 My guitar only has five strings 'cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there. |
| I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice. |
| I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new. I am a good salesman. When I'm on form, I can sell anything. |
| At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art. |
| In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter. |
| Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don't fit in a very interesting way. |
| One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn't if you knew better. |
| 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. |
| I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It's still got the same strings on it. |
| Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable. |
| I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper. |
| If you're in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect. |
| I've discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that's already there. |
| Every collaboration helps you grow. With Bowie, it's different every time. I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments. That inspires him. He's very quick. |
| 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. |
| I'm very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement. |
| Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others. |
| When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me. |
| I often work by avoidance. |
| I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years. |
