What part of the creative process do you most enjoy?

For starters, definitely the inversion process. I tend to be quite scatterbrained in the sort of day-to-day routine and when I start thinking about music… it’s definitely this very “submersive” process. Making music is something I’m actively learning, so I would say the discovery process is what makes it most fun. I think if I were incredibly skilled it would take half the fun out of it. Just discovering some new, unusual production trick with some new piece of equipment or trying to pull off this melody that I haven’t really attempted before tends to [give] a very immediate sense of satisfaction. It’s a process that doesn’t require planning. It’s just kind of a weird, regressive, [and] childlike process.

Some songs remind me of video games I used to play when I was a kid.

I did grow up playing a lot of video games. A lot of Mega Man, for sure. But, I think that the games that I got most absorbed in were those really badass early 90’s tough-guy beat ‘em ups, like Streets of Rage, Fatal Fury, Battletoads, and Double Dragon. Embarrassingly enough, I was still gaming well into middle school. Some time around high school when I showed more of an interest in working on music, I figured out that if you’re going to invest your money in something, you can’t buy synths and Playstation 2 games. [laughs] If anything, it’s weird because there’s a lot of games I played specifically to listen to the music in it. I remember trying to get to specific levels in Sonic [the Hedgehog] so that I could hear the song that would play at the underwater level because I always thought there was something really unusual about the sound card.

Did you ever play Ecco the Dolphin?

Ah, man! I had a friend who had that game. I never got to sit down and play it myself. But that had some pretty interesting music in it as well. I remember just thinking that the concept was so weird. With video games… I’m willing to play a possum with a sword or a fox with three tails, but for some reason a dolphin always bothered me. [laughs] It’s like, I don’t know if I want to play the dolphin, I don’t know if that’s necessarily what I like to do in my imagination.