Ever since I was 18 or 19, I've wanted to question the sound, tones, and scale associated with the piano as an instrument symbolic of modern European music.
For me, the keyboard is always an additional sound to the piano. Piano is the main instrument; I can't go anywhere without acoustic piano. It's been my best friend since I was 6 years old.
The only instrument I know how to really play, and the instrument that I absolutely love, is the piano. I have been playing piano ever since I have been 9.
I was aware of that theme of mortality in my music since around 2009. The decaying and the disappearance of the piano sound is very much symbolic of life and mortality. It's not sad. I just meditate about it.
In most musical instruments the resonator is made of wood while the actual sound generator is of animal origin. In cultures where music is still used as a magical force, the making of an instrument always involves the sacrifice of a living being. That being's soul then becomes part of the instrument and in the tones that come forth, the 'singing dead,' who are ever present with us, make themselves heard.
I've been making electronic music since I was 12. I was making music as soon as I knew how to make sounds on a piano. My parents had a baby grand, and the piano is still my favorite instrument. I look at it as a songwriting machine.
Using modern guitar techniques and modern methods on an early instrument is not a very clever thing to do, because it is the authentic spirit of the instrument that should dictate the quality and characteristic of the sound.
Since I've grown up I really wanted to be able to create something different. In Persian music, opposite, again, to classical music, that the instrument developed and evolved over, like, hundreds of years, our instrument all remained the same.
I started playing music when I was 18. My heart was just broken so badly that I decided that I really wanted to start playing music. It felt like the only thing that I could do in response to that. And I've been playing ever since.
I have looked to the Steinway piano since I was three, not only as my ideal choice of an instrument. But, as a responsive and ever reliable friend.
As a musician, your instrument is almost predetermined. I had played drums, piano, clarinet, but when I heard Wayne Shorter play the saxophone, I knew that sound is what I wanted.
I can produce any instrument, any sound that I can imagine; it may be percussive to the audience, but in my mind it may be a piano, a melody, or a tuba, or a harp, or a harmonica. My mission is to allow people to hear the dance in its purity and up against any other type of sound or music.
I wanted to be a musician. I just wanted to be famous because I wanted to escape from what I felt was my limitation in life... And I wanted to write music, and I didn’t know what I was doing and I never had the technique or understanding of it... But I’ve always played the piano and I can improvise on the piano, but the problem is that I can’t write down what I write. I can read music but I can’t write numbers.
Since I first fell in love with choral music when I was 18 and began composing at 21, I've been listening to these recordings of British choirs. I just fell in love with that sound - that pure, clean, pristine sound - and I think it's probably been the biggest influence on my sound.
When I was coming up in Miami, the music in the city at the time sounded completely different. I loved it, but it just wasn't the type of music I wanted to make. I wanted my wordplay to be more sophisticated. I wanted the sound to be more lush. I wanted my music to sound like who I was and aspired to be - boss.
My first instrument is piano, I play some piano and guitar. So my solo music is more like real singer/songwriter type stuff.
I think it was inevitable that I get into synthesizer music. I always wanted to deal with sound more than anything else. I couldn't get the sounds I wanted out of the piano.