[Trama]

Is there any music you do actually listen to every day?
I listen to The Necks almost every day. I'm crazy about them – I've been a fan since their first record. Mostly I just listen to electronic music.

When you say electronic music, what kind of stuff would that be?
Mostly old stuff. There's one guy named Roland Kayn who I listen to pretty much every day. You know, there's the famous people like Pierre Henry and all that stuff, which I listen to a lot. And I still get new records by my friends – if Kevin Drumm has a new record, I'll get it. There's a new guy named Kassel Jaeger, he's someone who I've enjoyed lately. His stuff's really good. But otherwise, I kind of listen to the stuff I liked as a kid, After years, you just know what you like. I never understood, just because something's new, why I should listen to it. I'd rather listen to Led Zeppelin than some new rock band. I mean, seriously: what's the point? I can listen to a Led Zeppelin record 500 times and love it, and I really doubt anything I could hear now would be as good as that.

Do you have a favorite one?
Oh, Presence. [Laughs] That was an easy one.

It's probably quite a controversial choice…
Presence is perfect, absolutely perfect. If ‘D'yer Mak'er’ wasn't on Houses of the Holy, it would be Houses of the Holy, but ‘D'yer Mak'er’ sucks. [Laughs] I hate reggae rhythms, it's just the most boring thing I could hear – but it's just my taste. But Presence, absolutely… just without a doubt.

What did you take away from that record?
Presence is just perfection. Even the attention paid to what kind of guitar tone he uses for each phrase. The thing I really love about that record is that everything is so considered and so perfectly chosen, and then it's just done. It doesn't sound fussed over – but it is fussed over – but it sounds like it's just being done off the cuff. And that's one of the hardest things to do. I don't like hearing the difficulty: I don't want it foregrounded when I listen to things, that's not interesting to me. Otherwise it's sports to me – listening to Yellowjackets or something. I think half of the interest of making things is finding ways to hide what you're doing.

So as a producer, how would you go about doing that?
[Laughs.]

I've heard about you making The Visitor, and it sounds like you made things as difficult for yourself as possible…
I had to do what I had to do. I mean, it's different every time, and each time you do it you hopefully have moved on to the next level of difficulty, and the next level of difficulty of hiding the difficulty. With other bands, usually [I do it] by not letting them come into the studio while I mix. I don't let bands have any say in the mix. This may sound weird, but in that world, that's what I'm know for – so you either want that, or you just hire a really good engineer. That's the only thing I really hardcore about, just: ‘Out! Out! Out!’

Anyway… let's talk about these shows you've got coming up. I can imagine how you might go about preparing for something like the Happy Days gig, but what about the '80s tape and tabletop guitar performances?
For the tabletop thing, by actually remaking the kind of guitar I used to use in the '80s – because it had pick-ups everywhere and switches – so I've been remaking the guitar, and that's almost done. So when I'm done remaking it, I have to start playing it and practicing it. The string quartet score, unfortunately half of it's missing, so I've been having to rewrite from memory what it was. I don't have the tape any more – but the tape part for that is actually just oscillators. Each string goes into its own ring modulator, and then there's a control frequency for that. Luckily I still have the notes, but I have to remake the four-channel tape for that. Some of the old tapes, it's just cleaning them up.

You still have the old tapes?
Some, yeah. I partially chose what I did based on what still existed. So it's been a lot of just cleaning up tapes and restoring them and stuff like that, and just building the guitars. And soon: lots of rehearsals, things like that, which I don't like doing. I feel guilty making people play stuff.

But these are people you play with on a regular basis – surely it isn't such an imposition?
Well, for this it's people I don't. Because it's a lot of people – some people I don't even know. Like for the string quartet, I had to get a string quartet, and I know the one violinist but I don't know all the other people. And, you know, they have to play one note for thirty minutes, that kind of stuff: it's easy, but it's not. [Laughs.] And I also have to fight the temptation to change stuff now. I keep remembering, ‘I was 18 years old, I was 18 years old…’ It's kind of tempting to get rid of the embarrassing stuff. I'm not going to do any of the stuff that would just make me cringe… which is most of it. [Laughs.] There's been a lot of physical prep, and I'm not nearly done yet. There's really not that much that I can just let slide. The trio with Eiko [Ishibashi] and Tatsuhisa [Yamamoto], that's always improvised so that's no problem, but the other trio that day I have to write tunes for it.

Which trio?
It's the ‘jazz trio’ – which is Tatsuhisa and this bass player named Chiba, and we haven't played yet! So that should be interesting. I mean, it's something I wanted to do next year – but I think I said that to myself last year.

You've got a lot of new material lined up, actually. Were you trying to make sure that it didn't all end up being too backward-looking?
No. In a way, I would rather have done more old stuff, because it would be easier to prepare.

Is there any reason why you didn't?
There's not that much of it left. I used to have a habit of throwing everything out, so there's not a lot of the old stuff left.

What form would that old stuff take?
Lots of scores. I stopped writing scores, basically, during college, when I realized that you'd never get to hear these goddamn things, but I used to have tons of them. I never thought that I'd be doing something like this – not that it's a big deal or anything, but I never thought I would need them. There was a sax quartet – I think that was actually unplayable. It was all circular breathing, so I think people would pass out after a while. [Laughs.] When I was younger, I definitely didn't like any breaks: I definitely liked continuous sound. So the big band is just something I always wanted to do, and I'm kind of just going off notes that I made over the years. That one's actually been the hardest, because I can't decide how specific to be: some of these people I've played with before, and some of them I haven't, and I can't waste everyone's time. They of course want to rehearse, but I can't pay them for the rehearsals. For these shows, I'm basically giving the musicians all the money, because that's the only way I can… you know…

Do it?
Yeah, really. That one, I'm still working on that one… I'll probably finish all of these things an hour before soundcheck. I'll probably keep fiddling with all of the stuff until then: I have a bad habit of not stopping. [Laughs.]