What drew you to music?

At first, it was a fairly unambitious pursuit - more like inertia. I started out singing in a boys' choir, then I began playing the cello, and after that I formed a band and spent a year as its drummer. I still cannot really play the drums very well, but at the time, being in a rock band seemed cool. I was actually "fired" from it because I became more interested in drum and bass, and from there things somehow kept moving forward. I also began producing quite early on - experimenting with a computer. Toward the end of secondary school, I briefly considered architecture. The thought crossed my mind once. I am still very interested in facades and different design solutions, but at that point, when I was finishing school, there was never really any question of my doing something else. The path presented itself quite clearly. I had already made a few successful records with a couple of bands, and I simply continued moving forward on that momentum.

If I think about the form this has taken by now, what drives me most today is a kind of curiosity about life in general, and about music in the broadest possible sense: how to mix completely different things, how to put them together, how technology affects music, or how to put your emotions into music. It is like a bottomless well, and that is what is so wonderful about this art form. It is probably the same in other creative fields, but I feel that I can keep satisfying my curiosity for the rest of my life. There is always something new. You travel somewhere and discover that there is so much music you did not know about or had never truly felt before. So let us call this ambition more of a curiosity about all of it.

Do you have a character trait that has supported your success?

One of the main traits that comes naturally to me is that I am quite naive; I do not form preconceptions about things, whether about people or possibilities. For example, just this past weekend I had an event where I was asked to combine medieval music with a "rave." I tried to sketch out in my mind what that might be and how people might have danced at the time. That is the curiosity that arises in me: I had no preconception that it could not be done or that I would not do it. I am very open to things. That often brings all sorts of complications into my life too, and perhaps people with whom things would not otherwise work out.

I feel that now I am moving more toward depth than volume. At least, my own wish or intention is that, while this naivety has so far created a situation in which I have done many different things, I increasingly miss or long for the chance to take one subject, one field, one narrow topic, and go three steps deeper. Over the course of my twenty-year "career," I have tried a great many different things musically. I have written ballets, worked in pop and folk and done all kinds of different projects.

Now I feel that I am looking for something I can dig into more deeply, to see what it has to offer at a deeper level.

What has kept you on your path?

Curiosity has kept me in music, and it is why I have not really been able to drift elsewhere. Ten or fifteen years ago, there was a period when I directed almost more of my energy toward the organizational side of things, although it was still connected with music. I realised quite quickly that I was fairly bad at it or, more precisely, that there were people who were considerably better. After that, I brought music back into focus quite quickly. For me, the role of curiosity is that I leave room for whatever I discover along my path - for surprise and spontaneity. I feel that this suits me because I do not know exactly where I will be musically in five years, but I do know that I will keep creating and moving toward greater depth. That means longer-form works, because when you take on a subject, it often has a million different facets, and you need some way to convey and manage them.