Oneohtrix Point Never

I was a failed grunge kid who was too nerdy to totally get down with rock.

As a movie fan, I remember Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender and the sort of energy around 'Reservoir Dogs,' and the jump from 'Reservoir Dogs' to 'Pulp Fiction,' and how everybody was stoked on Quentin's career.

When people talk about how parameters can generate really good work, there's no better example than working within a genre in film. That's like the ultimate parameter.

Oneohtrix Point Never is total freedom to do what I think is right.

Nothing's ever easy about composing for other people's projects, but I like it. I've been lucky to have worked with adventurous directors who trust me.

I've lost so many gigs composing commercial or television music because I can't repress my inclination to work against conventions.

I loved Alva Noto's 'Xerrox, Vol. 3' a lot. It might be my favorite of his records. I must admit, I was bummed to see him say he was surprised by how emotional the record came out, as if he was ashamed. But there's something perfect about that.

O.P.N. has always been about reaching for some kind of liminal state in which opposing aesthetic forces become entangled and confused and equal.

Especially in repetitive music, to make a long piece of music you have to be extremely skilled in your sleight of hand. Just to make long form music it's very difficult and you really have to consider what you're putting someone through.

The way I think about things or hear things in my head is actually much closer to acoustic instruments. I don't have weird synthesized fantasy of music in my head.

Film work can be anything from just really hard and stressful and you're subjected to really weird deadlines to really draconian and weird and disconnected. You're working in service of the thing, and that can be really amazing for everyone involved, or be kind of just a waste of time.

I knew my whole life that I had to make ends meet or I would be ashamed of myself. I had a lot of pressure from my parents. So that's where my vision comes from. It's not to be a great artist, it's always to be like, 'Dad, look, I didn't let you down.'

I was perpetually this B-minus kid vacillating between eagerness and depression. I wasn't a bad kid, and I definitely wasn't aggressive, but I was a sad kid.

The easiest way for me to tell someone what I do is to say that I'm a non-musician who practises and produces music. I don't have a theoretical language for music. I have this abstract dream language.

You look at somebody like Thurston Moore. Is he a noise dude? A punky dude? Is he a free jazz dude? He's a stimulation chaser, and I relate to that.

I basically am always chasing this super enhanced stimulation from music.

I am not an egghead in the least.

I'm not much of a crier, actually. You know, I tend to cry and get sappy on planes.

I'm predisposed to believe we live in a complicated, enmeshed reality. There's no authentic or organic.

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.

Science fiction to me is the ultimate art form, because it speculates on bodies and worlds that don't exist.

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.

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.

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.

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 love the idea that you develop a relationship over time that yields new projects and more creative freedom and trust.

All of those 10cc 'Not in Love'-type synthetic choir sounds on 'Replica' are all from the Omnisphere. We used a lot of that.

I was doing the Klaus Schulze noise-kid thing before it became interesting to people.

I really love Glasgow. It reminds me of Boston in parts.

My friends and I have often discussed the plausibility of a connection between qualitatively bad music and quantifiably successful music, often citing the example of Candlebox and their paradoxical influence on culture.

I can't tell you how much more important watching 'Hellraiser' is to my music than listening to a Milton Babbitt piece or something.

Anything that's too self-assured just makes me nervous.

There's an arrogance of assuming that we can interpret the past - that we've left the right footnotes, that we're doing the right reclamation projects, that we're not overcorrecting. Actually, we have no idea where we're going. It's this Tower of Babel type scenario.

That idea of being so sure of what has happened, and what will happen, is the most idiotic human thing that anyone can do.

Thrillers rely on certain archetypes and our familiarity with them is quietly driving all of the tension. So it becomes an interesting challenge from the score perspective, to enhance that tension without being noticed, just like those archetypes.

Yeah, I tend to tinker with things that I love. It's habitual.

I would love to perform in an Amangiri hotel somewhere. Just off to the side like a piano man, while people drink and eat.

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.

The films of Gregg Araki may not be classified as horror, but they have been known to horrify viewers.

There are so many things that interest me more than standing on the stage of my own obsessions.

I love Ableton's vocoder and Operator for basic side subs and general low-end.

If I'm not using something, I tend to sell it and move on, so I'm not too sentimental about hardware synths.

While I absolutely love a great drummer and get tunnel vision listening to drums at a show, a lot of the time I feel like drum machine-driven music tethers you to a genre.

Yeah, I guess generally I don't want things ever to be easy. While there's some danger of doing something that loses your personal stamp on things, I'd rather take the chance of doing that and do something slightly uncomfortable or hard for myself.

Growing up, I wanted to write films and make films. Even as I took this detour and stayed in the music world, I still think in terms of 'What is in this room? What is the shot? Who are the characters? What is the conversation here?' My sense of pacing is very filmlike, it's not musical.

To me everything is a material, and everything is subject to change. When I work with found sounds, I'm trying to figure out how do I make this come from me?

I think nostalgia used purely for the sake of emotional reminiscing is extremely boring.

The problem with depicting what's weird and what isn't is that it's got to this point of near total oversaturation. There's definitely a threshold at which that language and experience becomes tedious. How can something be weird if everything is apparently weird?

I love seeing Tim Hecker perform because the experience truly shakes me.

I don't like straightforward drum sounds and hate snares; can't stand them.