I was really into the music of Cream after I finished composing the music for 'BTTB.'
When I was four years old, my mother put me into a school for early music education where you get perfect pitch and harmony and composition.
Usually, when Nirvana made music, there wasn't a lot of conversation. We wanted everything to be surreal. We didn't want to have some contrived composition.
Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.
I like to comprehend more or less everything around me - apart from the creation of my music. It's an obsessive character trait that's getting worse. I don't switch the light on and off 15 times before I leave the room yet, but something's going wrong.
Somehow in the 20th Century an idea has developed that music is an activity or skill which is not comprehensible to the man in the street. This is an arrogant assertion and not necessarily a true one.
One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world.
Or the other process that is important is that I compress longer sections of composed music, either found or made by myself, to such an extent that the rhythm becomes a timbre, and formal subdivisions become rhythm.
Though my poems are about evenly split between traditionally formal work that uses rhyme and meter and classical structure, and work that is freer, I feel that the music of language remains at the core of it all. Sound, rhythm, repetition, compression - these elements of my poetry are also elements of my prose.
A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence; or a good piece of music. Everybody can recognize it. They say, 'Huh. It works. It makes sense.'
There's this thing called compulsory licensing law that allows artists through the record companies to take your music at will without your permission.
I think music will be created algorhythmically, all the things that we do will be boiled down to a little computer program.
There's a lot of music that sounds like it's literally computer-generated, totally divorced from a guy sitting down at an instrument.
I want to bring real music back but make it marketable and mainstream. To me, real music isn't everything being synthesized, computerized.
Sometimes when you have multimedia, people use it too much. It has to be a tool and not the end product, if you can use it as a tool. The same thing apples when you are recording. We had this problem in the 80's, we got so computerized there was no heart and soul in the music anymore.
Sound quality was supposed to be one of the big selling points for CDs but, as we know, it wasn't very good at all. It was just another con, a get-rich-quick scheme, a monumental hoax perpetrated on the music consuming public.
Me, I've concentrated on music pretty much to the exclusion of other things.
A lot of painters listen to music, I think, while they paint. But I hate to do that. It's a horror. I can't really listen to the music. I'm not really concentrating on it, and I'm not really concentrating on the painting.
I still have a lot to learn. I'm concentrating on learning a lot more about music.
Music for me, it demands full concentration.
