Phil Elverum Quotes

I was real into Devo, Pavement, Captain Beefheart, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

R Stevie Moore was obviously a huge influence and is still a very big influence in my life.

Obviously, Sonic Youth has been a huge part of my life for many, many years, and I love all those guys dearly.

I picked up the bass kind of postpunk-style. There's a real art to not learning how to play an instrument and being able to still play it.

I've been into Sonic Youth since junior high school. I think I kind of have ADD, so it's good music for ADD because it just throws you in different directions all the time. I really like Kim Gordon's voice and Thurston Moore's voice, and I like the guitars going off on tangents.

Hearing things like 'Wake Up' by Lora Logic, or the Raincoats' 'In Love' - that was something I wasn't prepared for. I couldn't hear anything that came before it in the music, and I didn't want to. I was absolutely in love with its out-of-nowhereness.

To be in a band, at least according to the rules of rock in the 1970s, one must know how to play an instrument. But rather than waste time solving that problem, No Wavers ignored it. The point was simply to make music, not to learn how first.

Sonic Youth could never really get it together acoustically - quite frankly, it wasn't something we were really that interested in.

I got into alternative rock in the early 80s, bands like Husker Du and The Replacements. Bob Mould's playing was a huge influence. It was very heavy with a lot of open tunings, which was great because I played in trios, so I used open tunings to get a fuller sound.

I don't know what the vintage Sonic Youth sound is.

Bands such as LiLiPUT and Essential Logic were just as unorthodox as Gang of Four or Wire, even taking their sounds a step further with shrieking vocals and saxophone.

If you go back and listen to the album 'Name' was on, there were a lot of garage songs on it.

I really liked punk music and experimental music that my brother was taking me to go see in the city, when I was probably, like, 13 years old. I was seeing a lot of teenagers making 'weird' music, and I think that was probably a big part of the reason that I actually started to play myself.

I remember when I first saw 'Guided by Voices'; those earlier recordings are so deconstructed, kind of like four-track music, and so artful in their collage and in their weird fragility.

I've been a Nick Cave fan since the early '80s when he was part of The Birthday Party thing singing Australian self-destructive rock band and I've always followed his work and loved it.

I feel like I'm a rock artist. I don't feel like I'm a pop artist. And I'm alt rock. I'm indie rock. I'm punk rock. Because it comes from the pots and pans. It's a lot of me, but I've got multiple personalities.

I've always been a huge Butthole Surfers fan. The first time I saw them was in the early '80s when all they had out was their first EP. I thought they were amazing. They've always been a huge influence and one of my all-time favorite bands.

I was greatly influenced by musique concrete when I was, like, 10. I was completely mesmerized by the idea that you could make music out of sounds. So that's been a constant influence on all my work.

People like Aphex Twin, Jason Pierce, Jarvis Cocker and William Orbit are actively showing their interest in a wider field of music. Jarvis and I met on a benefit for an extraordinary man called LaMonte Young, the father of minimalism, who worked with John Cale and shared a loft with Yoko Ono.

As I got older, I fell in love with Radiohead, and 'OK Computer' is one of my favorite albums of theirs. Sonically, the tone of the guitars on tracks like 'Electioneering' just rips right through me.

I'm definitely a cult artist.

I listen to a lot of indie or rock music.

I've always been a rocker. Like ever since I was really young. I had a crush on the Green Day guys. That's always been what I was like and been my interest.

Doolittle was a major influence on the Seattle grunge scene, which emerged in the early 1990s.

Things that excite me are these four different bands: Wire, with a song called 'Champs,' Misfits, with a song called 'Hybrid Moments,' R. Stevie Moore, and Wipers 'Wait A Minute.'