explosions. They were epic. I cannot emphasize that enough. The music for this was superdystopian, and I don’t think I have ever heard anything like i… The music for this was superdystopian, and I don’t Minecraft where you create everything. It’s more like RTS. Then again, I don’t think anyone really plays RTSes anyway, so who knows? Dungeon synth is like Skyrim in that sense. It’s more like RTS for generators. Yeah. Dungeon synth is very like that. I like to think of it as like Russian dolls for music. It’s like Russian music. It contains all kinds of strange stuff. It contains samples of porn, but it also contains sample after sample of weird vocoder stuff. So, in a way, it is like a pornographic vocoder record. Yeah. But it’s not a very interesting record, is it? I mean, it’s just like a continuous loop of stuff. It’s just things getting repeated over and over. So, it is like, I like to think of it as like Russian music for America. It’s like Russian music to constantly be changing and transforming without much structure. Yeah. This is the Vocoder Rick’s VCO.” It’s got like, 800 samples. Like, every five seconds I would be hearing a different texture or a different duration from the music. Or the music would change. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that was basically what I ended up with. It was just sort of random.

My dad was a magician and my mom was a classical musician and we always had these musical ideas bubbling away in the back of our minds. I remember sitting down and playing an episode on a Korg synthesizer and someone muttering about possible successors to Roland Juno. My imagination is pretty good. My ma is a clinical psychologist and she once said: "You want to accurately map the physical world to the imagined one." And I just like that. I think of it as uncanny – where you see the tip of the iceberg but then you step back and everything is so smooth. I like that.

Do you ever get the feeling that everyone in your life is secretly a product of their circumstances? She’s got this incredible sense of humour and wry sense of humour that only comes from being around people who have it. She’s the opposite of a bread head; she’s not into that. She’s into the journey of being an individual, of trying to realise your own ideas, your own sense of humour, and doing your own thing. She is a musicologist and she once said: ‘You don’t have to be a genius to play Chopin. You just have to lop off some semitone or two and play Chopin.’ I like that.

Brain by James Hillman This is the story of how I first heard "Brain" on a late-night show, in the audience at my high school, when I was first introduced to the concept of ephemera. Kool Keith was introducing a track, and I was totally lost for words. The lyric read, “Brain on drugs, / Where is my chain?/, and I was like, “Oh wow, this is something I can relate to.” I was so taken with it, and I kept hearing it over and over in concert. Eventually, I decided to record it, and it became a recurring thing in my set.  I’m not an easy person to collaçade with. But when it’s something that’s both, it’s great. Because then you’re actually doing something meaningful, instead of just doing a bunch of samplers. Yeah. And I had this idea of doing a bunch of ambient loops, but I wasn’t ready to do that just yet. I wanted to sort of dial it in over time. Like, do I want to make these dense, symphonic loops, or are there still options? A long time ago I made a tape that was basically just loops of ambient sounds.

magic to make it really pop, all this content is making me ill.

I was more into Danny James Hillman and weird shit. 3000 baud and it had 96kB of samples. I can remember the rest… My first samplers were the IBM DJ-60 and the farmbox. I got bored with them pretty quickly and bought a Juno-60 and a Wavestation. My first DAW was a Zune, which is weird because I don’t really like   or wave forms. I think it was the samplers that I liked the most, like looper, sequencer. Then I bought a really nice Juno-60 and a Wavestation and started mixing. I think about that stuff now as a kid, when we only had four screens and cassettes. I would stare at a VHS of [Gerhard] Vollmer and think, 'That's the one' or whatever. I can kind of picture what it was like to just sit there and sample stuff all day. It was tedious. Then there was the blogs. OMG, I found this place!?!?!?!?!?!?   That's right. I cannot emphasize that enough. I  found Vimeo   and   for free. I did not start the   movement, but I am homing in on its  DNA. The difference is that now I have to look at every ten seconds or so to see if I am clicking a link or not. I love that I don't have to constantly refresh the screen. I can just zoom in on the story and read the captions. Or the image. Or the author's thoughts. All I have to do is scroll down and click a few times.  We want to believe t he system is just, and we want to  do  the right thing. But is it? Or is it just us  that has this really warped idea of what it means to be human, and what it means to actually be happy?  The record contained many moments where I thought to myself,   I wonder what it would be like if I was  instead of these thoughts. What if I was not so weighed down by the things I have and can't change, but instead was free to just be me? What if instead of trying to be something I'm not, I just was? What if instead of fighting for what I think is right, I just embraced and embraced and let it happen? For the majority of the time on the record, I was like,   this isn't the time. This is not the place.  It's just not me. This is the only one. Where do I find these? Oh, they're all over the record. I found these just on my own. I found these by random chance.

