A lot of your songs take place in a bleak semi-destroyed world and focus on collapsing/decaying structures and corrupt systems. Do you think of yourself as a dystopian songwriter? Are you influenced by any particular dystopian works, like Brazil or other post-apocalyptic films?

You know, I hadn't thought of myself like that, mainly because I try to avoid saying "I am thus-and-such a kind of songwriter" — I think you have to be careful not to compartmentalize yourself, or at least that's true for me. But I was a young comics & SF books reader and it's true that much of my favorite stuff involved post-apocalyptic scenarios: Logan's Run was a big movie for me when I was a kid, and there was a James Sallis story in Again, Dangerous Visions that left a huge impression even though I'm not sure I was even reading it right. I barely remember it except that it felt kinda scorched-earth, you know? But always in those movies the best part was when they see, like, the Forbidden Zone in Planet of the Apes, or the overgrown places outside the city where Logan finds Peter Ustinov with his cats. Am I even remembering that right?

One of my favorite songs of yours is "The Day The Aliens Came," the one about waiting eagerly for the genocidal alien invaders to arrive, which was left off the Sunset Tree album. Was there some reason this song was omitted? Could this song inadvertently have given away crucial info on the coming alien invasion?

Yeah we recorded that one in the studio and we sort of went nuts with it — it had this huge treated surf-y electric guitar and jaunty rhythm section and emotionally it just didn't fit into the album at all any more. After a recording session, when you're putting an album together, some songs sort of raise their hands and quietly say "I don't really play well with the others here." And that was true with that song; I dug the song, everybody liked it, it had a great feel. But it was out of place there.

Your new album includes a song about H.P. Lovecraft, "Lovecraft In Brooklyn." Why should we identify with H.P. Lovecraft's feelings of alienation and xenophobia during his exile in Red Hook? What about that image appeals to you? In Lovecraft's case, that alienation leads to all his best speculative horror... do you think xenophobia creates better speculative fiction than xenophilia?

Well the song is not really about Lovecraft — it's sung by a guy who's identifying with Lovecraft at his most xenophobic and terrified. Why does that appeal? I think I'm just attracted to hermits in general — to people who don't feel like they're part of the world, who have a hard time feeling like they're really present in the same space as everybody else.

Second part of your question is self-evidently true, the classic trope is Alien Invasion, right, not Aliens Who Are Swell Folks!

Are there particular science fiction authors you're influenced by? Or other works of science fiction that have had an impact on your writing process?

When I was a kid I pretty much worshiped Harlan Ellison and I still think he's a good writer. Through his interviews & his introductions in the Dangerous Visions books I got into James Sallis & Carol Emshwiller, and I'm still a big Emshwiller fan to this day — she writes such hard good sentences. I think I checked out of the science fiction hotel early in high school and never really looked back, lit-wise — the stuff that was getting popular was Piers Anthony and Anne McCaffrey stuff, and more power to anybody who's into that sort of thing, but I liked much much darker stuff and I started reading Faulkner instead. I think I'm more interested in horror than science fiction ever since — it's more of a constricted niche but it seems to attract writers whose visions are more demented. Not that there isn't plenty of awful horror too of course. If I gotta see one more well-dressed ambiguously sexual vampire whose manners are 19th-century impeccable, I'm gonna fall asleep and never wake up again.

Your new book, Master Of Reality, is about a teenager in an adolescent psychiatric care facility explaining his need for his confiscated copy of the Black Sabbath album the way you'd explain "love to an android," according to the 33 1/3 blog. I'm dying to read it. How far do you pursue this metaphor? Is adult sanity like being an android? Also, the album ends with "Into The Void," about leaving a doomed Earth for outer space. Do you think people still write songs about this type of escapism from a ruined world? (I can't think of any recent "we're leaving Earth" songs, but maybe I'm missing something.)

I think the narrator of the book is saying something that all teenagers know instinctively: that there is something wrong with adults. That, somewhere along the way, the adults lost the plot. Maybe it's just that they got stressed out by having to pay bills, or maybe it's just the nature of aging, but from a teenager's perspective, it looks like aging just strips you of your ability to be reasonable, to be cool, to understand other people. So in that sense, teenagers are living as captives in some colony where the androids have all taken over, and where they've made it clear that they intend to turn their captives into androids, too.

I think people prefer to soak in dystopianism more than write about escape the way Ozzy did — and, to be honest, I think it's posing to focus real hard on "the world is screwed!" tropes. It's like, every emo and metalcore band thinks they're the first people to notice that the world is harsh. Good job dudes! Give yourselves a gold star! Meanwhile Ozzy has the courage to dream, to talk about leaving the world and going someplace where everything's cool, and he sneaks in "the world is screwed" tropes while he's at it - that's what makes for a good lyric, I think — that little bit of extra effort.

