Before returning with his triumphant new album SYRO, Aphex Twin shared a list of all the gear he’d used to make the music. It is long and obscure, and it could honestly be a list of alien technology for all I know. If Richard D. James ever gets around to putting together another Aphex Twin album, the gear list might be even weirder. As FACT points out, Aphex recently did an interview for the German magazine Groove, answering a list of questions from a crew of fellow musicians that includes Caribou, Nicolas Jaar, Ricardo Villalobos, and Skrillex. The whole thing is full of interesting tidbits. For instance, yes, he does still have his tank, and yes, Skrillex can come drive it. But the most fascinating bit may be that he’s brought in a programmer to help make a randomizing sort of music software. Here’s how he describes it:

I’ve actually recently hired a Chinese programmer to make a music software for me. It’s taking the concept of mutation into music software. You give the program some sounds you made and then it gives you six variations of it and then you choose the one you like most and then it makes another six and it kind of keeps trying to choosing the variations by itself. It’s a bit like that, but more advanced, but basically it starts with a sound, analyzes it, then does different versions of variations. It randomizes, it compares all of them to the original and then it picks the best one. It sounds totally awesome, but it needs to be tweeked a little bit. I will continue with this. I have a whole book full of ideas for software and instruments.

Nobody else thinks like this, which is, of course, why nobody else makes music like this guy does. Read the full interview at Groove.