The only outlet in mainstream culture for classical and more experimental music to be heard is through movie soundtracks, and they're such a wonderful display of emotion. I think the guy that did that best is Stanley Kubrick, working with Wendy Carlos who is an electronic composer.
I've always tried to create music the way Kubrick makes film, just kind of mimicking consciousness. He has a way of mimicking this greater power.
Enya is a very matriarchal musical force. Her music is very feminine and she layers her voice a lot. It leaks into my music secretly on the side. There's a lot of lush layers of my voice hiding in the cracks.
My dad was a real working musician in the late '70s and early '80s. He had a band that was signed to Elektra/Asylum and they would perform at like Madame Wong's and Whiskey A Go Go all the time.
The bedroom is an archetype. To me it stands for a lot of the silliness of our modern culture where the kind of things that we worship in our sacred spaces are based on media and movies because we don't really have much else in the way of myths, if that makes sense.
I find Nevada to be extremely spooky.
I find Trump to be like a parasite.
I've always been on the periphery.
Water represents to me, the beginnings of life, it is where we come from in our most primordial sense. It relates to some of our deepest subconscious thinking - it's a force we can't really see or understand, we just get glimpses of. But it's a part of us all.
I was born in L.A. In Santa Monica, actually.
When I was a little kid, I was a huge fan of 'The Kids in the Hall.' They were like my boy band. I was obsessed with sketch comedy. Being raised Christian, I was somewhat sheltered from the more radical high-art world. So to me, comedy was where people got to express themselves in an abstract way. It was a big part of my growing up.
I always had a lot of empathy for the deep outcast weirdos in school. I was kind of like the more sociable weirdo, but I was always talking to the real weird ones.
I don't wanna make something depressing, I wanna make something sorrowful.
I'm a big fan of horror films, particularly 'Friday the 13th.' It's one of the only genres that weaves abstract experimental techniques into the mainstream; having to be spooky requires a little more creativity.
Seeing Wolf Eyes for the first time - I was fifteen. I had this crazy feeling that this my generation's Stooges. I got infected by that energy.
Absurdity is my favorite brand of humor because deep down inside, in our subconscious, it's all surrealism. It's all abstract. The world is the surrealism, the absurdity, the humor - it all just overlaps.
Nostalgia has become so much more popular because technology and climate change are visibly present. It's easy to idolize the past, before those things were prevalent.
Seven Words' is a wanderer's tale, a well-worn subgenre in the tradition of farewell songs. The tune itself is trying to evoke the familiar act of leaving somebody in order to save them, or continue seeking.
There's this kind of robust confidence that I had as a teenager that became really constricted and slowly, like, weighted down by sensory experience by the time I was in my mid-20s.
