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How has your relationship with Morgan grown over the years?

I mean, there's so much. When you come from a classical music background, and you hang out with someone who knows how to make dance music, there's a totally different kind of listening you have to do. There's a whole art to making a groove. It has so much to do with not making things complicated, but keeping the most essential things, and making those things work in exactly the right way. For classical composers, it shouldn't be so alien, but it is kind of alien. It's really hard for me. The reason that Morgan likes my stuff is because I'm somebody who likes to make dance music and kind of fails at doing it. He just likes the way that I fail at doing it.

It's nice that he has your back like that.

We would be working on rhythm connections and there would be some rhythm track, and he would shift it milliseconds, but it would change the groove completely. Stuff like that I found so interesting, especially for the new album. There's just a higher level of production with the editing, recording vocals, instruments and mixing. It's fun to hang out with someone whose quality control is really high and whose ears are really good.

Everything just sounds pristine across all of your records and across everything on the label. It's a crystal clear quality to it all.

If something wasn't right, I would have to get it right. Sometimes we would talk about the fact that we're spending all this time trying to mix and record everything, and everyone is going to end up listening to it on low quality MP3s on their fucking ear buds. It's really sad. I work for a non-profit—my classical music organization is a non-profit—and I know some acquaintances that are multi-billionaires that help fund these organizations. This one guy has this system that is literally from like the year 3000. It's for listening to vinyl and stuff. It's like people seeing in black and white and being perfectly content to see their lives in black and white. That's what listening to crappy MP3s is basically. It's really sad.

Do you take that idea when you're setting up to play live? I know you're a big disco fan, and I saw David Mancuso play a few months back. We all had to wait like an hour for the show to start because he had to get the sound just right. When you go out to play, do you put that sort of emphasis on sound?

I wish I could do that, but I'm not David Mancuso. It's hard to make money selling records these days, because everyone just swaps music. So when I play live, I take playing live seriously. I want to go out, jump around and make some money. I don't do that many shows, but I have a really good new crew, so I'm totally psyched for this new tour. I always want it to be the antithesis of the dude hunched over the laptop. So I'm really far from that.

Who are you taking out with you? What should we expect?

I have a live vocoder person to handle all the vocoder parts. It's kind of cool. You can synthesize all the parts, like on the album, just by having one person singing and being able to play all the parts and vo-code it. He decided to get really good at it. There's that dude, then there's this friend of mine playing live electric bass. There's also the drummer from Escort, Ben. And when there's a budget, I will get Claire to play with me. She is the singer on Entropy Reigns. She is awesome. Traveling with five people is pretty crazy, but when we can swing it, it's awesome to have her on stage. She's like the best one on stage anyway.

I read somewhere that between this album and the last one, you were learning how to sing, so to speak.

Yeah, well a lot of the vocal parts are from playing viola, so there are these horrendous three octave things. I spent a lot of time trying to actually sing them. I think if people like this one better or hate it in comparison to the last one, it's probably because of that. I feel like it's the biggest change on the album.

How would you sum up the sound for this album?

I had this idea for it to be little music boxes of sound. I wanted to make the first BassOmatic album. I wanted each track to be a different sound world. I wanted these jewel boxes of sound. I wanted them to be shorter and more complicated. That was the plan. This is probably a huge tactical mistake, but I wanted to think more about sound in songs than make it something that is banging and club friendly.

There's a real ethereal spirituality to the album. Is that on purpose?

I was raised in the most secular, anti-religious household possible. When you play music a lot, you can't help but have these experiences that feel outside of yourself. A lot of it is me trying to reconcile those experiences with a scientific worldview upbringing.

The songs themselves are so composed and so well-structured. When you sit down to write, what's the first idea in your head?

It's different for different songs. You know the composer Aaron Copland? He has this really great book called, What to Listen for in Music. He used to keep little notebooks, and whenever he would think about something, he would write it down. Then when it came time to sit down and write a piece he would just open the notebook and pick one.

So it's not like strictly classical composing, where you've got all the notes laid out before hand?

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