Devin Townsend Project frontman / mastermind Devin Townsend is featured in a new interview with Noisey discussing The Retinal Circus, his new project The Moth, Ocean Machine and Strapping Young Lad. An excerpt is available below.

On new project The Moth: "It started out as just being a symphony, but then I was like, 'I can't get ten million bucks to just do a symphony.' I needed to make it like a musical, with orchestras and choirs, and if I try and be like, 'We're gonna redo Steinbeck, we'll do The Grapes Of Wrath' then it's gonna get lost in a sea of that shit. But if you make it just fucking absurd and a spectacle of fundamentally unsellable items and concepts but with the same production values as The Phantom Of The Opera, I think it'd get people's attention, right? Ultimately, it sounds like a load of fun; I wanna get a load of buddies together to work on this concept that I think is pretty interesting. I do the Devin Townsend Project and all these rock records, but that's shit I've been doing for twenty years—it keeps the boat floating more than anything else. I'm gonna die whenever, so I just want to make a statement. And it's about nothing. I haven't got a point I wanna make—I just wanna have fun.

I had this orchestrator come and stay with me for a month, and he's done Spielberg, Slumdog Millionaire and stuff like that. He's fucking brilliant and so far out of my league, but he's really interested. So he came over and we started working together and dude, it's so good. So when we propose the idea, it's not gonna be like a pipe dream, but it's this really well-thought-out thing with all the orchestration and the art and the logos."

On the Ocean Machine 20th Anniversary show in Bulgaria: "That was my manager, Andy Farrow. Without him, I would've been moving much more laterally over the past five years. Because I'm trying to get ten million dollars to do a cock symphony, I need to experiment with some of the past material in order to work with choirs and symphonies live. Bulgaria has a great symphony orchestra—within my price range!—and I can't wait. I was there yesterday and it's this crazy old Amphitheater; it's 2,000 years old and they call it The Ancient Theater. Is that just because it's old? Did they used to call it The Marble Theater? We're doing Ocean Machine and all this by-request shit, but it's all with the choir and orchestra. I really enjoy new experiences, and it gives me an opportunity to test my ability to orchestrate with an actual orchestra and hopefully that'll set me up for – I don't know if I mentioned it – my cock symphony that's gonna cost somebody ten million bucks."

On Strapping Young Lad: "There was nobody there for our last American tour; that was one of our least-attended tours, there were like fifty people in these 500 and 600 capacity venues. But it's looked at with rose-tinted glasses by people who didn't see it and it's built up to be something more than it was, so they think we must've been the best. We clearly weren't! I wouldn't reform Strapping for the same reason I never did coke or heroin, because I know myself enough to know what's good and healthy for me. Life is literally for living, so why would you want to spend time being a martyr for people? It just seems like that mentality is contrary to anything creatively astute. But at the same time, the fact that people pay attention to what I do and keep asking why I don't do Strapping again? Yeah, that's flattering, especially considering nobody liked it when I put the first record out. It was just Blackadder meets poorly-produced Fear Factory."

Go to this location for the complete interview.