People do dismiss ambient music, don't they? They call it 'easy listening,' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.

I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It's still got the same strings on it.

Most big concerts sound disgusting and awful and insultingly bad. It's like going to the cinema and been shown a scratchy film which is upsidedown and the bulb had gone on the projector. The quality of large-scale live music is so shocking.

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.

John Cage made you realise that there wasn't a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn't appreciated.

People always focus on people like me who use synthesizers, right, which are explicitly electronic and therefore obvious. "Ah, yes, that's electronic music." But they don't realize that so is the concept of actually taking a piece of extant music and literally re-collaging it, taking chunks out and changing the dynamics radically and creating new rhythmic structures with echo and all that. That's real electronic music, as far as I'm concerned.