I know you’ve also done some work under the names Evan Marc and Evan Bartholomew.

Yeah, I started a label with Noah Pred called Thoughtless. He moved to Berlin, and the label kind of picked up and got way busier than I could keep on top of. Now he’s running that entirely. I don’t have as much involvement in the house and techno scene now.

You’ve talked about the struggle to make money as a musician which distracts you from time in the studio. What do you say to rising producers about that tension?

I think it’s a trade-off. People need to understand that if you really want to make money as a musician, you’re going to have to tour, and that means there are going to be sacrifices. Sacrifices like being around for weddings, and dinner parties, and baby showers. Catching up on real life with friends is not as easy when you’re a touring musician. I’ve been doing it long enough that I’ve been able to find a balance, but it took ten years before I was making an income that allowed me to not be on the road all the time. For some people it happens right away, and they’re headlining festivals and making tons of money, but I don’t think that’s the story for most people. There’s a lot of Tuesday nights in Richmond, Virginia in a sports bar, for years and years of my life trying to get myself out there and make it.

I found out about you through Rainforest Reverberation. I know a lot of the Bluetech project is focused around conservation. You could describe the Amazon Basin as the lung of this planet, and we have lung cancer. Do you think the cancer is terminal?

It’s hard to answer that question and not be a debbie downer. My experience in the Amazon, and what I saw says that we’re basically screwed. The oil interests, the mineral interests, the misappropriation of funds that are set aside for conservation. The political reality of where the money is actually going, even from the NGOs, when it gets to the Amazon is that there’s no regulation. It’s inevitable, when people are hungry and a country’s economic policy requires they give access to their resources, which is the Amazon rainforest. Then they’re going to coose to sell that rainforest. It’s more politically expedient to have income and blame it on the world economy than it is to preserve something that has more intrinsic value, and not a financial value. Unless something really drastic changes, like ecotourism or conservation becomes economically viable for the countries in that region, I don’t really see a way in which the destruction of the rainforest is going to stop.

I can obviously tell that conservation is a big part of your life, but what’s the most important thing to you?