Do you find that your approach to making a record changes each time? Your process?
Yeah, yeah. I don’t wanna do it the same way. I mean, there’s lots of stuff I do the same way. But for me, it just has to come out as an experience. And if it’s a real experience, then you don’t want to try and make it just like the last one. So I continually try to come up with ways to initiate myself into having the experience. Or, after I’ve had the experience, ways to initiate myself to be further into it. So, with Avatar there were various things I did. And now, with Neoplatonic Aquatic Sysmposiums, mainly it was just this reading list. But it started with—I went to Greece, and I was reading parts of Plato underwater. I was reading it underwater, and I was like, ‘I’m gonna make an album about the Neoplatonic worldview… underwater.’
What do you mean when you say you read it underwater?
I took excerpts of Plato’s Timaeus, which is his creation theory book. I laminated them, and I snorkeled and read them underwater. And so did my friend, and my wife, too. It was super fun, just one page at a time. It’s really hard to understand Plato, so you need to read it over and over again. It’s been translated so many times, even just in Greek , incorrectly. So you can read all the Plato you want, but in the end you’re gonna have to read somebody who knows what they’re talking about telling you about it. The way that it’s translated, the way the verse is written, is really alien, and that’s cool. It’s cool to read writing from a long time ago, underwater.
I had to do it really quickly. I bought the book in Athens, flipped through it, and found a page that seemed like it was the right page. The page ended up being all about breathing, about how the creator made humans’ breathing apparatus. So, in effect, it had a lot to do with what was going on literally. But I was just having free thoughts, and then going through with them. Putting free thought into human practice. I think it’s cool to have far out ideas, and it’s more interesting to actually fill them in with actual intellectual work. But I don’t want to use the word ‘work’ too much, because I don’t want to make it seem like I’m a hard worker or something like that. [Laughs] I just want to be in that world. I want to live in whatever worlds I’m creating at the time.