One way of working is just bring a group of totally different musicians together and encourage them to stick to their guns, not to do the thing that normally happens in a working situation where everyone homogenizes and concedes certain points - so eventually they're all playing in roughly the same style. I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away. So there would be a kind of space in the middle where I could operate, and attempt to make these things coalesce in some way. In fact quite a lot of my stuff has arisen from that.

I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new. I am a good salesman. When I'm on form, I can sell anything.

The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture.

I've had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I've often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.

Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.

With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.

One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.