Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when - and he won't necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

I love San Francisco and Brighton has something of San Francisco about it. It's by the sea, there's a big gay community, a feeling of people being there because they enjoy their life there.

The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

I often say to people that producing is the best paid form of cowardice. When you produce things you almost always get credit, if it's a good record, but you hardly ever get the blame if it's not! You don't really take responsibility for your work.

The tools are evolving, and people's interests are evolving as well. So, suddenly people like to hear bands, people like Devendra Banhart or the xx, bands that make a kind of virtue of sloppiness. That isn't what they would describe what they're doing, but the fact is they make a virtue of the sort of hand-made nature of what they're doing.

It's actually very easy for democracy to disappear.