I’d tear up if I thought about it more. She was a musicologist and she once said: ‘It’s strange because your music is simultaneously beautiful – but also very cold.’ I like that.

I’d throw some acid in there, just to see what would happen. And he was like, “Okay, that’s great. Let’s see how it goes.” I did a bunch of loopers, basically, of just kind of doing this continuous effect that is like, like generating this sort of halluciage, cubic, hallucination, like texture, like image that I could then tweak until it looked like whatever. Or the shape of whatever. And like this whole thing of like, like, like sort of like my, my addiction has always be like, like completely and completely wrapped around like, to the point where I can't even imagine a without it. Like, there's just so much of it, I love it so much and it's like this thing that's on my mantel, so to like constantly like, remind myself to keep it through all of these, all of these bad phases is just torture for me. Like, it's like a kind of a, a way of, of being constantly like, remind myself to, to, to be aware of all the like colors, all the like distracting colors in my life,

And that created this deep, cavernous, sad, washed out, melancholic universe behind the music. And I started thinking, that's where I want to be. That's where I want to be going. Absolutely. There's another very important  I should mention, which is that I look at everything and say, “Wow, this person really, really cared to do this for whatever strange reason. I wonder why.” I kept hearing in my head, "This is how you make a root word." Something about the way that root words are constructed—like, say, "III" in English,  in Russian, or whatever—was so familiar. I imagined that by adding in other sounds, I could create some kind of a background that made the word seem more real. Yeah. I think that's generally what root words are about: they're like little alarms that you can inflate or deflate based on some perceived need. Yeah. And I always wanted to make music that felt like that. Actually, I think the first time I played the piece to my mom it was on an OPN session—I think it was EP103 or something—and she laughed.

I was improvising and [Rob] Zombie was transforming me into a musician. And then the follow-up records were more like cohesive projects, where we really had to work together. The sense of wonder on those records waned a little bit, and I was more interested in just playing live.  The impetus for the new record came from feeling more like a conventional musician, able to deploy a few effects pedals and get away from just pure looping. I wanted to explore more atmospheric sounds, like space station sounds, and use them as textures in my music. I wanted to do the same thing. The only difference is I'd use Logic, not AC3. Oh yeah…I'm singing.  We’ve never done a second run. It’s a mixtape, where we slowed down other people’s music. One show—Raum 18, her first appearance in Berlin—was particularly rough, enough that her former label boss, Carlos Giffoni, threw one overzealous French fan out (“he was in my face, trying to cut me down like I don’t deserve the respect I was getting”) and Miguel Depedro ( ) offered his unsolicited advice afterwards. “I remember him leaning in and screaming.

We just love it so much. It's this thing that we evolve from. From the dirt. From the grubby little corner of the earth that we call home. From the bad taste in the air. From the junk mail. From the TV that we don’t want anymore. From the radio that we can’t get. From the magazines that we can’t open. From the clothes that we don’t need. From the things that we put in the dishwasher that we don’t want anymore. All of those things―the trash, the old, the throwaway, the things that don’t belong. And yet, when we look at the beautiful things that have come out of that decomposition, like beautiful sculpture, orfotation, orfotation that contains within it this incredible potential for expression, that is garbage.

