Jason Moran Quotes

The Zombies were really unique - they had elements of jazz and classical music in their songs and songwriting. They had a very, very different sound compared to a lot of their contemporaries at the time.

I'm trying to bring a little bit of every type of sauce into one type of sound. Something that's really fresh.

I was listening to Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd, because that was new music for me. I really hadn't been up on them. I mean, I'd heard of them, but I wasn't up on their music. And I kept listening to Radiohead, and I was like, Man, I want to make hip-hop that feels like Radiohead. I want to make hip-hop that can use guitars and soul and jazz and just fuse it all together.

I'm just trying to avoid any sort of generic kind of music - I don't want to do generic jazz or fusion.

I'm trying to use people like Meredith Monk and Philip Glass and Terry Riley as the backing tracks for new pop songs. It's really hard trying to use the format and write a pop song on top of avant-garde music, so we'll see. It could be cool, or it could totally flop.

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.

Prince turned experimental music into pop music. 'When Doves Cry,' the whole 'Purple Rain' soundtrack - he was inspired by the Cocteau Twins and new wave pop and brought it into R&B when he first started, and then it became this cool, next-level, kind of hard-to-digest music. Which is what I felt 'House of Balloons' was.

Rock and ambient music might as well reside on opposite sides of the galaxy, so it's almost shocking when a band like Deerhunter melds the two so effectively.

Babymetal's music is kind of - no one else creates this kind of music. When Babymetal first started, we wanted to give the impression of like, 'What the heck?!'

I thought it would be interesting to play classical music on rock instruments.

I'm a rapper and, obviously, hip hop rap is my main thing. But I also like to dive into different genres and kind of be a bit more experimental and open myself up a bit, whether that's taking influence from jazz or soul or electronic.

For more than 10 years, Daniel Snaith has been playing mad scientist with pop and psychedelic music. As Manitoba, and more recently as Caribou, he's pushed the genres' limits with electronics and studio trickery.

Working with Timbaland, you know it's not gonna sound like anything else out there today. The sound is very next-level.

I think EDM and metal and rock have been together already for a long time. Bands like Nine Inch Nails, Linkin Park, the Prodigy - they all have influences from both.

We are aiming to create a one and only new music genre that exceeds the limits of pop and metal music.

Bjork for sure. Definitely, I would like to do like something with Tommy Genesis, too. There's a lot of people actually.

I was always interested in mixing experimentation with pop music, and Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream - we were all doing it at the same time, just very isolated from each other, all in our different cellars, in different worlds, without the Internet - underground in every sense.

I wanted to find a bridge between Musique Concrete, electro-acoustic music, and proper rock music.

'Sunshine Superman' was a pioneering work that for the first time presented a fusion of Celtic, jazz, folk, rock, and Indian music as well as poetry.

I've been listening to a lot of music by Arca.

English and world music were something that I had immense love for, and to get together with a fellow Indian and bring this sound and vibe to the world feels great.

I'm no Robert Christgau or Chuck Klosterman, but I would say that Landlady is like if Harry Nilsson was produced by Brian Eno. Or, if David Byrne fronted Wilco. Those are my two hoity-toity musical epigrams.

I had this instrument that I built in high school. It was a huge, six-foot-long stringed instrument, and I started playing with that amplified and singing through power electronic stuff. I played those shows, and it would blow the lid off of everybody, and everybody would flip out.

Alchemy is one of the good quote-unquote south-Asian experiences in that it has a wide variety of classical to experimental music.

I've always wanted to dress like this, and I've always wanted my music to have the edge, the twist to it.