G: Are the tracks recently featured on your MySpace page going to be on the album?
DL: One tune, “Nous Tombons Dans Elle,” this French disco thing, will be on the album.

G: That track has some wild vocals. I love the ending.
DL: With all the kids singing? It’s really just me – it’s all my voice. That song was recorded on four-track a few years ago, so I just recorded those tracks slower and made my voice high.

G: How long have you been playing and making music?
DL: Twenty years? I don’t know. I was a band nerd in high school and a music major in college. I went to school in Texas, at Texas Tech. I was a performance major there.

G: How long have you been making music on a solo basis?
DL: Probably since college, when I started doing four-track stuff.

G: Are there any local artists who you find exciting musically?
DL: There are tons of people. Matmos is exhibit A, and also Kevin Blectum and Wobbly and Safety Scissors.

G: Most of those people are doing something somewhat different than your music.
DL: Yeah. Kevin [Blectum] might be the closest.

G: It’s just interesting that you’ve mentioned people who aren’t traditional songwriters, at least in comparison to you. Their approaches tend to be more fragmented and sometimes based in electronics or samples.
DL: I grew up on the Beatles and Beach Boys. People have sometimes compared me to a guy on Smalltown Supersound, Max Tundra. Locally I also like Kelley Polar [also of Metro Area], Bevin Blectum’s brother. He has a string quartet. He and Bevin Kelly are from Oakland.

G: As a music journalist [for Pitchfork], what’s it like to read things written about you and your music?
DL: I’ve had more people complain about a review I’ve written [laughs].

G: Does making music inform the way you write about it?
DL: Definitely. When I started [writing as a journalist], I wanted to write about things I didn’t see written about that much.

G: Hearing your music and Lindstrom’s, it makes sense that you would forge a connection.
DL: Lindstrom and I share a lot of influences that I hadn’t even realized.
I remember the first time he wrote me [about my music] he was talking about Paul McCartney and [laughs] his big thing was Todd Rundgren. I wasn’t a big Rundgren fan, but he wasn’t the first person to listen to my stuff and mention Rundgren. Lindstrom is into produced prog-y pop.
I feel really fortunate just to be able to work with [Lindstrom and Joakim Hoaglund].
That first track [“Forelopic Bit”] on Lindstrom and Prins Thomas is, to me, the best example of how to make a dance track from these really prog-y fusion-y influences. A lot of people are trying to do that right now. You can go out and hear these Balearic and beardo DJs just playing tracks. Sometimes that works -- Optimo is bad ass -- and sometimes it doesn’t. But Lindstrom is one of the few guys who are actually trying to make original songs incorporating those influences

G: Amongst musician-DJs, most are stronger on one side of that equation. Like some people prefer Ricardo Villalobos’s tracks to Villalobos the DJ. Do you like Todd Terje?
DL: I love his reedit of Michael Jackson’s “I Can’t Help It.” It’s a nine-minute version, and in the middle he strips out all of the song for this conga break – I think it’s percussion from the song that he somehow separated [from the rest of the tracks].

G: Your song “Conversational” might be my favorite thing on Lindstrom’s contribution to the Late Night Tales mix series.
DL: That song is two or three years old. I wrote it at a time when I was just writing tunes. It’s not even going to be on the album.

G: What are you listening to at the moment?
DL: To be honest, what I’m listening to is salsa music. There have been all these great reissues. Also classical and impressionistic piano music – a lot of Ravel, a lot of Debussy, a lot of Schoenberg, and a lot of Satie.