Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

The artists of the past who impressed me were the ones who really focused their work.

Often, I think you find that you're enjoying certain things, you've got this new way of listening, and you find that you really enjoy the way that sounds on it and the way this other thing sounds on it and the way that other thing sounds on it. So, you're finding a new pleasure that you didn't know about before.

I think, if you spend a day or - as many people do - a life working only with that aspect of your being, the cerebrum connected to a finger, I feel that the rest of you atrophies, essentially.

Think inside the work - outside the work

It's actually very easy for democracy to disappear.