When I make music I try to be as honest as I can to how I experience the world. Like how you arrange a piece of music formally. I tend to observe a lot of chaos or whatever, the fragmentation and melancholy. That's the filter I synthesize my world view with. If I didn't formally have that chaos and it was really linear, it would make my skin crawl.
I saw Double Leopards play at my school and realized there were other ways to approach noisy music that weren't necessarily aggressive. That became a very important concept for me as a musician. I don't think I would have been that interested in creating and performing my own music if it wasn't for this group.
The subject is missing from 'Replica' - it's about malleability of materials, and working with metaphor, and sculpting in time. So that makes a collaboration with another person who pushes sound in a sculptural way appealing, because you're like, 'Let's see what dimensionality is introduced from this other perspective that I might not have.'
When you're working in service to a big project, there's always the question of, 'Is there total freedom to do what I think is right artistically, or is this a job?' It's okay for things to be a job. I'm perfectly comfortable working. I don't need to sit around and quench whatever personal artistic thirst I have at all times.
The thing that I've always been a little bit jealous of is a complete, a total giving to one form, like a genre, and just a mastery of it. My thing is very different. It's a complete embrace of something, but I've never been able to say, 'I believe in this.' The only thing I believe in is that I'm in this perpetual state of disbelief.