When I started DNA, I did think about it — did kind of go for a visually outrageous thing. Ikue Mori didn’t play drums, I suggested that she learn drums to be in the band. She looks great, and Robin Crutchfield was an artist who was around, and who wanted to make music, but he was most famous for a photograph of himself shirtless with a lot of dolls taped to his torso, and it was an incredibly sexually ambiguous image. He looked really feminine in a really strange way, he didn’t looked like a transvestite. He looked like some kind of weird — and I wanted to create some kind of striking visual image. Ikue didn’t play the drums, I bought her a record of Brazilian rhythms, and she started practicing trying to imitate these rhythms, so it was kind of strange sort of roots music once removed on one level.

The music I came out of, or the music that had meant the most to me was I guess Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis and some Brazilian music, pop music that was very extreme or avant-garde or arty or whatever you want to call it, because this music was, if you remember, really popular in the 60s, in the 60s some of the further out stuff was the most popular stuff, like Jimi Hendrix, who’d go from playing something really bluesy to feedback to busting up his guitar. Miles Davis, his electric bands, and this is the stuff that if anything influenced me directly.