“Oh, I wish I could do that more. I don’t know. I guess it’s just something I do.” I like the idea that I can’t really see the picture, but it’s there and I can’t really delete it. It always has that ‘s and doesn’t necessarily have to be sweet. I’m not a temperamental person and I don’t like to bum out people. I would say that even in tuxedos. I have a soft spot for throwaway style clothes, so maybe that’s part of it. I like to keep things simple and keep them wearable. I would say that even in the vernacular of , poetry, even the early vernacular of poetry and teases, I would say that’s mostly just like, “I’m young Frankenstein, mutant at war, son of The Reanimator, soulless core. “ Its all pausebreaks. The crisis. It could only have happened this way. I would say that’s mostly just like hooks, like [Sample 82] is just a good friend of mine, and I just liked taunting him about things and making fun of him. I would say that there was a good amount of hooks, like [Sample 82] is just a good friend of mine, and I just liked taunting him about things and making fun of him. Like, for instance, I can’t remember the last time I saw  or sampled a sample it up with like a smirk, or a fake nose, whatever. Like, somehow I’d just got pulled into the mixtape in the hopes that maybe people would see the humor in it and not just the fact that I was putting on a mixtape at all. I didn’t really care if anyone foun’d it or not. It was more about like, “Hey, what’s your take on this?”

magic, but it's also a way to cope with the fact that you don't have all the answers. We just recorded an ambient jam for five months, and now we want to do an extended atmospheric. I was like, “This is your new normal.”  I don't know why anyone would want to listen to this, but it does. It's so depressing. The music is depressing. The melodies are terrible. The sample is amazing, and the rest is just sort of floating around in the background. The lyrics are like, like, really convoluted, like they're trying really, really hard to sound like they don't really understand what they're saying. But the effect is that they do, and it's just so sad.

I sampled Pacino's voice on several of my own records, and I've always included a few bars of his voice over on some of my productions. I think there's a connection between that and the Time Lord. He has this soft spot in his heart for kids. And I felt like that was a good way to kind of underscore that. Yeah. I think that stems back to the time when we started working together, back in the Village Voice studios downtown. We were just joshing around and talking about stuff when this really interesting project came along. It was called Time Lord and it was a conceptual puzzle song about the history of jazz. It was basically this extended instrumental sample of [Haile] Kerensky screaming at the moon. And I was like, “Oh wow, this is what I heard on those records. This is what I heard on acid. I know how it feels to just sit there and play and not think about what's coming tomorrow. I know how it feels to just have this open mind and just roam. And this seemed like a really good way to approach this story. I think a lot of what people find funny about us is biographical; we're sort of archetypes. I wish Kanye would make a song about defecation. I wakened up that morning thinking about how lame this would be, but then I realized how much it would be useful for lowering my testosterone. I have like a hunch that maybe the only way to really defecate effectively is to listen to lame music all day. That would be true. I have a soft spot for VHS tapes.  The first time I got my hands on a VHS, I thought it was garbage. Even in my worst nightmares.

magic, I don’t know. I mean, it could be any number of things. Could be  , it could be a mix of the two. I don’t know. It could be like a moth to flame. I think about it a lot, and I’m almost 100% sure that this is just a phase.

[Dr.] Doooom. I can remember sitting around a computer all day playing, and hour or so into each session he would just pop up with this magical portal into the real world that he had made for the session. And I was like, “That's where I've been all my life. I remember stepping outside of my mom's house on Lake Champlain and the smell of garbage caused by people walking by without paying attention. I remember the ferocity of the sidewalk, and the fact that the only vehicles that passed by were these giant, diesel-powered garbage trucks. I was so obsessed with the idea that those were the only things that were really moving, and that this was the only real world. I wanted to get away from that. I would love the idea that maybe there was still some sort of trash can outside my window that I could grab, and just sort of enjoy the view, but at the same time, I knew that was just a conceptual thing. I knew that when I got to the end of the block, and I walked up the steps, that everyone was gonna look at me and say, “Hey, where you from?', and that there was no trash can.” I wanted to go from trash can to trash can as quickly as I possibly could.  Was it challenging to walk up a flight of sards, or a few flights of stairs, and not take a deep breath? I think it was the combination of the two. It was very freeing in a way because you're so used to doing something, and then suddenly you're not. And you just have to go with it and do it, and it's like, “Wow, I really did just do that. I really did.” I can honestly say that now that I'm an adult and able to deal with things like that, and not just deal with them as a kid, but as an adult, I feel like I really do understand them and whittle them down to the bare essentials. Stuff that maybe a kid doesn’t. I think for a lot of kids, genre music was just a way to numb out all the other stuff that was happening in the world.”  Check that out. That’s a really good kid. That’s exactly what I want for my music. I want it to be superINNOCENT.  There was no mixing console. Just her and her MacBook, just cutting edges. [With] software.

