Pitchfork: He told me that you were instrumental in making sure there was a lyric sheet for the album.

PK: If it was down to him, none of his lyrics would have been on any of the records. I think he writes incredibly good, succinct songs, and approaches things in interesting ways. His lyrics are far from obvious, and I think stand on their own away from the music, to a certain extent. There's a sort of poetic form to them which I think isn't hackneyed at all. It's really fresh.

It’s not always the easiest to understand what he's saying, and I think that's partly by design. But I noticed a lot of people have said that certain songs really clicked with them when they could see what he was saying. The whole process is about communication, I feel. I'm glad that those are going to be out there for some people, in some form.

Pitchfork: On the one hand, he's a very private person, as he said to me again and again, and yet his lyrics are also incredibly unguarded.

PK: Yes.

Pitchfork: And he's also one of the most chill people I've ever met.

PK: Yeah, he is. I have to say, he's a pleasure to spend time with and to work on sessions with. His influence on the session and his attitude towards keeping morale up over long days, day after day, day after day, is impressive, I have to say. He's a pretty special character, and I feel privileged to be able to work with him at all.

Pitchfork: He told me you guys accidentally fried the hard drive on his laptop when you were modifying a synthesizer in the studio.

PK: [Laughs] We! Oh, it's we now! No, I do feel a little bit guilty about that. We were having to fix something on the Moog, and he was taking screws out of it, and so they didn't get lost, I knew there was this very small but very powerful magnet in the studio that the guy who runs the studio liked to toy with, so I was like, "Hey, just use this to keep all the screws together." He put it down, and kept putting the screws on it—this is right next to his laptop—and then at some point he picked up the magnet and put it down on the corner of the computer, on the laptop, rather than on the desk. And of course, being a super-strong magnet, it started freaking out the drive. By the time we figured out what was making this crazy sound, it had fried the drive. I forget what the outcome was now; I think he managed to get all the stuff off the drive anyway. But yeah, that was kind of a drag.

Pitchfork: That must have been a moment of terror in the studio, thinking you'd just lost everything you had recorded up until that point.

PK: I have never, ever seen anyone so chill about their computer just getting fried. I felt, of course, guilty, because I'd introduced this magnet into the scenario. But Noah's not one to blame people. I was freaking out more than he was.

Pitchfork: He told me you were responsible for a lot of the interstitial synthesizer bits on the album.

PK: Because of the way that he plays live, playing by himself, he often does these transitional pieces between songs. Noah was interested in trying to do it in the studio, and we talked about it, but to do that sort of thing properly, you have to decide on the tracklisting right from the start and build it like that. It's a much more laborious process to do it afterwards. So with that in mind, and knowing how I've worked on things before, I figured out where things spill over. Like those unearthly vocals in "Sequential Circuits", that was when he was doing his vocal tracks. That was him warming up just before doing his vocal take. And then each successive overdub of the vocal, he would somehow—and, endlessly, this would amaze me—he would remember what he had done the first time, and add a second part, and then add a third part. This happened on a few different tracks, and it would just create these beautiful little bits. We used one at the end of "Tropic of Cancer", that was him warming up, and then the stuff—I think it's turned backwards, but at the end of "Sequential Circuits". After we got the basic tracks down, we were doing vocals at the start of each day, which was I have to say a pretty sweet way to wake up each day. I know the engineer in the studio—he was a little shy with Noah, but he would talk to me when Noah was out of the room—just thought it was the greatest thing ever. Just to hear his voice soar like that, to spend a couple of hours each day warming up while he was singing, it was pretty sweet, I have to say.