"I came to this record through the Encyclopaedia Of Jazz. As a teenager I played a lot of jazz piano, but more like learning how to play bop or more traditional types of jazz. And I was getting to the point where I was starting to find out about Sun Ra and some of the weirder stuff that was out there, and I was working through the encyclopaedia and I crossed every record off the list if I thought it would be far out and interesting. We had a scam going at the time. HMV in Toronto was pretty relaxed and you could return things for cash value immediately. So I'd go in and buy a stack of ten CDs and I'd just got a CD burner - this was like 1997 - so I'd take them home and burn them all and then take them straight back. And they'd be like, ""You've got the entire recorded work of The Beatles here - you didn't find anything that you liked on there?"" And I'd be like, ""No these are all rubbish, sorry."" And I did the same with John Coltrane. Then I can remember getting to the Albert Ayler page of the encyclopaedia and you know how there's that snooty canonisation thing with jazz music where somebody like Wynton Marsalis or one of those conservative types would be like, ""This guy lost the plot. He went off the deep end."" But this record blew me away. I got this and Interstellar Space, the John Coltrane album, and they both have long periods of free-form wildness on them. But the thing I loved about Albert Ayler is the melodies on the songs - again, a lot of them sound the same, but they feel so elemental to me. It's another record where I feel like those melodies have been there since the beginning of time and it just took him to play them. The sound of his saxophone is so amazing. It's super far-out and forward-looking. If that's too out there for you, there's this album by him called New Grass, where he hired a rock band, and it's like some A&R man had tried to make him have a hit record. There's a song on it called 'Heart Love' - it's less far-out but it has his crazy saxophone playing on it, but with a beautiful melody and this free-soul singing on it."

"I guess there is singing on it, but it's still instrumental music that opens your brain. It starts out almost sounding like weird pots and pans that I guess, my theory is, they're speeding up and slowing down their four-track so it's like [makes hissing, distorted sound]. So it does that for probably ten minutes, you're just sitting there, it's like psychedelic meditation, like you could tone it out. It's definitely analogue, it's probably four-track because, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you feel something lift up, like it un-pause and start to record again and it's just like [makes skronky sound] and there's this weird guitar shit. But then they just have a good thing with mood where it just takes you on this weird textural journey and then somewhere along the way, it gets really heavy and the drummer starts in, and you don't know what he's saying, so it may as well be instrumental. The first Dead C record I ever got was Trapdoor Fucking Exit, which is an amazing title and an amazing album cover. That came out on Siltbreeze, which is a Philly label, so that's close to home. My buddy Richie, who I worked at this brewery with, he turned me on to that kind of thing and he made rethink how the... he basically hit me on to how my path in music should be, which would be: some people can jump up to a decent-sized label, but other people have to do it themselves, much like The Dead C, where you just start small and make it your own artform and then eventually, bigger labels aren't going to be able to ignore you because you're doing it yourself anyway. They can decide, if they like you, you're going to be doing it anyway. So I got that Tusk record pretty early, but I remember listening to it on the airplane in-between touring/recording for this new album and it's just another that just opens your brain and opens your mind. They're just as passionate, or they come off that way, about their music, except they're from Bumblefuck, New Zealand, but they put out tons of records, so it might as well be jazz - they're definitely influenced by that sort of thing. I have no doubt in my mind - but of course I could be wrong - that they're influenced by those psychedelic jazz records."