Words by Andrew Parks

When self-titled confirmed a rare Zomby interview for our current issue, I expected some eccentricities—the elusive producer shields his face in photos and prefers lucid iChat exchanges over in-person interviews. What I didn’t anticipate was brutally honest quotes like this: “I thought we were all gonna live forever. I was in a dream world—never broke a bone in my body; never saw my dad ill; never took a day off work. It sounds stupid now, but that’s life, isn’t it?”

Indeed. And the brute force of how it all usually unfolds really hit home this past year, as Zomby dealt with his father’s death and tried to process all the personal and creative pointers the fellow musician had given him over the years. While the melancholic, mercurial shades of Zomby’s long-awaited new LP (Dedication, available July 12th through 4AD) weren’t directly influenced by his father’s passing—its shape-shifting songs came first—the entire thing is true to its title, a literal tribute to the unspoken connection many fathers and sons have.

The following is an extended version of the Zomby interview that premiered in the our magazine yesterday. It’s not the entire conversation, though; that’s more than 10,000 words and three hours of iChat transcripts that’re both revealing and rambling in all the right ways…