Your show at the Trunk Space was very energetic. Reading through your CD (of live recordings) it was apparent that you took a journalistic or poetic approach to new tour experiences. How long have you kept a tour diary? Is it a physical notebook or is it digital?

I have a large, backed-up glob of text data on several hard drives. It’s probably five or six megs of text at this point. I have notebooks too but I usually type up any text of worth that I scribble in there. I’ve been keeping a tour journal for years but only recently, and very tentatively, began blogging excerpts. I intend to focus more on writing on the back end of 2014 as I recuperate from a pretty intense 2013 and early 2014. The blog’s going to get weird, and I might start to think about a longer-form outlet for my writing. We’ll see.

How many times have you played at the Trunk Space or other Phoenix venues in the past? What have previous shows or crowds been like in Phoenix?

Good Lord, I wish I knew off the top of my head. It’s at least six. I don’t think I’ve gone a year without playing there since 2009 or so. But the irony is the first two times I tried to play there I had to cancel. The first was in 2005 on the tour supporting “Central Hug/Friendarmy/Fractaldunes,” in which we got into a wreck just outside of Blythe, CA. The second was in 2006 on a tour with So Many Dynamos as my backing band, in which our van blew its water pump…again, just outside of Blythe, CA, which really freaked me out, so much so that I became obsessed with Blythe and made two E.P.s with it in mind, “The Blythe Archives Volume One” and “The Blythe Archives Volume Two.”

How would you describe your music to an “uninitiated listener”?

Mark Robinson from Unrest had a great response for this when people asked him a similar question, and I’ll paraphrase it. His idea was depending on who was asking; for his grandparents or people who just seemed like they casually liked music, he’d say “We sound like R.E.M.” or the closest mainstream equivalent. For punk kids, he’d say “like Mission of Burma but more calm.” I’m really really loosely paraphrasing but the idea is great. There is no “uninitiated,” it’s more that people know and care about drastically different music, so you have to tell them things in terms of what they know. When I knew less about electronic music and someone tried to describe Tiesto to me in terms of other EDM artists I’d never heard, I was frustrated and clueless. When they used concrete, relatable terms, I knew what they meant a bit better.

To more directly answer your question, if a stranger I knew nothing about asked me what my music sounded like, I’d say something like “’80s synth pop [everybody knows what that sounds like] combined with Woodie Guthrie [everybody knows what that sounds like.]” If it was someone who knew very little about contemporary music, like my grandparents, I’d say something general, like, “I’m a folk singer and sometimes I use computers to make sound effects.” To someone who has music tastes similar to mine, I’d say “I’m really influenced by the aesthetic of New Order, the production of Arthur Russell, the words of Leonard Cohen and Michael Stipe, and the consciousness of Billy Bragg.” None of those are satisfactory answers, but it’s important to give people an idea sometimes. I cringe when I read about musicians saying their music is unclassifiable or uncomparable. People who say that usually sound like a drab combo meal of Fleet Foxes and boring “Carrot Rope”-era Pavement.

What influences do you draw from musically?

See above, although that’s just a limited part. New Order, Billy Bragg, Leonard Cohen, are all huge. I also listen to a lot of 20th century instrumental/”classical” [an annoying misnomer but people know I’m talking about orchestras and sheet music when I say that so there it is] music, particularly Arvo Part’s singular use of harmony and tone clustering. I adore impressionism (Debussy, Ravel, etc.) and I’m a sucker for Stravinsky when he gets creative with percussion. I also had a very mind-blowing seminar on John Cage taught by David Grubbs of Gastr del Sol, though I’d hesitate to say that Cage himself is what influenced me there; more his associates and the people who inspired him (Schoenberg) or were inspired by him (Partch) and the guidance of Meister Grubbs in interesting new thinking on aesthetics.

Your lyrics are sometimes dense or esoteric yet maintain a certain poetic and intellectual quality that is relatively unique. What kind of “formal education” do you have? What did you study? (You have that line in Erica Western Teleport “you took a year or two off to decode what the camera pulled in / the USB port fried”. Did that come from personal experience?)

I studied physics — successfully up to the level of a B.Sc., and then I dropped out of grad school twice, once for theoretical physics and once again for aerospace engineering. It really messed up my brain in a great way, learning to think like a scientist and using those patterns applied to musical and aesthetic questions. I also sat for a battery of undergraduate coursework in music theory and a few grad seminars in aesthetics in 2007/2008, though that work hasn’t yet added up to a credential.

What influences do you draw from that shape your aesthetic in general? A lot of your subject matter relates to topics as diverse as Czechoslovakian politics to Cylons to heartbreak to cyberpunk-esque technobabble.

Star Trek: The Next Generation. In all seriousness, I’m not entirely certain where my brain stops and my music-making begins, and I think that’s probably pretty natural and normal. I just write about what’s on my mind, like everyone. What’s on my mind tends to be things like the long-term geopolitical outlook, astrobiology, religion as it relates to cosmology — the kinds of topics science fiction writers wake up thinking about, but applied to the form of tech folk/speed folk/whatever music.

You also play with a lot of religious and political imagery. Do you feel comfortable identifying with any particular political organization/party and do you adhere to any particular religious doctrine?

