It's really interesting to just look at the career of a musician and a producer that went into many different genres and many different styles and many different places but always breaking the barriers between genres and at some point reinventing himself all along the way but also inventing things at the same time.
Artists are overcompensating with this aggressive, energetic, hyperstimulating music - it's like someone shaking you. But it can't move people on an emotional level.
Everyone making electronic music has the same tool kits and templates. You listen, and you feel like it can be done on an iPad. If everybody knows all the tricks, it's no more magic.
In the history of pop music, a lot of great records cost an enormous amount of money. There used to be a time where people that had means to experiment would do it, you know?
It's a very subjective, personal, instinctive approach as musicians of saying, 'We don't want to replace what's around; we just want to widen the possibilities.'
It's very strange how electronic music formatted itself and forgot that its roots are about the surprise, freedom, and the acceptance of every race, gender, and style of music into this big party. Instead, it started to become this electronic lifestyle which also involved the glorification of technology.
Music was segregated in the '80s, and then in the '90s the boundaries started to break down, and rock kids got into electronic music. But then you got this reverse snobbery where people would only listen to electronic music and not rock.
Technology has made music accessible in a philosophically interesting way, which is great. But on the other hand, when everybody has the ability to make magic, it's like there's no more magic - if the audience can just do it themselves, why are they going to bother?
There have been movies like 'Paranormal Activity' or 'Blair Witch Project' in Hollywood that showed you could do movies with little or no money. It doesn't prevent them from creating larger than life spectacles as well.
There was a naive quality in 1982 around technology and the start of video games. And that's like the start of electronic music - there was this statement and, ideologically, these things to fight for.
There's something in human performance that is very smooth and very fluid, and at the same time it can be very precise, and that can take a lot of time, trial and error.
When you look at what we can call the golden era of concept albums, which starts in the mid or late '60s and ends maybe in the early '80s, it's an interesting time for music. You see all these very established and popular acts and bands and artists that were somehow on the top of their game but really trying to experiment.
The concept of the robot encapsulates both aspects of technology. On one hand it's cool, it's fun, it's healthy, it's sexy, it's stylish. On the other hand it's terrifying, it's alienating, it's addictive, and it's scary. That has been the subject of much science-fiction literature.
