Well, I was talking with a friend who's the MC on two tracks, and we got on the topic of [Nigerian author] Chinua Achebe's book Things Fall Apart, which follows a man's life in his village. He's subject to many fears; one of the chapters catalogues his phobias and anxieties, and one of them is the fear of the forest. He talks about that like an organizing principle of life, of people who decide to live out on the plains, and people who make the decision to live their lives in the forest, and how those two groups understand each other. I was interested in that as a metaphor for control of nature, fear of nature, fear of chaos.

Was that an organizing principle for the way you set out to do these tracks?

A lot of my work has been characterized by precision, and I tried to allow myself to be a little more anarchic with the sound this time around. A lot of the stuff was done with generative software programs; I re-edit stuff, but the computer generates the initial stuff, and I allow myself to sort of prune rather than create on my own.

Which software were you using for the generative stuff?

Various Max patches that I've written. They're fairly simple, but they get some interesting results.

Tell me a bit about your background.

I'm from Providence, Rhode Island originally. I grew up playing music, including jazz. An early formative experience was through my mom, who had a good friend who was a Sikh; he gave me an Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan tape at age12, and that was a watershed moment. But I always had a eclectic ear, because I grew up surrounded by hippies, and there was a lot of psychedelic music going on as a child.

    I was in bands and all that, and I started trying to make electronic music about 10 years ago, when I moved to L.A., where I lived for a long time. Then I moved to Chicago and didn't have anyone to play music with. Well, technology was at the point where there was a lot of free or cheap stuff available, and it's sort of taken over my life since then.

Are you a gear junkie?

A little bit. I have a lot of analog synths and stuff. I play a bunch of instruments, but I'm into old electronic stuff; I'm an engineer for my day job. I do location sound for documentaries and stuff like that.

How much did vintage gear figure in on Fear of the Forest?

Pretty much all of the keyboard sounds are old synths or electric pianos. I use the Hohner Pianet, and I have an Echoplex I run some stuff through, and this old German Dynacord tape delay. Every sort of piano sound on the album involves some configurations of those three elements. And then I use a Juno 106 on most everything, and a Prophet on most everything, too.

But what you do doesn't sound like a hodgepodge of old things. It's always interesting how something new comes out of blending and smearing vintage sounds.

Certain sounds get calcified, and you've got to look at things in different ways, even with things that are so maligned, like the DX 7. If you put that sound into a new context it can work really well.

Does the discovery of new equipment or software lead to ideas for music?

Not really. I tend to listen a lot to things, a tendency to start with a kernal of an idea that's usually from somewhere else, like the rhythm, and I'll try to program it, I'll try to flip it, I'll try to combine things.

How's your work ethic? What's the usual process?

I usually make an effort of making something everyday, of which 1 percent is usually good. I normally start with rhythms, some beat I hear coming out of a car down the street, etc. and I think maybe I'll try to do that, though I very rarely try to copy someone else. Then I just go from there.

What are you feeling/thinking when you make music? Are you thinking concept?

I don't in general. I have a list of things I try to do, like checking out reggae rhythms, Moroccan rhythms; I experimented a lot with half-time, double-time, two-step kinds of things on this record, doing that lately too. I spend a lot of time trying to sneak more complicated things into things that are really simple. And I have a very sort of dub approach.

Might a particular emotion or idea about atmosphere drive the writing?

Oh, definitely. I think that happens later on, I end up with a lot of material from just sort of sitting around and recording and programming stuff, and then prune back and create a piece out of some of those different things. I always go with some sort of emotional or spiritual idea behind things.

    It's difficult to do that with the collaborations, though ­­-- it was only on "Black Monday" that I had any input writing the lyrics; Jah Sight came in with it and we built that from the ground up. We talked a bit about the concept, decided the song was about trauma, a sound like separation might work. We had the hook and the chorus, and he ended up writing the rest of the words.

How much do you baby pieces through?

So much. It takes me so long, everything. Like today, for example, I have two tracks for this mixtape I'm doing for Dublab, and they're both vocal tracks. I had one we recorded in January and it's been sitting around half-finished, and I worked on it very hard the last week, I changed a few timbres and presets and stuff, and everything now just sounds terrible. So two days ago I threw it all away, a total mess. [laughs] Hopefully I'll just muck around here the next few days and everything'll come into focus. I'm working with a friend on it, and he wants everything to sound more organic, less electronic, since the vocalist on it has a very gritty, British voice. But mixing on computer you get used to things sounding glossy and sheeny, and there's normal listening fatigue.

How do you know when something is ready to be heard? Do you have a sounding board?

I have a couple of people, but for me if I can listen to it myself and have an emotional, visceral reaction to it without thinking, "Oh, that should be changed" or "That's off" or if I listen to it at different times of day and have some sort of reaction to it, then I know it's done.

One can see all the attempts at categorizing that'll be thrown at your music, or the common elements it's assumed to derive from, like dancehall, ragga, two step, reggae, soul, dubstep, etc. Do you feel comfortable giving your sound a genre niche if just for the sake of convenience?

Well, I wouldn't call it dubstep at all ÐÐ I live in New York, I'm not British. I've been doing what I do for eight or nine years. It touches on a lot of stuff that's happening, but I think the "genre" has suffered in the same way that drum & bass began to suffer ÐÐ it became a sort of orthodoxy. What was exciting about that stuff in the beginning was it was sort of throwing out the vocalist in a lot of ways, particularly like a lot of stuff that came out on Hyperdub, for example. It used to be exciting, and different with each release.

    I really get tired of the whole "genre" taxonomy that seems to be such a big part how we book musicians, how we talk about music, how we structure our brains. It's incredible how quickly everything mutates, and all the worst aspects of trend and fashion get hooked into it.

    There's a little more juiced-up kinda sounding stuff on this record, but as I was doing that I was thinking, Is that a British style? At any rate, I try to feel comfortable being thought of as a New York artist, but I'm sort of a global citizen, too.

Much like the way dub-style has become a common vernacular the world 'round.

Dub is an approach that extends out ÐÐ you can say Can is dub in a lot of ways; Pink Floyd is dub. It's the approach of using the studio an an instrument, with all this sort of sleight of hand.

    The interesting thing in Jamaican dub for me is the spiritual angle of it ÐÐ the ghost in the machine, the scream in the name of God...That stuff is fascinating and inspirational to me.