When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.
If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones.
I’ve never used a PC in my life; I don’t like them.
I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.
Repetition doesn’t really exist.
My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.
My shows are not narratives.
I want to rethink ‘surrender’ as an active verb.
The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don’t set out to say anything very important.
The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.
The reason conservatives cohere and radicals fight: everyone agrees about fears, no one about visions.
Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
I wanted to use the studio like a microscope for sound, which is what good engineers do.
Well, there are some things that I just can’t get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they’re of my own creation, as well – and they’re just as annoying. It’s not only other people’s ear worms that bug me, it’s my own, as well.
All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.
I’m actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.
Attention is what creates value. Artworks are made as well by how people interact with them – and therefore by what quality of interaction they can inspire.
As soon as you externalize an idea you see facets of it that weren’t clear when it was just floating around in your head.
Stop thinking about art works as objects and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. What makes a work of art good for you is not something that s already inside it but something that happens inside you.
Regard your limitations as secret strengths. Or as constraints that you can make use of.
Tommy Cooper finds a painting and a violin in the attic; takes them to an expert who says, ‘You’ve got a Stradivarius and a Rembrandt. Unfortunately Stradivarius was a terrible painter and Rembrandt made awful violins.