Not yet, but I feel very comfortable eschewing several: Republicans, libertarians, nihilists of all stripes (especially those who claim they’re anarchists), and especially Evangelical Christianity, under whose oppressive and deceptive influence I was raised. I’m less comfortable declaring allegiance to any particular group at this point. This is not because I think groups/parties are inherently bad, but rather because I think there isn’t one that accurately represents my interests at present. I’m a registered Democrat and I vote that way most of the time, though I’m partly ashamed and partly proud that I was one of a handful of liberal Florida voters in 2000 who lost Al Gore the White House by voting for Ralph Nader, and at the time I was a registered Republican so I could support John McCain in the primaries against W because of McCain’s remarkably progressive stance on media ownership issues. I try to make every decision on a case-by-case basis, but in our society that’s extremely difficult and, sadly, of questionable value; the political game seems rigged and over to me. I still vote and everyone should because we should do all the good we can, but I’m not excited about it.

The religious system that most closely reflects my faith would be Unitarian Universalism, but I do not attend any services. I see value in many religions and I oppose strict atheism just as I oppose dogmatic Catholicism and Islam, but I find myself agreeing with many things said by atheist thinkers, such as their assertion that morality (which I absolutely believe in, not a foregone conclusion these days is it?) stems from consciousness and relationships rather than an arbitrary god or book. The difference between their stance and mine is that I view ontology as an ethical guidepost: there seems to be a universal inborn ought rather than some dour glowing Caucasian guy in a beard and white robe saying what we should and shouldn’t do, and I emphatically think rather than there being nothing at all, some black horror void where all effort careens into an abyss, that there is an emergent structure vaguely resembling morality and an emergent universal teleological ought. I know Bergson’s been thoroughly discredited by a lot of logical positivists, and I don’t care; his concepts in “Creative Evolution” need buttressing but I think they’re very, very close to the way things are. The universe “started” (to use time-language, always a problem!) as a black formless void, to paraphrase Genesis and also every modern cosmology textbook, and now we have ferns and airplanes and slime molds and spacecraft and sex and LSD and the Golden Gate Bridge and dance clubs and literature and fish tacos, “ex nihilos” as the Greeks said, out of nothing. Despite everything we know about thermodynamics a high entropy state, at some point in time, flashed into a low-entropy state, and even logical positivists are stumped here when you ask them what the prime cause was because they assert that such questions are nonsensical, by definition unknowable — which I think is their Achilles’ heel, their ultimate cop out. Something’s up here and we’re too dumb to figure it out at this stage in our evolution, and maybe that’s fine, but I’m going to keep trying and I think that’s extremely important. And if someone else’s way of trying is atheism, yay. And if someone else’s way of trying is attending the Anglican Church, yay. I just draw the line at dogmatically-derived morality and philosophy, because I had way way way way way too much of that as a kid in intellectually lazy proto-fascist puppet show youth groups and I’m allergic to it.

Your first full-length debuted in 1998. Have you been touring since then?

No, I started in earnest when I dropped out of grad school in 2003.

What musical projects were you a part of before Emperor X? How did Emperor X come to be?

Several high school bands, a project called Thee Harmonious Fists which is ongoing, and a band called The Cadets which was really important to me but which fell apart as we all went different directions in life. (The Cadets sort of mutated into XMTR. Derailleur, which I contribute to sometimes and which remains the primary songwriting outlet of Chuck Smyth who was the singer in The Cadets and who is one of the best songwriters I’ve ever met.) I was also involved tangentially with a project called Applied Communications as a producer/engineer/superfan, although the guy behind that project (as with all of the above still one of my closest friends) scrubbed all Appl Comm content from the internet. I consider this a criminal act for which I hope he will one day be prosecuted.

Can you describe your geocaching project a little bit? It seemed to be a very innovative and artistic form of marketing. Was it nice seeing a few pageviews go up after that NPR article?

It was a lot of fun. I expanded it significantly after that NPR piece, and all the info’s still up at http://westernteleport.com. I think a little over half were found. The rest were probably destroyed by security guards or cleaning staff.

At the Trunk Space show, you were using some kind of electronic sampler. What type of hardware was that and what is your recording environment like?

It’s a Teenage Engineering OP-1 and it’s the most important gear purchase of my life so far. It’s basically EDM in a candy bar-sized mini-pad. You can do anything imaginable on it. It has its own strange workflow that takes months to master, but once you have the hang of it it’s…man, it’s hard to describe, but I usually just cut to the chase and describe it as the Fender Stratocaster of electronic music in that it’s the device that makes a new sound pallette available to people for a relatively affordable price all in one package. If the price point were just a bit lower I think this device would be fundamentally altering the concept of folk music, and it or a device like it will do that eventually for sure. Folk music involves microprocessors now. Welcome to 2014. ☺

When did you start working with and what has it been like being on Plan-It-X Records?

Chris Clavin came to a few shows in Bloomington, invited me to a Plan-It-X Fest, and said he wanted to put something out. It was very quick and natural, and he’s one of the best people in music right now. Such….WEIRD, taste, you know? TRULY weird, in a great way, and a great songwriter. I’m proud to be associated with him and his various projects and the other bands on the label.

A lot of your songs also involve some form of transit and touring must keep you on the road a lot. What’s it like experiencing that type of constant novel stimuli? How does that kind of lifestyle and constant shift between various types of cultures/subcultures influence you?

Following the unattributed edict to “write what you know,” it comes up a lot in my lyrics and writing because it’s how I get around. But I have to admit a certain sneaky joy that I get to express the world as seen from a bus or train window or a bleak craggy sidewalk by an empty parking lot in some blazing southern suburb because it’s very different than the world most people get to experience. It’s a pain that I can’t drive, but it’s also been a gift in that I can describe the world in great detail from a unique vantagepoint.

You have a new album coming out?

The Orlando Sentinel, June 27th, pre-order now and get the first track! http://emperorx.bandcamp.com/album/the-orlando-sentinel