Well, I started on a classical course with the clarinet, but then I switched to the saxophone and so the Blues was the first big thing for me. I was never one of those monster horn players who could play Bebop — so I tended to do long notes and try to say something that way. I was really influenced by guitar players and harmonica players and, of course, the extraordinary sax players like John Coltrane and Joe Henderson, Sonny Rollins, and Pharaoh Sanders, who were really blowing it out and trying different things.

Oh yeah, sure. In school, all my friends were seventeen-year-old music geeks. So I got to hear all kinds of stuff. I had some really cool music classes, where we listened to John Cage, Steve Reich’s tape loop stuff and his Music for 18 Musicians, which I loved. We looked at Philip Glass too, although I was never so into Philip’s timbres. They were too trebly for me.

Getting into Feldman happened a little later. But then I moved to San Francisco with Jamie, who was a massive record head —

Twenty.

He’s a fantastic artist. He retired from curating, but he discovered a lot of people and gave them their early shows: Kara Walker, Margaret Kilgallen, Barry McGee, you name it. When he was the curator at the Drawing Center, he encouraged Kara to make those first big pieces of hers. She did it — it was amazing — and she made him a little cut-out that she pinned on his cubicle, and which he kept. But yes, he’s a fantastic artist. He was in a lot of group shows in New York in the early days. His work was pretty intense. He would press dead birds or mice in these Old Master art books and create absolutely beautiful pieces from them.

Oh, he wasn’t killing them! But it was a little too much for some of these collectors. I’ve got two new records coming out that are going to have some of his work on the covers. He’s done many of my covers: Cascade, The Garden of Brokenness, Sparkle Division’s Jupiter Lounge.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, he was my mentor. He taught me about art and music. He worked at a record store when I first met him, and he would come home from the buying truck with the coolest shit — all the German stuff from the 70s.

One that really made an impression on me was Brian Eno’s Music for Airports because it’s melancholy. And then I found Eno’s Discreet Music, which has an operational diagram on the back that shows how he set up his long delay echo system with a tape recorder. I saw it and thought “Oh, I can do that!” Old tape decks were cheap at junk stores in those days. So I went out and bought some and I started experimenting with that. Actually, my new record, September 23, is a remastering of one of the early piano loop and tape delay pieces that I made around that period, which was never released.

No, I was around twenty-one years old and we were living on Jay Street in Brooklyn. Our neighbor downstairs had a piano — he was the rehearsal pianist for the American Ballet Theater, I think, a fabulous Southern Queen who eventually became very famous as Lypsinka.

John Epperson, yes, he and his partner were the first people we met when we moved there. He let me go down to his loft when he was at work and play his piano. I had a cheap little Radio Shack cassette recorder that I’d put on the piano while I’d play this horrible piece I’d been working on since I was in high school or something, trying to get it together. And then I’d take it upstairs and test out William Burroughs’s cut-up technique, by making loops. That’s how that started. I got some really nice feedback loops for the delay system and I would record that live to another cassette to see what would happen. The thing about feedback is that too much of it just destroys everything. So you have to surf it and be very careful with it. Anyway, the new album is one of those pieces.

They’re everywhere! There are cassettes everywhere that we’ve been archiving.

Archival works are archival works. They were one-time live recordings, so the most I can do is maybe try to get rid of some of the tape hiss because I don’t like that. It just closes down the music. With these old pieces of mine, everything is in the mid-range, and you have to find the music. Get rid of anything in the bass, because that’s going to be tape rumble, and it’s not part of the music. No subwoofers, you know —

Not with this stuff. You don’t need it. We just take off the highs and the lows, and then we find it. And it sounds great. It’s amazing, considering how badly recorded all these things were and that I didn’t know what I was doing.

No, I was just doing it! For about ten years.