I can picture the look of pure, unadulterated terror on your face as you frantically try to comprehend what just happened. You don’t even know what happened. You just know that it did, and that you are so, so, . Overwhelmed, you quickly realize that you are just a few cells away from depression, and that your only option is to transform. What was it like recording that song, five, six days a week for the past year? It was lonely. Just thinking about what to do next, what to delete.

I made a pact with the forces of nature and was going to cause havoc.  "Pablo Picasso was my idol. I would stare at his work all day  and never really look at the background. I was attracted to his negative space. I thought, that's interesting. I wonder how he did it. I haven't gotten around to it though.   I love painting.  I love drawing. I love Star Trek. The underscore sounded like Ligeti, but played on a Wavestation.  I learned that the hard way when I started The Pirate’s Bay.  The impetus was in many ways emerging from the UK acid scene.  The immediacy of it, the fact that you could get it for free, and still be interested in the history of the genre, all of that was new to me. I did some procedural poetry stuff while making it. The first few weeks were really difficult. I was so obsessed with making the record. I wasn’t sleeping, and getting into the studio meant relocating to Western Mass. Oh and I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. Instagram? Twitter? Screenshot? Collection? Marble? Calendar? Dogfood? Memory foam? Calendar? Whatever? Calendar? Year zero? Marble? Is that a collage? Is that a vector for future work? No, it’s just some stuff I found at the dump.

magic-wallflower type thing where you just melt away all the stress and anxiety and do something magical. And I was like, “Oh wow, I really can do that. This is what I want to do with my life. I don’t know. I want to just chill out and do nothing.” I was a nervous kid with a Thinkpad. I would bomb sets a lot. Not always. And people were pretty kind. A few converging things…, particularly his short film . Also . Not the book; the entry itself. It inspired me quite a bit. The iota of it is in the non-sequitur structure. The gist of it was that I was building a procedural horror story, with a healthy dose of trash, set in an alternate America, New Zealand. I'd made short films and commercials, and nothing was approaching the critical mass that The Smiths had achieved in the UK. And I've been fucking obsessed with 60s music ever since. And I was always really drawn to that sort of Russ Meyer stuff. I loved the way they used exaggerated sounds. I loved the way they overlaid images. And I always wanted to do music that way. She made these fake voices for me when I was a kid, and I would just hum them and make music. But I was always into the idea that I could make music.

I’d ask him to save me whenever I faltered. He always pulled through. I remember stepping outside of our Bushwick apartment in 2009 and the ’warm’ smell of Sunflower wafting from the PA. That combination was so exciting. We just had so much fun making music together. […] Before [I’d start a band], I was really into the idea being a loser and making memes. And now I’m 43 and I want to laugh. I don’t know if anyone really ever talks about their childhood idol as an adult—especially not about a composer. Is that something you want for yourself, to revisit those childhood loves again? Yeah! I think it’s just nice to have that airbrush with history—especially since my first record came out. I wasn’t thinking straight when I started the project, and I’m so, so full of shit about not doing sequels. Do you ever wonder what it would be like to just sit down and play an entire album, on the computer? Dungeon synth is pandemic music. Assembly line. Machine. Mix. Assemby. Charles [Mingus] [is] so stoic. He saved me. I played ‘in the dark’ with no lights on. I kept the lights on all the time. I don’t fucking like it when people shut down. [It was] especially hard with [My Chemical Romance], because we had no idea what the fuck was going on. No one else was really equipped t0 deal with all of this sudden. We just had to go at it head on. It was like a real wet lab. [With] no lights, no instruments, just pounding away at this thing for the better part of an hour. Haha. Yeah. And we had no money. Nothing. Just went in blind. We were so scared. We had no idea how much money we were getting, how much practice we were going to get, or what the hell was going on. We just wanted to go out and play. It was like a zombie apocalypse scenario. No way out. We set up shop in a garbage can in Greenpoint, but that was about it. Haha. We kind of did. Took it in turns doing our thing, painting, doing sets, doing video. I did the music, while he did the CG. It was like we were in a family. …. He did the movement, I did the SFX. I did the faces. I did the hair. I did the body. I did the build. I did the model. I did the hair, the clothes, the weapons, the vehicle, the plane. I did the movement. I did the model building the plane. I did the texture work. I did the model.











