When I think about the stuff I turned down it's kind of insane.

You can be a great DJ and still be not very good at DJ Hero. And vice-versa: You can have never spun in your life on real turntables and be fine on DJ Hero.

Sometimes there's this balance: if you try to clear 10 things you'll probably get lucky and be able to clear most of them, or all of them; try to clear 20 things, in my mind there's gonna be at least one issue, maybe two - and then that's when it starts getting into either re-recording stuff, or you've got to take that song off.

As far as the mechanics of how the music was made, there's no denying: Endtroducing was extremely simple. That's not to denigrate it - that doesn't mean I'm knocking it or I'm saying my new stuff is better, or anything like that: it just means, I literally had, what, 12.5 seconds of stereo sampling at my disposal, and some turntable overdubs... The nature of the beast back then was probably about 50% looping and 50% chopping, and that was what you could do with samples.

I couldn't make a real drum'n'bass or dubstep record to save my life. But I can be influenced by them in small ways.

Through it all, the words of John Peel echo strongly within me: you have support the music that's being made now. You have to continue to look forward and learn from what's happening. That's my philosophy, anyway.

Cutting and pasting is the essence of what hip-hop culture is all about for me. It's about drawing from what's around you, and subverting it and decontextualizing it.