Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature... The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

When you look back on a historical period of music, it seems so obvious to you what the characteristics of it are, but they're not obvious at the time. So, when I look back at my own work, I could easily write a very convincing sort of account of it that made it look like I had planned it all out from day one and that this led logically to that and then I did this and then that followed quite naturally from that. But that's not how it felt.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn't if you knew better.

Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.

I don't like celebrity programmes - but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.

Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results

I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.