I'm actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.

Cultural objects have no notable identity outside of that which we confer upon them. Their value is entirely a product of the interaction that we have with them.

I think the other thing that's important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time. In fact I often say that the biggest difference between classical music and everything else is that classical musicians sometimes shut up because they're told to, because the score tells them to. Whereas any music that's sort of based on folk or jazz, everybody plays all the time.

I remember when in the early days of rock'n'roll, when everything sounded totally different, all amazing and blah blah blah blah blah. Now you can play me one second of any record from that time, and I'll say "1959" or "1961." I can hear precisely. It's like it has a huge date stamp on it.

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist.

People do dismiss ambient music, don't they? They call it 'easy listening,' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.