I kept saying I got sick of listening to people's productions, like people who had no ideas, no songs, nothing to say but could still con people's ears into thinking those songs were there by the application of production. I kind of wanted my record a little more honest than that: "Well, this is us. We put a microphone on it. Here it is."

I don't know if embarrassed is the right word, about pop, but I prefer the abstract and the distorted in music. And I keep writing these proper melodies and harmonies, and they're the bits that get thrown out of the records! And I have quite a collection.

Making a record's a real fight for me. I'm constantly fighting with this thing inside of me that says I should be sitting in a room with Matthew Shipp or I should have Han Bennink on drums or this song should be playing for the next 20 minutes in my head, not a silly little pop song. It's constant.

I want my records to be the most magnificent and glorious-sounding records, but also want them to be the most intense and fragile. And I want that all in the same ten-second bit of music. And it just takes a while to get there, and I don't write the songs and then go and record them, I write in the studio. So it takes a while to kind of piece them together and know that that's what I want it to be like. And I constantly throw the bits up in the air and see how they land, and eventually they kind of keep landing in the same place and that's where it stays.

It's a weird situation, doing interviews. Nowhere else in the world can you talk about yourself and have people listen like they're interested over and over. Most people, if they talked about themselves for a half an hour, you'd go, "I'll give them a miss next time." So it's kind of weird.

I think it's essential to make new music now, and to try and make epic records now, and not rely on what happened in the past.

Sometimes it's easier to make decisions when you know that you've tried things that are so wrong, you know, "OK, I don't go that way with it. I don't go this way with it." The way I work, I kind of have to go down all those wrong paths to know that the one I'm doing really is the one that is going to work.