P-Funk featured so many science fiction elements, from the Mothership and the Clones of Funkenstein to "Atomic Dog." Where did the science fiction themes in P-Funk music come from?

To my knowledge, the early P-Funk scifi themes grew out of George and Bootsy's reported encounter with a UFO, somewhere out in the forest. I have no idea what they were doing in the forest but they have said that the encounter was so close, that it would have a lasting effect on them both. Of course, most of us musicians have either seen or been a UFO at some point in time during our careers, so a bit of sci-fi is bound to influence us.The Parliament-Funkadelic stage show in the 1970s was super elaborate, with the Mothership landing and the giant skull and lots of weird costumes. Did you guys think of it as creating a scifi opera on stage?

In my opinion, the whole P-Funk stage show could be considered as the first mash-up, with many different concepts mixed in... outta space... outer space... skull rock... pop-gun funk... a few cloned meat loaf-isms and even some sexy underwater-underwear mishaps. It was quite an event to behold and to be a part of. I guess you could say "everything plus the kitchen sink" but the science fictional aspects seemed to impact and stay with our fans the most, throughout the years.

A lot of your late 70s songs, like "Musical Son," "Theme From The Black Hole" and "(Not Just) Knee Deep," have totally infectious synth hooks. Were you trying for a science-fictional sound?

As far as my creations, "Musical Son" and "(Not Just) Knee Deep" were concerned, I would consider these songs to be based more on sci-fact, plotted against a grid that utilized my roots in Deep Funk/Jazz and Gospel. My guess is that the main reason the synth hooks sounded so different and futuristic was because the Moog gave an other-worldly vibe to what was mostly, up until then, a soundscape formed and upheld by non-fluidic aspects of analogue-esq instru-mentality. As such, there was very little fiction involved; it was really happening! Anyway, I always thought of a sci-fi synth sound to be more Theremin-like... perhaps something you would hear on Forbidden Planet or somewhat like the ARP sound from [the Ohio Players track] "The Funky Worm".

What made you decide to go all electronic with 1984's Evacuate Your Seats? Were you influenced by European techno music of that time?

I was compelled to make the project electronic. Evacuate Your Seats was happening for me, at the perfect time and represented the best opportunity for trying something different. I have never liked the idea of saying "this is my sound and I'm sticking with it". So, Evacuate caught me at a time when massive samplers were first being built and the Synclavier was the weapon of choice for any serious experimental keyboardist. Just check out some of the Zappa stuff.

These instruments were big, bulky and very expensive at that time. Case in point, a $10,000 sampler would only hold one 10 second sample so I had to use 15 of those devices for the Evacuate album. My Synclavier was another expensive monster and also used on the project.

To me, Evacuate did not sound like a European techno record. Maybe some might disagree, although I did like what the Europeans were doing with their music during that time. Evacuate occurred as a product of my own "new direction" into algorithmic sound and (simulated) computer sequencing. I say simulated because at the time of the recording, none of the gear would sync up together so most of the tracks had to be played and chopped up by hand.

Do you feel like you influenced today's electronic musicians?

I would like to think that there are some musicians who were and are still influenced by my electronics and synth work, aside from the rappers who used samples of my work.

For instance, since Evacuate was recorded in Detroit and was being played there quite a bit by DJs like The Electrifying Mojo, I did begin to see lots of youngsters catching on to the sound, some went on to become influential "musicians" in their own right and a style called Detroit Techno evolved soon afterwards. Perhaps there was some influence there, from Evacuate tracks like "Techno Freqs" and "Stick It In" but I can't say for sure.

What made you decide to start your own social networking site at iamnation.com?

By night-light, I have no choice but to become a super-mad funkateer with a half cape and a half-fro, so I guess you could say that IamNation is one of my respectable "digitized daytime job-style hobbies". IamNation is one of those internet projects that I've always wanted to create... especially since I caught wind of Livejournal a couple of years ago.

At the moment, membership at IamNation is by invitation only and just a few friends and I are using it for posting and messaging back and forth. One of the most famous of those friends is the fantastic P-Funk artist, Overton Loyd. Overton is also a contributer to the design of IamNation.

IamNation has recently turned 2 and I have now completed the forth upgrade to the system, so our members are just beginning to migrate over to the new site. I am also considering opening up a membership tier to the public, in the near future.