Quotes from Steve Aoki

My favorite country to visit is Japan.

'Boneless,' even though we were thinking about servicing it to radio, it made more sense putting a vocal on there. This was actually the first time that I really looked at doing a song for radio and kind of let go of some control and listened to a lot of different radio pluggers and had Ultra come in and help out with ideas.

A lot of my building blocks - who I am kind of as an artist - all came from being in L.A.

I wrote probably my phattest banging record with Knife Party: 'Pile Driver.'

Dance music is my love, is my passion, is my life. I live for my fans and take my art very seriously.

The craziest thing I've probably done during a show is the balcony dive - it was pretty scary. I was like, 'This could result in an injury of mine,' but somehow I survived.

Self-discovery is so important in identity processing: who you hang out with, what clothes you wear, what shows you see. As a kid, I found out about things through friends. I would go to hardcore shows with 50 people.

No matter what I do, I can't help but feel that I'm under a microscope. Some of it is completely silly, and some of it is meant to be hurtful. For example, a website accumulated all of my music videos to point out perceived Illuminati images. I loved that one. Of course, it was all ridiculous but funny.

I never cake someone who doesn't want to be caked - at least, I try not to. Sometimes I miss my target. I'm pretty much going through the crowd making sure I find someone who wants to get caked. If you don't want to get caked, shake your head or tell me you don't want to get caked. It's that easy.

The haters and the trolls have always used me as an excuse to make fun of something that is out of the ordinary, something that doesn't necessarily make sense to them. For whatever reason, I have always been a target that people love to attack.

The way I pick who gets caked is generally by who shows me the most energy and is screaming for it. I still can't help but ask myself... should I stop caking people? Will that stop the haters from hating? Stop giving the trolls more content to target me with?

The thought of bringing a cake into a dance music show is a bizarre one. The idea of rafting on top of people is just as bizarre as well. And I think whenever something bizarre comes into play, it immediately becomes an easy target. And for those reasons, I know that I have been the target of criticism.

Whenever I work with different artists, I expand as a song writer, as a producer, and I always want to try and find the bridge between my world and their world.

The ephemeral part of this work is that in music production, the sounds evolve so much faster than it used to, which means that you really have to put in a lot of work and effort in constantly designing the next sound that will move the culture forward.

I like looking at a future where we're expanding our creativity and brightening our lives. I believe that eventually we'll get to a point where we'll be able to live indefinitely through our technology.

I have been doing merch' since I was 15 and in bands when I was a teenager - silk-screening shirts, making the emulsion in my mom's closet I converted into a dark room, through college. That's essentially how us bands survived was selling homemade t-shirts.

For a DJ at my level, you can really go through life and travel the world without seeing a single thing. It's harder to go out and see the sights than it is to play a show.

Grateful to The Kerry Gaynor Method for saving my manager's life. He quit smoking thanks to their genius Method.

My life, I swear, is, like, 75% public. I have a very small percentage of my life that is private. But I do keep that private life private.

I'm 36, but I still feel like a punk kid with $200 in my savings account.

My favorite food is Ramen.

I love to work with artists that were able to find a brand new name and create something really exciting and fresh.

I started using a raft at my shows in 2009, and in 2011, I started caking people.

Extending our lives, extending our creativity, opening up the mysteries of the brain. All those things that are really exciting - that's kind of the basis of 'Neon Future,' and that's why I interviewed Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey.