breadth of my own listening and also the fact I'm pretty voracious, -- I don't want to stay on the same thing forever - I can be that. I took The Velvet Rope by Janet Jackson sort of like as a guide for this album. I think Total Loss is a super varied record, there's a lot of different styles and songs on it, and to me, her record had every genre of song, ever on it. Are you still doing your PhD? TK: Yeah. I've heard that you like to keep you academic work separate from your musical endeavours. TK: I wouldn't say that I keep them separate, they're just very separate, very different expressions of like my life, they're totally different. Do you ever find the boundaries between the two overlapping? TK: Yeah, there's a common wellspring, which is me. The ways in which they overlap would take a long time for me to explain, because it's not intuitive to say there's a common thread between this experimental R&B stuff and developments in 19th century logic, but I'm attracted to all the things I do for common reasons, which I can see personally. He certainly uses the word "weird" to describe his own compositions quite often. Makes the whole thing sound calculated, and not a little bit contrived. Is that what the indie-r&b guys set out to do? Making purportedly "weird" records to distinguish themselves? He's trying to make something unique, combining influences some would see as being