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

You can't really imagine music without technology.

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.

Songs that don't depend on composition depend instead on performance - so the fire has to be there in the playing.

You feel as if you're not living a full life. Which, of course, is why - it's my theory about why so many people who are heavily into computers are also into extreme sports and S&M. It's because their bodies are crying out for some kind of action.

I got an amazing 10-CD set, it's the music that Alan Lomax recorded in Haiti in 1936. And what's incredible is how fantastic the drummers are and how off-the-grid they are. The liveliness is astonishing; they're just totally alive, these recordings. It's very interesting, to me, to be reminded of that, that there was a time when things were not that tight.

I've never used a PC in my life; I don't like them.