I'm a huge Hayao Miyazaki fan. He might be my favorite director of all time - the beauty that he sees in the world and the attention to detail. I try and focus on that while making music: trying to use as many real instruments as possible, have it feel as tactile and tangible as possible.

I think that layers in music, whether it's layers juxtaposing emotions and feelings or layers of texture, make for a more interesting product.

We lived in a suburb in Johannesburg, which is a massive city of about 8 million people, and my parents would drive me to school every day and over the weekend I would go to the mall and then occasionally on Safari. Pretty normal stuff, apart from the Safari.

The moment you're too apologetic about something and people know that something isn't finished, they listen/look for the mistakes or cracks, but if you act like it's done people experience things in a totally different way.

A lot of my ideas come from McNally Jackson bookstore. One of my favorite things to do is just go there and look through architecture books and interior design books. Something about the aesthetics of space and beautiful images works with my brain.

I had this perfect situation where my studio was a three-minute walk away, and every day I would go to the studio. If I had an idea, I could work on it at the highest level possible.

A true artist is practically married to his or her art form so I just couldn't turn my back on it.