On December 5, H. Wiley Hitchcock, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Andrew Imbrie all gave up their mortal forms, but they left us with their minds— signified by their corpuses of works, each of which was extensive.

What “sad” music do you like to listen to, and does it make you feel happily sad, or sadly happy?

Only now, 16 years later, is the irony fully apparent—that the technology that created a Goliath music industry also has served as the stone that threatens to topple it.

The Japanese soundscape, whether in the office or outdoors in the neighborhood, is neither particularly silent nor even relatively quiet—it’s full, rich, and for the most part quite noisy.

What tricks or techniques do you have to get the creative juices flowing and that compositional ball rolling?

LIFE—fluid, invisible, inaudible… is simple yet deep in its fundamental concepts, important in its themes, and excellent in its realization.

Does “unuseless” culture have any musical implications?

There might be issues of inadvertent liability if you are trying to be particularly discrete when recording out in an urban setting and keeping your equipment under wraps.

I’ve been thinking about creative uses of microphones and unorthodox recording techniques in general, and was wondering if any of you have any that you’d like to tell us about.

Examining the gap between a teacher who somehow still likes to pick up and hold his music, and his students, to whom a song, a track, a tune, a composition, is as ephemeral as an infrared signal from a game controller.