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

Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.

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

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.

If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn't bother to find new ones.

Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.

Everybody thinks that when new technologies come along that they're transparent and you can just do your job well on it. But technologies always import a whole new set of values with them.