You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.
When you make something you are always offering some choices and denying others.
The most important thing in a piece of music is to seduce people to the point where they start searching.
I’d rather hold one note for an hour and modulate it so that it means something than play 3,000 notes in 15 seconds.
Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.
If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.
Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.
Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement.
I cant duplicate my own successes, because part of the creation of that effect is making something happen that you didn’t expect.
If you had a sign above every studio door saying ‘This Studio is a Musical Instrument’ it would make such a different approach to recording.
What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest – the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.
Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on – including your own incompetence.
Every collaboration helps you grow.
I’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip.
The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one’s furniture.
I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new. I am a good salesman. When I’m on form, I can sell anything.
I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.
I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.
Also something that you don’t have to listen to from beginning to end – you can enter at any point and leave at any point.