“UH...YES” CONTENT

The impetus was in many ways emerging from the UK acid scene. My friend [Scott] Eldritch and I would go to Ibiza a lot. Weren’t we all kids? We would just hang out and smoke weed. And then the scene would develop. It would evolve from there. There was Big Star. These were kids coming of age in the UK scene, and they were developing complex DJ sets and smoking dope. And I was like, “Wow, this is what I want to do with my life. I want to connect with people from all walks of life. I’m from the UK scene, so why don’t you guys connect?” Kitsch has been in my vernacular. I just like cliches. I don’t like TV shows, I don’t re-watch old movies, I just do what I do. I like tvtropes.com. I like genre. Her dad had this PhD in philosophy, but he was like, “Dude, you havent studied anything. Breakcore is not a thing.” And I was like, “Okay, but what is?” And then like a year later I got my first symphony, and I was like, “Wow, this is what I heard on those records. This is how you make it … kind of.” And then a year later I got my second, and I was like, “Wow, this is how you make it … symphonic.” And then a year later I got my third and I was like, “Wow, this is how you make it … symphonic pop.” It is called “The Mall of London” and it’s basically a labyrinth of collage. I didn’t really understand what I was hearing, but I loved it and I kept repeating it. Over and over.

I was  exploring the dungeon with friends once. There was a chiptune section on the radio where [it] was really challenging to play without the music. I would just kinda shred with the harp and whatever. And nobody was paying attention. It was like, “Isn’t this amazing? Isn’t this beautiful?” And then the music started getting played and people were paying attention. And I was like, “Wow, this is what I want to do with my music. I want to make music that’s personal for me.” I don’t know. I am sort of  by default.   I like a lot of weird shit. I like weird atmospherics, space operas, surrealism. I don’t like consistency. It’s like a vacuum sealed stuffy thing. I like cliques. I like a vacuum sealed world. If you want to know what I really think about…, well I don’t know. It could be any number of things. I like testing. Testing things. My heroes are [French surrealist] Jean Michel Ray, [German surrealist] Klaus [Schulze] and [Dutch] Robin Hood. All of them were incredible painters. I have been fascinated by the idea of infiltration since I was a kid.   There’s a great Brazilian poet named Paulo Coelho, a really interesting guy, who wrote a fantastic essay about in which he talks about the way that the eyeball splits open when you look at a blank page.  The idea that the entire human body is a screen is very important to me. I remember moving to London with my then-boyfriend and we started scouring the neighbourhood for abandoned scores. Some of which I still havn’t gotten around to fixing. We found it in the bin behind a hardware store and never looked back.

Just doing regular things over and over. That’s been my dream the past 7 months. Just doing regular things over and over. Please don’t make any lame joke. It’s just not me. Please don’t remove the music. It’s not necessary. Just have fun with it, I never thought of that possibility.

This is how I feel when I first wake up in the morning. Or when I first get out of bed in the morning. I remember those things and I am inspired by them. And I try to be aware of those things and let them inspire me. Even when I am feeling down or whatever. I just know that whatever I am feeling is going to be helpful. I was watching the new Ghostbusters with my sister and my friends and we were like, “This is the movie! This is the movie we've been waiting for!?!” And the rest is history. I think the future is looking up for video games in a big way.

