"If it's difficult to describe the music that Chris Thile has been making since before he reached puberty, that's just the way he likes it." So says Frank Oteri in his introduction to an interview with Thile for New Music Box, the web magazine of the American Music Center. "But even by his standards," Oteri continues, "the projects he's gotten involved with in the past couple of years completely confound expectations."

Among those projects are the five-piece band Punch Brothers, whose Nonesuch debut, Punch, featured the four-movement The Blind Leaving the Blind, which the Herald (UK) called a "work of staggering imagination"; and his self-titled debut duo record with bassist Edgar Meyer, with whom Thile performed at Carnegie Hall in October shortly after the interview with Oteri.

"Now everything and anything is possible," Oteri suggests, "and Thile voraciously seeks out new sounds from all possible sources," referring to Chris's claim that the "last Radiohead record gets listened to with the same filter that I've got for Simon Rattle doing Mahler Nine with Berlin."

Read the complete interview transcript and watch the accompanying videotaped conversation with Chris at newmusicbox.org.