I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.
I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, 'Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!'
When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn't about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind.
Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That's what surfers do - take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we've become incredibly adept technically. We've treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part.
Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
What I believe is that people have many modes in which they can be. When we live in cities, the one we are in most of the time is the alert mode. The 'take control of things' mode, the 'be careful, watch out' mode, the 'speed' mode - the 'Red Bull' mode, actually. There's nothing wrong with it. It's all part of what we are.
Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness.
The English don't like concepts, really, not from a pop star. It's alright if they come from an 'intellectual,', but from a pop star you're getting ahead of yourself. Part of the class game is that you shouldn't rise above your station, and to start talking about concepts if you're in the pop world is getting a bit uppity, isn't it?
People do dismiss ambient music, don't they? They call it 'easy listening,' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.
In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient - ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.
I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.
When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.
When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.
I'd love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music.
I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.
The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn't just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one.
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.
Well, there are some things that I just can't get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they're of my own creation, as well - and they're just as annoying. It's not only other people's ear worms that bug me, it's my own, as well.
I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.
Classical - perhaps I should say 'orchestral' - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities.
