"I had a group of friends who were all into rap, and we’d drive around and listen to jazzy, laid-back East Coast hip hop. If you didn’t go into New York it was boring, so we’d spend endless time driving in my friend’s car listening to Digable Planets, A Tribe Called Quest or De La Soul. I wrote an article for my high school newspaper about the hidden links between punk and rap."

"When I was a teenager, I was an avid Smash Hits reader - all through the 80s, that's what I read. So when the Beastie Boys and Run DMC came along, I was all over it. We were nicking VW signs from cars, skateboarding. That was a really big thing for ages. I was into that stuff for a while but the one hip hop album I listened to the most was this one. It's another one that doesn't ever fade. It's got this depth to it, and it's easy. But it's also serious and it's bumping. Obviously there are loads of other really important hip hop albums for me: Notorious B.I.G, Dr Dre, Jay-Z. I get a similar feeling from listening to really good hip hop that I get listening to Nubian music. The whole way of writing with loops really appeals to me. It was weird because I was listening to a lot of this kind of music, and playing and listening to a lot of jazz but they were two separate worlds. I was really into guitar music as well. When I was a kid I was really into Van Halen, heavy metal and all that stuff. Those two worlds never quite joined together. It wasn't until A Tribe Called Quest, and Galliano, Joyful Noise of the Creator. That Tribe Called Quest album, for me, joined those worlds. They mined a lot of old Lou Donaldson records, and other things, but it sounded really current as well. It pulled a lot of things together. And obviously, it branched out to lots of classic 90s hip hop: Guru, Jazzmatazz, Nas. It was a really amazing time."

"When I was growing up, hip-hop was pretty new. My oldest brother was really into it. Also, we had MTV from about 1990 onwards, so you'd see all these different people - A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy and Gang Starr - just became a soundtrack to whatever we were doing. I picked that one because I love DJ Premier's production, but also Guru's voice. I'm a big fan of the experimentation within hip-hop. Nowadays, people feel hip-hop has gone mainstream or whatever, but at that time, people were making records that were sampling very out there, experimental music, but combining them with parts from classical or jazz recordings, resulting in this very dense collage of sounds that is at times not even very melodic, but it's always got an amazing groove to it. It was those aspects in combination with Guru's voice, I just found it really inventive and exciting. Also, I would listen to it, and want to know where the samples had come from, and then I would go on missions to try and track things down. I think there was a Monk Higgins sample used on the track, 'Code Of The Streets', and that's just very alien-sounding. It's very basic, but it uses this beautiful violin part all the way through the track. They must have just been listening to such a wide variety of music, and what they've come out with is much more interesting that what came out post that era of hip-hop. You get some songs where there's a whole song taken, with just new lyrics added on. Back then though, there would have been as many as forty songs sampled in one song sometimes."

"Hip-hop has always been such a big thing for me, particularly hip-hop production. So many of my favourite producers growing up, and the reason why I wanted to make produced music, came from people like RZA, Premier, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, Timbaland and early Neptunes, early Kanye even - and Madlib and J Dilla are both right up there. I picked these two albums [J Dilla's Donuts is also on the list] that came out on the same label and from the same scene rather than say, Illmatic, because at that point in my life there was a sense of like, no matter how much I liked Public Enemy or A Tribe Called Quest records, I was coming to them late. But I can remember Madvillainy leaking way in advance and thinking it was so exciting being there for it happening. I think it will be remembered as a classic record. I've got to know Madlib since then, which is amazing because he's an absolute hero. I'm coming to hip-hop more from a production point of view rather than listening to the MCing or the lyrics - that's because I produce music. But this is a record where the Doom part and the Madlib are so perfectly matched. It's like the greatest hits of beat producing - every track is completely insane. The way he cuts up the samples is so, so heavy! I think it's pretty much perfect. It's so eccentric. There aren't that many genres of music where eccentricity is embraced in the same way. This is a really, really weird record, but it's totally canonised as being a classic record. That's wonderful. Maybe in the same way Theo Parrish's music is - people embrace that weirdness, but there are other genres of music where they don't. The feeling I got when I made Swim - and it was a little revelation - was that if you asked your general public person about dance music they'd say it's all the same and formulaic, there's got to be a repetitive beat and blah blah blah. But the fact that there is a kind of repetitive rhythmic element is actually quite liberating - so long as it's got that framework you can do anything else on top of it. You don't necessarily have to have something that functions as a song. And hip-hop's the same thing - so long as there's a beat that moves you, the other things around it don't really matter, you can do what you like. You can have a sample of a Pakistani singer over the top or an old soul record or even just random drum machine hits firing off all over the place - there's a crazy variety of things Madlib does when he's producing. But because it still makes your head nod, you can leave that area and be more free."