There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.

I've noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it's far enough in the future.

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

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.

The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn't just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one. A responsible designer might try to overcome this limitation - probably the engineers at Marshall tried, too. But that sound became the sound of, among others, Jimi Hendrix. That sound is called electric guitar.

The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can.

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.