I kept trying. I met engineers, and they would tell me to try this or that. And then I started to get better equipment. [Turning as Gary Wright enters the room] Gary, come say hello to Cyrus. Gary Wright, my chief engineer, Sparkle Division partner, and tour manager. Gary lives here too.

Gary Wright: I’m one of them.

We were having fun. Preston was bringing all this cool shit into the studio, and I said, “Oh, well, maybe I’ll pull out my sax.” He was like, “Hello, here’s the microphone!” We worked on it for a few years — I thought it was great, but Preston had cold feet. Then finally, during the middle of the pandemic, I said, “Let’s just do it. Drop it in the summer and see what happens.” We did a crazy album cover with Leonora, the Queen of Williamsburg.

Oh yes, we were very close friends. I was like her son. I helped take care of her when she got old. When I had my shop, she’d come down from her apartment all dolled up after watching the soap operas — she’s Sicilian-American, and they don’t come out of the house in schmatas — she always had on her designer glasses and her furs. She’d come bring me food, and sit in my store until I closed, and call out to her friends, and just carry on. She was a legend on Bedford Avenue.

1989. We had been in the loft I mentioned on Jay Street for nine years before, but we had to leave because they were going to tear down the whole neighborhood for redevelopment. We sued them with the other loft tenants and they eventually had to settle with us, so we took that money and were able to renovate this beautiful mess at 118 N. 11th Street and turn it into what became Arcadia. We stayed there for twenty years. I finally had a budget, so I got to have a real studio there.

Oh yeah, we got rich. But we were white trash with money. We spent it so fast it just disappeared — producing bands, putting on shows.

Yes, I have an amazing recording of a live concert of hers.

She had her own sound effects guy doing these live effects, which were incredible. And it was packed. Everyone was there — 400 people, slammed, but I still lost $600 on the show because I had to rent a Steinway for her. She didn’t like my piano.

We had Rasputina. We booked them a lot. It was run a bit like a company: if someone was booked on the second week, maybe they’d do the door on the first week or something. Of course, everybody was stealing from me, but what are you gonna do with these kids? That’s New York and it was fantastic. Not everybody got to play. Mark Ribot wanted to play and sent me a demo, but it wasn’t what we were doing. So he didn’t get in, poor thing. Anohni we featured a lot, of course, when she started.

Me and Jamie were like her art parents in New York when she first started. She calls me Mommy. I’m so proud of her. My God, what she’s done! She played Arcadia many times. I was also working quite a lot with this female, folk-pop duo, The Murmurs, they were terrific. But then they got ruined when they got signed by a big label.

The big labels ruin everything. After all these other bands saw The Murmurs get a record deal, they wanted me to help get them signed next. I was like, “Look, after what happened with these fuckers, you can pay me to produce your demo, and then you take it and do what you want with it.” I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

They were all artists and they were always invited. But we made a lot of noise. Sometimes they complained late at night when it was really loud. These lesbians would sometimes come up the back stairs, full-bush-naked, and I’d be like, “Okay, okay! I’m turning it down!” For a couple of years, it got to be too much with Arcadia. Then we would just have a few parties a year, like my birthday, New Year’s Eve, a black sheep Christmas and Thanksgiving. We’d polish up Granny’s old silverware for that and I’d always get a whole big thing of pâté from Florent to serve.

Florent was the most fabulous French diner in the meatpacking district of New York. All the drag queens were there, Connie Girl, everybody. And the pâté — the goose liver pate! Honey, even the vegetarians ate that shit.

Oh, of course, we used to go to all the art movie houses like Film Forum. Jamie liked horror movies, so sometimes he would drag me up to Times Square, when it was a horrible, pitiful mess with these pissy, nasty old theaters, to see these horror films. It wasn’t for me. We’d come out and see the zombies on the street — and it was like the movie was still going on!

At that period, I was working on The Hymns of Oblivion material, because I had all these synthesizers and everything in the studio.

