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

I'm kind of an evangelical atheist.

Complexity and intelligence grow from simplicity, not from greater complexity.

If I tried to make a commercial album, it would be a complete flop. I have no idea what the world at large likes.

Whenever there's a new music, there's a new way of listening. And whenever there's a new way of listening, there are new musics that follow from that. And people start listening differently - that can either mean in different places or at different volumes or in different social groups or through different technologies.

I got an amazing 10-CD set, it's the music that Alan Lomax recorded in Haiti in 1936. And what's incredible is how fantastic the drummers are and how off-the-grid they are. The liveliness is astonishing; they're just totally alive, these recordings. It's very interesting, to me, to be reminded of that, that there was a time when things were not that tight.