A lot of the so-called systems composers have this thing that the system is always right. You don't fiddle with it at all. Well, I don't think that. I think the system is as right as you judge it to be. If for some reason you don't like a bit of it you must trust your intuition on that. I don't take a doctrinaire approach to systems.

I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.

If you think of the way a composer or say a pop arranger works - he has an idea and he writes it down, so there's one transmission loss. Then he gives the score to a group of musicians who interpret that, so there's another transmission loss. So he's involved with three information losses. Whereas what I nearly always do is work directly to the sound if it doesn't sound right. So there's a continuous loop going on.

Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.

A culture is the sum of all the things about which humanity can choose to differ.

I wanted to use the studio like a microscope for sound, which is what good engineers do.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.