Exactly. Now I had real faders, plugins, all that. I was working on that for a long time, but nobody wanted it. And then, when CD burners came out, I went back into the storage room — the Land That Time Forgot — and pulled out all these old loops and started transferring them to digital because I knew, first of all, the tapes I bought in the late 1970s wouldn’t last.

Yeah. Tapes fall apart, the glue loses its integrity, the dust turns back to dust. Only the plastic lasts forever. When I started digitizing them, flakes of the magnetic strip were crumbling and scraping away, which created all these gaps and silences.

Exactly. So that’s how The Disintegration Loops happened, coming out of that process. That’s when all the shit really went down.

I realized what was happening particularly with the second one. In the second one, I started trying to add a counter melody and then I realized that when it starts disintegrating away, you don’t need any counter melodies. Just stay out of the way. Make sure your levels are good. And just see what happens. The process meant a recording was only a one-time thing. I knew that it was a masterpiece as soon as I heard it. I had to call everybody to come over right away and hear it. The phone wire started lighting up! Anohni was calling David Tibet and everybody else in London to tell them about it.

That’s what I always tried to go for: something timeless, something eternal. That’s why I like loops that just do one thing — there’s no beginning and no end, you can just listen to it forever and be in that moment. I call it a “bubble of eternity.”

No it all came in order, and that’s the way I released it. The six pieces, and then I added the 1.2 and 1.3 at the end for denouement.

Everybody says that. It’s not true. People don’t buy CDs, so they don’t read the liner notes. But the liner notes explain that I made them over the summer of 2001 and had just finished them right before 9/11. We had set up speakers on the roof and were listening to it when the attacks actually happened.

Yes. I borrowed a neighbor’s camcorder and I shot the video that evening, in the last hour of daylight on that day.

I will never go see that show. I’m honored to be in it, but it’s too much for me. I saw 9/11 happen, I was there. I mean, I remember when the wind changed that day and the smell came — we just went and curled up in one little closed room, crying. It was so horrifying. I couldn’t relive that.

David Keenan was the first one to write about the album, in The Wire. I cried. I went to Other Music in New York and got the magazine and cried. Then my orders just started going crazy, and I was able to pay off my $30,000 of debt. I didn’t have any money. I was about to lose the loft. In fact, I got an eviction notice on the day of 9/11.

Yeah, isn’t that amazing? You never know what happens when you show up for work. Instead of being depressed about not having a job, get in the studio and make some work for Christ’s sake!

I love California. New York just never stops. It’s always a drag unless you’re rich. I mean, it was fun. We had a lot of fun back when everything was cheap, but I also had so much more energy back then. My God, I can’t believe it. Now I just want to sleep.

I’d never thought I’d be able to buy a house but look at this. We have gardens all around — fruit and flowers all year. Limes, guavas, Meyer lemons, blood oranges, figs, grapes, pomegranates, persimmons, you name it.

I buy all my friends’ records. I know all these cool people who do really cool things, Abul Mogard, Lawrence English, Yann Novak…

Oh, my darling girl. I love her. She’s wild.

Who isn’t? I mean, he was the guy.

Yeah, usually in the office. I listen to NTS, sometimes the BBC can be good.

Well, I have a cool new record coming out with Richard Chartier, in October, which Lawrence English mastered. And that’s great. But I don’t really give a shit anymore. I’ve done everything I wanted to do.

Sometimes I do, and it’s so beautiful that it breaks my heart. It’s profoundly moving.

That’s true, it’s very direct. It basically is: “Here it is. Enjoy and see if you like it.” It’s mind-blowing, really, to hear these comments though. I’m very happy I did what I wanted to do and that it finally got noticed after twenty fucking years in obscurity, which was frustrating.

Yes, like William Burroughs, I’m a late bloomer. But it shows that it can happen. That’s what I tell the kids.

Keep going, honey. Say “yes” now, because you can always say “no” later. Don’t give up on your dreams. That, and get a good lawyer!