When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.
In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America.
I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‘I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.’
I do love being in my studio. Especially at night.
It’s actually very easy for democracy to disappear.
It’s nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn’t think of.
I’m bloody awful at multi-tasking.
I don’t want to do free jazz! Because free jazz – which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering – isn’t actually free at all. It’s just constrained by what your muscles can do.
I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.
One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.
Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.
Most game music is based on loops effectively.
I’ve discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that’s already there.
Being an artist is a job for life.
I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It’s still got the same strings on it.
More and more I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now.
My guitar only has five strings ’cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there.
In my normal life I’m a very unadventurous person.
The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.