Since the mid-2000s John Maus gained a reputation as an arcane conversationalist, whose public dialogues offered as much intricacy as they did enthusiasm, with a philosophical repertoire only matched by his own nervous body language. For this interview we plunged into the specifics of those discourses to try to trace the strange continuities between the continental thought and mystical traditions Maus is enamored with and the postwar pop sound his work inevitably comes to represent.