I'm a bit snobbish about breakfast: eggs benedict, or eggs royale, or something like that. Or just some really amazing, proper brown toast with smoked salmon, lemon, and black pepper. That's a great start to the day.
Jon Hopkins
I prefer a long day of starting in the morning over working late into the night.
A lot of my creative ideas begin in the pub, talking through possibilities with collaborators.
If you're a traveling artist, you probably experience insomnia at some point. You need things to be the right temperature, the right light... it's essential.
I love starting a track in one place and not knowing where it's going to end up.
There's never been a time when there hasn't been ritualistic dancing, and I think clubbing is our modern incarnation of that.
Nothing competes with the buzz of making your own record.
Some machine-y music is great, but you can apply any groove to any song now - there's literally a massive drop-down menu on most programs. And that's what takes the human being out of the process.
I got this pretend grass stuff called LazyLawn on my roof. Now I can go out on my terrace in bare feet, and it looks exactly like a lawn. This is what science should be for.
I have always been interested in incorporating real places into the music I make. Bringing the outside into the controlled world of recorded sound just gives life and physicality.
It sounds a bit pretentious, but I'm never really conscious of what I'm doing musically.
Singularity' goes through a process of purification and signification. If you listen to it, you can hear quite a chaotic and disruptive beginning and by the end, you're in such an opposite zone.
I'm very impulsive and I always had a belief in instinct leading the way.
It is funny how we talk about nature as this separate entity when we are nature, and nature is us.
I have the inability to stop thinking and switch off from work at night, which causes a lot of sleeplessness.
I was drawn to music from a super early age. At school, my ego co-opted it to some degree and I would use it to gain some sort of social credibility.
It's extraordinary to hear from people who are bereaved, or gone through a divorce, and they still take the time to tell me how a certain track or album helped them through tough times, or kept them sane.
I'm an example of someone who got a bit more focused as I got older.
The first thing I remember hearing was just the dance music that was in the charts when I was growing up. I don't remember many of the names of specific tracks - they were just kind of early acid house things.
It's great to do something that makes your brain just switch to a different mode, and music can do that really powerfully.
When you've got hardly any equipment, very little money and no access to any information, your sound is very much dictated by you, your setup and what you're listening to. Nothing more.
You don't make this kind of music expecting to have to do TV press and stuff like that. I don't mind doing it, but it's a fairly underground type of music. You do it for the love of the music more than being a star or anything.
Learning how to be calm and centered in any situation is a skill for life, whatever you do.
Well, I don't really use MIDI that much. But I do record audio around me a lot, and just layer it up and see what effect it has, without any aforethought.
I love that tension between machine sounds and organic sounds, and also the contrast between abrasive sounds and soft sounds.
I did classical music when I was a teenager, but the experience of performing a classical concert felt too frighteningly pristine for me to continue with it.
I've always been obsessed with contrast in records, and using harsher elements to make the quieter ones more powerful.
I've tried to do every album in a different style, which is why I tend to leave a fair bit of time between each one.
I've learnt over the years to always be thinking of titles and ideas that I try to put across with just a couple of words. It's the difficult part when you're writing things that are basically abstract.
I'm not keen on interfering with nature; I don't want to edit my genome.
Well, I like the idea of seeing every piece of music as fluid. I see the tracks as places almost, structures you can inhabit and explore.
To try and create a transcendent state through music has always been the intention.
The process of repeating a rhythm while it gently evolves has an incredible effect on the brain, or on mine anyway.
I think I took eight or nine months to make 'Immunity.' I just focused on mainly that, and it felt amazing.
I like to have an album arc that comes from an experience rather than a story.
My own personality is fairly optimistic and generally very happy, but like everyone else I've been through difficult stuff, particularly in my teenage years, where I experienced enough melancholia to feed any number of electronic records.
If I've made something really serene... well, if everything is like that, it's like having too much icing on your cake. You need something else under it, some kind of grounding. It's like if you're making a film, you can't have only happy moments, or else they become meaningless.
Meditation gives you back one or two sleep cycles every time you do it. Do it every day and it goes quite a long way towards helping insomnia.
I went to a hypnotherapist and learned how to hypnotize myself and explored orthogenic training, how to relax each part of your body.
I was always fascinated particularly with synths: how they looked and stuff that when you're a kid you're like this is the most incredible thing in the world just to play.
I always liked the idea of shaving the back of my head and getting a tattoo of my own face there so that, whichever way I was looking, I could freak people out.
I'm never really conscious of what I'm being influenced by when I'm writing.
I'm not someone who can just be paid to play keyboards on songs. I tried to do it - I needed the money, but it made me really unhappy and ill to be doing it.
I don't believe in getting a lot of new gear all the time, so I get very deeply into one instrument and use it for many years.
No, I'm a quite big believer in not being in the studio if I don't feel like being in there.
I remember having a 7-inch Depeche Mode single when I was ten and really loving that.
What do I call my music? Beats with melodies.
I'm a massive catastrophist by nature.
For me, the score is one of the main characters of a film.
Whenever I've improved, gone up a level in sound-making, it's been because I've done an album.
