I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.
Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is.
Software options proliferate extremely easily - too easily, in fact - because too many options create tools that can't ever be used intuitively. Intuitive actions confine the detail work to a dedicated part of the brain, leaving the rest of one's mind free to respond with attention and sensitivity to the changing texture of the moment.
I know that if I had a television in my flat I would convince myself that everything on it was really interesting. I would say, 'I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here!' is so sociologically fascinating that I think I'd better watch.
I think generally playing live is a crap idea. So much of stage work is the presentation of personality, and I've never been interested in that.
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.
I don't live in the past at all; I'm always wanting to do something new. I make a point of constantly trying to forget and get things out of my mind.
If I tried to make a commercial album, it would be a complete flop. I have no idea what the world at large likes.
I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, 'Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!'
You can't really imagine music without technology.
I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being.
We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
The reason I don't tour is that I don't know how to front a band. What would I do? I can't really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.
I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me.
In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient - ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.
I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.
Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.
If you've spent a long time developing a skill and techniques, and now some 14 year-old upstart can get exactly the same result, you might feel a bit miffed I suppose, but that has happened forever.
When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.
My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when - and he won't necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.
I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet.
I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.
I think there's a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.
Most game music is based on loops effectively.
My shows are not narratives.
Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.
I'm fascinated by musicians who don't completely understand their territory; that's when you do your best work.
Some people are very good at being 'stars' and it suits them. I'm grudging about it and I find it annoying.
Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.
When I finish something, I want it out that day. Pop music is like the daily paper. Its got to be there then, not six months later.
Although cover notes for classical music albums tend to say that the trill of flutes suggests mountain streams and so on, I don't think anybody listens to music with the expectation that they're going to be presented with a sort of landscape painting.
I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn't want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. 'Discreet Music' was like that, and 'Music for Airports.' What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out.
I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.
It's nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn't think of.
I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.