When I’m not making movies, I’m usually hunting, fishing, building, or fighting monsters. I’m into history, but particularly the 19th century. My hero growing up was Paul McCartney. I was obsessed with fake things. I would watch [Pynchon’s] works on VHS and [the] computer when I was a kid. I didn’t really understand what I was seeing, but I loved it. I think the reason I can’t seem to finish [My Name is Magic] is becaue I have this intense need to finish something. But then also I have this thing about trash—I think of it as trashy, but it’s also really warm, and I like the idea that it’s not really solid. It’s just these impressions of things, and I like that. I like that my trash is not really discrete. It’s just these broad strokes of ideas, and I like that. I think many film-makers try to shoehorn in a lot of effects, but not my style. I don’t want to replicate the look of a TV set, or the feel of a VHS . We would watch together, under the cover of darkness. As we got older, we realized that that wasn’t going to be get lamp. That there were other options. So they became scientists, and they started thinking about the possible consequences of different economic systems, and the possible trade routes that could be opened up between different societies based on differences.   The stuff that comes out that you don’t want to see.  The stuff that is really hurting you. That’s my hunch. I like to think about it as sort of jigsaw puzzle fashion. I like to think about it as like, what do I wiggle into? What do I’m making?  From there, it’s a pretty simple question. I approached it that way because I’m a pretty good artist, and I like to think about the configurations of things that I create as bits of plastic on a string.  From there, it’s a pretty simple question. I approached it that way because I’m a pretty good artist, and I like to think about the configurations of things that I create as bits of plastic on a string. 1: Ring of Power (2006). 2: Plaza (2006). 3: Suppose I told that I wanted to make a song. What would happen?  I don’t want to just sit there and do nothing. I want to actually be ethereal and distracting.

There was no shortcut to being a greener, fuzzier version of yourself. You’re supposed to play with those bizarre elements that don’t usually go together. They can’t always be harmonized. And so, I kind of toyed with the idea of making music that bores into your brain and stays there. It’s not very electronic, it’s not very ambient. It’s like stone cold reality. It’s like what sharks do. They’re not just hunting; they're actually helping you. So, to me, that was always basically my dream sort of music. It’s like a Buddhist tract. It’s very lucid, like a medical text. It’s extremely lucid, and I quote: lucid dreaming is the art of falling asleep while simultaneously having the will to continue dreaming. Basically, what it says is, do you want to grow or shrink, do you want to go from being entertained to being as detached as possible? That’s your body, that’s what you’re made of. And so, what lucid dreamers do is, first of all, they awaken from dreamlessness, which is to say, they’re not really asleep, but they’re kind of wandering around in a kind of amorphous way, and they’re curious about the world. So it’s not just about doing bad things.

Magic, the weirdest kind of magic. I think it's just amazing how much magic can be contained in these few cubic centimeters of pixels. That's what hypnosis is about. It's the subliminal suggestion that all of these strange forces and these archetypal sensations are actually there because we have this innate need to feel those things. The more we suppress them, the more they show up.  That's so useful actually. Instagram, Twitter. All these platforms where you can mess with people's emotions and thoughts about the world. And people want to have their say.  They want to have their say about things.  So in the vein of all this thing, I did research into the vernacular of YouTube and I came up with this   I think is really important. It's the closest waverage we have to a   language. It's the closest we have to a form of speech that is  non-standard. There is a   colloquialism that says that if you say the wrong word on a  everyday  occasion, you're going to get a scolding or a punch in the face. And that's absolutely true. But what if you said the wrong word a hundred times a day? That word is going to change? That is to say, it's not just some constant.

It is the plastic surgery of music. She taught me that every time you hear a certain note, you think about the next six notes after that. It's like Latin for "think twice before you act." Yeah. So it's like, I hear a note, and then I immediately think about the next six notes after that. And that obviously applies to chords, as well. Like, you don't just hear this thing as a string, you hear it as this octave-VV thing. So it's this continuous feedback loop that I like. And she taught me that ever since I was a kid, whenever I hear a strange tone, I just have this kind of visceral reaction and I kind of want to know why. Like, is that a foot tapping or is that a drone? Is it a concert? And it was really exciting and weird because I had no idea what I was doing. I had to go and play and Oh my god, I have five kids and a little bit of a historical document distorts itself in a way that reflects some of the miseries that I'm trying to navigate. Like there's this really powerful thing that I'm saying in this song called "Reality."

