It's funny, I played a social gig once - we were playing music that was rhythm based, but it was going in some strange places. Some people came up to me afterward and said, "Can you play a tune that we'll all recognize?" I've carried that with me forever - why would you want a tune you could recognize? What's the point of that?

There's another thing that you don't want to take for granted, and that's the reality of there being an audience there each night. It's pretty amazing that that can happen around the world.

We're still making Hot Chip records whilst doing these other things, so why not just try and make music you enjoy making rather than being tied down by things? It would just be crazy to not allow people to make music.

I'll also listen to music on a Discman and realize how nice it can sound when it's not compressed to MP3 format.

I really enjoy playing for hours and hours. DJ sets where you turn up over an hour and you're on a festival stage, people basically expect much more pounding than I ever would play. I just feel like a fish out of water when I do those. They want something really kind of aggressive; that's not really the kind of music that I'm into.

To stop for years and then discover that the audience is getting smaller and smaller would be demoralizing.

I'm quite interested in what words can be, if it's very few words, and it's a kind of club track but it has a sort of uplifting or spiritual kind of feeling to it. Somehow, something bigger than just the words on the page happens when you hear it all together. Sometimes I notice when I'm DJing, I put on a lot of tracks that feature vocals. I guess for me, it's just from growing up loving songs, so maybe I'm geared slightly more towards dance music that features a song element.