Oneohtrix Point Never Quotes

I was left with an urge to make the guitar sound like things it shouldn't be able to sound like.

Every Bass Communion track is based on a single sound source. Increasingly I find that I'm really interested in taking a particular sound and it's almost like solving a problem. If I have a sound, the problem is how can I create a piece of music from this one sound source?

To keep creating something with this type of music, you have to take it out of the box.

In Sonic Youth, at the end of 'Expressway to Yr. Skull,' we'd tap on the backs of our guitars to get this low-level feedback, and if I leaned forward, and the guitar hung off my body, it would resonate differently.

We had a simple 8-track studio set up in the record store where I worked. And just staying after work and experimenting, realizing what was possible with recording - that's why my project was called The Microphones at first. Because it wasn't even songs really. It was just sound.

If I crave a frequency in the mid, I'll just drag in a sound and try to mold it into what feels right. It happens very quickly. And if I've been making a piece of music for five hours and it sucks, I'll just throw it away.

I haven't been walking around for years with some burning desire to do a solo record. If I had, maybe I'd have made a record that was experimental. Usually, the idea of a solo record is to get some weird stuff out of your system, but I don't think like that. I wasn't interested in making something that was a hard listen - maybe I'll get around to that some other time. I wanted it to sound effortless, not like I was trying to reinvent the wheel.

Not many composers have ideas. Far more of them know how to use strange instruments which do not require ideas.

I'm not saying that every song has to be an all-time hit or the greatest ever music. That's not what you should set out to do. But you have to find out what will work best for a particular story or theme or backdrop, and discuss how not to make it a cliche or fall into such traps.

I am always writing music. I have got unlimited ideas because I have been clean and sober for my entire life.

A blown-out tube ripped some of the grind from the amplifier, throwing us into a momentary tizzy. The unusual sound led me to play unusually, and the recorded take turned out to be a keeper. Insriration can come from the most unlikely places ... keep your head on and your ears open.

When I create music, the feeling that you get... I get first. You [the listener] have a delayed experience with the feeling I initially get when I have a creative insight. Not just the voice, but all the creativity - the production, the idea, the concept, the music involved. There is a high. There is an emotional experience that happens when everything comes together... I made music as consistently as I did, especially back in the day, because it made me feel so good... When everything is on, it's a wonderful feeling.

I do not write experimental music. My experimenting is done before I make the music. Afterwards it is the listener who must experiment.

It all comes down to what you truly love doing, and what I love doing is overdubbing and making new sounds out of things that are sometimes quite ordinary on their own, but when you put them together, they make something new--or something that sounds new. Just discovering things like that musically is a pleasure.

What excites me is the idea of doing a record that's pretty clean and focused on songs. I've rushed a lot with previous albums and there's not a rush now - it's not a race.

I've already done two cover albums. I don't know, maybe it wouldn't be a good idea to do another, but I just did the Led Zeppelin song for fun, and I thought I could do it kind of quick since songs that I love a lot I can do fast.

I like to think about the quality, content, and concept for my music because I think these are the most important things and it just molds everything together.

With all the touring and distractions going on, I would get a sound together but I wouldn't have time to work on it. So I sat on the road with the sketches and saw how they revealed themselves emotionally.

When I made Illmatic, I was trying to make the perfect album. It comes from the days of Wild Style. I was trying to make you experience my life. I wanted you to look at hip-hop differently. I wanted you to feel that hip-hop was changing and becoming something more real.

You noodle around with tempo and sound until you get the perfect fit for that particular song, and then, so long as you can sustain it, God is on your side and everything comes easily and even the waiters smile.

I would just be vibing with whatever I liked the most. And then there were a couple songs that I started on my own. I would have a melody or an idea and I would take it to the studio to go through it.

I find it to be an ongoing challenge to keep the guitar from becoming too traditional.

Anything that has to travel all the way down from your cerebellum to your fingertips, there's a lot of things that can happen on the journey. Sometimes I'll listen to records, my own stuff, and I think god, the original idea for this was so much better than the mutation that we arrived at.

I love music. I've just been putting studios together, here and at my house in New Jersey and so I can always make music and express my ideas and work with people to fine tune them to where they need to be.