I think one of the interesting issues that The Orb brings up is that we’re so limited by sampling. Today we aren’t really able to talk freely about samples, which for me are like footnotes, ways of connecting and constructing a deep and rich history around the music that we’re making. The legalities of the system totally prohibit this kind of discourse. It’s all reduced to profit-making. It’s as though the only possible reason that you could want to sample someone else’s music is to ride the coattails of someone else’s success. This is, in terms of media and in terms of discourse, totally handicapping us. I think this is also why you have people falling back into this idea of wanting to trip out and thinking about space and stuff like this. Because the entire infrastructure of music is against our thinking of it as anything else. It’s either money or some universal thing floating in the ether. There is never a point where it becomes discourse. That’s a problem.

Terre Thaemlitz