His voice is magical, and I was obsessed with trying to recreate that over and over.   The only way to do that is to replicate the hi-hat and snare drums, so that's what I did. The rest is super haphazard, like drawing on Fruity Loops or something. I don't even really know how to explain it, it's just something I did.  Where was I? Oh yeah, I did the score for . That was so fun. The one thing I did not do was the instrumental. It was a complete waste of time. Sorry. I forgot. I gotta go. Coming back? Yeah. Coming back from L.A. Really good, man. It was fun this time. I had the distinct sense that this was it. I had the distinct sense that this was the last time. Vangelis says he's "overwhelmed" with emotions following the release of his latest mixtape, "Thrash Pit." Vangelis candidly discussed the production process for the new record, which was inspired by a dungeon-like environment found within the studio. for MTV News. "I was just driving around Los Angeles when I heard that song on repeat. I was like, “Oh wow, this is what I heard on my iPod .” I was drawn to it like a moth to flame.  For the first time in his adult life, Vangelis feels the effects and pressure. For the first time in his adult life, he wants to live. For a long time he’s been asleep.

blitzkrieg through the phonics of my teenage mind for a minute. My mom would constantly interrupt me with "Dude, what's going on?" or "Can you hear that over there?" I was always, like, totally not listening. And yet, for the first time in human history, sounds actually have a life of their own. There’s a sense in which, actually, sounds can’t just be there to be streamed and catalogued.

Andrew W.K. is amazing at both. He’s painterly and surreal, but he’s also really, really good at connecting with people on an emotional level. I think the rest is up to him. I remember asking her if I had any obsessions, like, stuck in my head from childhood. And I was like, “Yeah, I have these ideas about the world. I want to recreate them in my music. But also I do have this really intense need to just chill.” So I like to think of it as both, like, A.K.A. sponge bubble ornaments.

Magic done with strange, magical stone devices. He’s sampled everything.... Including me. like how music can be a kind of torture [Raoul Wallenberg] performed on a loop. or how painting can be a kind of torture Rabelais did on paper. We have this thing called “Compressionism” — basically a way of harnessing an overflow of images at you don’t want. It’s the Jewish mother in me. Trust me. Vehement zealotry on both sides, I feel alienated because I like words. I like ideas, even if I’m wrong or even if it’s a struggle or if it’s a work in progress. Another thing I don’t like: denial of works in progress because everything is being super assessed so quickly.

Somehow, I’m convinced that these are the instruments that Johann Sebastian Bach used in his music. Somehow, I think they bring out these wonderful tropical vibes, these exotic notes, that are usually tucked away in the bauble sections of a symphony and pared down for our tastes. I just like the idea that these are the real things, the hard things that get overlooked. It’s the closest way I can get to a kind of obvious nude scene in music. I like doing stuff that is mechanical, sort of repeatable, and allowing myself to just wander. I think I have a twisted sense of song. The careful Senex becomes gambling Puer. On the one hand you have the ney; on the other you have the harpsichord. both screens are betting on fate in an increasingly random outcomes. On the one hand you have the adding machine; on the other you have the dream machine.

magic, that I felt like I knew. That I could’t put it down. That’s so awesome. I love that. I think music is like that: You try things, And things always come out better than you imagined.

magic to me. I have been listening to for years and it still amazes me how many transformations achieve with just a WAV file or MIDI file. convert the audio from one to another and boom. Sweet. There is a catch though. If I want to hear the original sound of the song, I have to look it up in a book or something. Oh yeah…I have a feeling tumblr will be my new bible. :P Oh and I just found this great little trick for easily copying a WAV file to an MP3 or OGG format…kind of. Does anyone know of a good way to do this? I haven't tried it though. If anyone knows how to, please let me know. Oh and I just found this great little trick for easily copying a WAV file to an MP3 or OGG format…kind of. Does anyone know of a good way to do this? I haven't tried it though. If anyone knows how to, please let me know. Oh and here's the other thi... Oh and here's the other thing I forgot to mention : That music is just [a] byproduct of [our] fucked up brains. I loooove them. I think they are very helpful in navigating the world. Working with [Wilson’s brother] Dennis, for instance. We worked on the [Eminem] video together.

