We're going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It's the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music.

Good teachers realise that the students are the antenna; they are sensing things that the teachers don't yet sense.

I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.

The tools are evolving, and people's interests are evolving as well. So, suddenly people like to hear bands, people like Devendra Banhart or the xx, bands that make a kind of virtue of sloppiness. That isn't what they would describe what they're doing, but the fact is they make a virtue of the sort of hand-made nature of what they're doing.

The problem with improvisation is, of course, that everyone just slips into their comfort zone and does sort of the easy thing to do, the most obvious thing to do with your instrument.

Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.

The trouble with New Age music is that there's no evil in it.