A lot of your compositions deal with harrowing themes of a psychological or political nature, yet very few artists expose their audience to these dark and hard-to-swallow experiences, preferring to entertain. Should your concert come with a trigger warning?
I don’t know, I think what I do is entertaining [laughs]. I feel very ill, physically and mentally ill when I hear Christmas carols. I feel so angry, so much like getting out a sniper’s rifle when I hear that kind of music. And Broadway shows with their sentimental songs, those kinds of things are terrifying for me because they call up memories from far back and I don’t necessarily know what they are but they just break me, they break my heart, they break my soul. Iannis Xenakis, the great Greek composer, he said the same thing. He couldn’t listen to the music his mother had played to him when he was young, because it was akin to thinking of someone who was disemboweled. And so for me, if I do a song that’s what you’d say is pretty, my interpretation takes it to another place because it shows the death of the virgin, the animal that goes out in the spring and then gets shot by a hunter. It is prettiness that is very alarming to me, so I tend to do a juxtaposition of something that might be pretty with something that is harsh, just because I feel that they occur in life together. I do it to save myself, to protect myself so that I don’t walk out like Bambi. I’m too afraid to do it and it’s much better to be on guard.
For me, something that is ugly is unrefined, repetitious, squalid, simple, not like a country ballad but an amateur version of noise music. Ugh, that’s just taking the freeway. You’re taking the freeway again, taking the easy way again. No, no, no. Go down the back alleys and then see what happens.