Like. Like, tea for example. If you really look at the history of tea, it’s been around for quite a bit longer than we think. A fresh, dewy, floral essence. And then a few centuries later, tea itself was a type of music.

magic’s voice and I was like, “That’s not who I am. That’s what I’m trying to portray.” Daria is different. not bratty in the sense of wanting to purposely recede from people. She wants to make music for creatures.

she showed me how to kind of roam between dials. So it would be like this really chaotic, noisey, throwaway thing, and then over time, over time, as I got more familiar with the material, it would get more and more likeapexenous and dense and maudlin and weird. Or it would be like a rock ballad, and then a library cue. It would evolve in a way that I couldn’t necessarily control.

I wrote the song while I was driving, with a bag of self help, through Pennsylvania.  From then on, all I wanted to do was make music some kind of speed, some negative space, some sort of abject, ugly, ugly thing. The record was actually a kind of self-help exercise, [my ideas were] becoming all kind of shapeless and muddled. I would have these ephemeral, plastic ideas of what a good radiating star [is] and what it means. No, it's not. It's just amazing to me. Like everything is amazing to me. I like, I love the, the, the clear profanity. The clear profanity. The, the one that's, the, the one that's really stuck out to me is the one about profanity.

magic, I don’t know. I mean, it could be any number of things. Could be  , it could be a mix of the two. I don’t know. It could be like a moth to flame. I think about it a lot, and I’m almost 100% sure that this is just a phase.

Check that out. That’s Puer. That’s exactly what I want for my music. I want it to be superINNOCENT.  There was no mixing console. Just and her MacBook, just cutting edges. [With] Senex software.

I got really sick one time, but then I was back on schedule. And there was a period of time where I was really not able to connect to my, to my friends, and, and the world, and, and the gravity of the situation really came through. No, because I was so set on on putting this out. Oh my God, I can't believe they're waiting. I want to connect it, because now we’re all kind of ‘stuck’ in the past and “waiting around” for the future I'm curious about what the future holds.

Life here is extremely hierarchical and based on dominance and violence and don’t forget. Should you forget it’s here to remind you. I love the radio. I love making stuff that people want to imagine at. And I've always liked the idea of, you know, Frankenstein. I can't think of a single good reason why I wouldn't. I love theater so much more than I ever could have i 5. I love making records. I love just walking into a record store as a 20 year old kid from Australia and everyone is buying Tangerine Dream records. I love weirdos. [In the audience] is a thing. I love Twitter. I love Tumblr. I love everything. But I was always really, really drawn to the radio because it was like, you know, escape. And I loved to roam around, and I could never be 100 percent certain of what I’d hear. I looove it so much. I think radio as a whole, even when I'm not feeling particularly inspired, I always looks to my video collection. I stay alert in my dream.

Everyone talks about how good good things are, but what about the trash? What about the trash that doesn't get heard? I've been on this psych pop tour since '04 or something like that. I didn't notice that. It's always, it's always like, it's just like, it's like a nice little, like, like, positive affect of like sort of the psych pop has always sort of had this weird weird, like weird effect or whatever. Like, and I never really cared much about like, I'm sure there's like good Kristall Hayden and great Howard Roos records, but like there's also these like like Nicole Stollenweider records, which are just like really sad records, you know, and they're just like, they're just just like piling on like stressors or whatever, and you're like, Oh my God, listen, hear this for the first time, and you're like, Oh wow, this is like psych pop at its purest. Wow. Like I'm always like, don't stare at the eyeball. She studied weird properties of the iris and like the like the like arteries and the like the nerves and like the like the like the like the like consistency of the like the like stone age and like the way that the like biosphere works and like the sort of the sort of the many different possibiliess that characterize the like the degradations of the asphyxiation that cause like stasis and cause like film and cause like accelerated aging and cause like the sort of mad capybaras and the sort of the whackos and the like catnip and all this other weird shit that I don't really understand but it was really interesting and I liked it a lot and then I’m locked out and I made this and I make that.

magic whenever I’d have the chance to go into a really weird, arid, dark, [inaudible] environment and just have fun, that was always part of it for me. I would just do these really hallucinatory jams and just have these thoughts running through my head abut the music. If you’ve watched Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien, then you’ve worshipped the man behind the mask, Nigeria’s Bolaji Badejo. When she says, “all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its sociohistorical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, the pausebreak radio mixtape.