“I just want to make stuff until I die, and I want to have as many people help me do it as possible.”

“I think there is an emotional intensity to ‘keeping it together’ that rivals the oh-man-I’m-losing-it wild person style of yesteryear, too.”

“It’s as if the movies have gotten both bigger and smaller at the same time”

“The idea of music being stripped down to pure melodies and arrangements is fascinating to me.”

From Traxman and Omar Souleyman to Perfect Pussy and Pity Sex

“I embrace the dark on a personal level, but in my work, if anything, I’m actually shining a light on it.”

“I like Japanese spoken by foreign people. I […] think it’s cool and hope that people feel the same way about Yako’s English as I do for a foreigner’s Japanese.”

“I would be proud that someone was influenced by my music and took some of it, because I would consider that as a victory for me.”

“Sometimes you have to become an animal to feel human.”

“Watching more groups of people chase each other around with those silly rods, I tried to articulate what it was that bothered me, exactly.”

“Here you have extremely up-to-date, contemporary, avant-garde, modernist expressions of a very ancient sonic culture, yet it’s the most non-traditional expression of that culture you can imagine.”

“It’s probably going to be our complete downfall, but whatever. I wouldn’t do it any other way.”

“There’s me [onstage], and then there’s Melissa at the back in the sound booth with the audience between us. We’re doing a kind of call-and-response with each other with the audience hugged between the two of us.”

“I just wander around and shoot, and I make stuff out of that.”

“[Footwork]’s still growing, but it still hasn’t grown outside the same box that it’s been in for the last five years, as far as a Chicago underground culture.”