The reason I don't tour is that I don't know how to front a band. What would I do? I can't really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.

When I was at art college, the teachers who helped me were not the ones I agreed with, or the ones who encouraged me, but the ones who took very strong positions. Because if someone does that, you can find your own position in relation to it: what is it that I don't agree with? In the studio I want to articulate a position clearly enough so that other people can use it - or chuck it away if they don't want it.

I've discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that's already there.

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.

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.

Repetition doesn't really exist

I occasionally meet people and they say, 'Oh, I was born to Discreet Music'... They always have very weird eyes, those people.