"The last one I think might be the most unusual one and this is footage shot by Zora Neale Hurston, who we know as a writer, a novelist, the author of Their Eyes were Watching God (the basis for the eponymous film), which is her best-known work. [She] was also a playwright, short story writer, and screenwriter for a while in her career. Really a Renaissance woman. When she was a student, she was studying anthropology with France Boulez at Columbia, and she was doing her fieldwork as an anthropologist on the kinds of communities that she grew up in, in Florida. In the late 1920s, she had a car and a 16-millimeter camera and she drove down to Alabama and Florida and she shot footage, ethnographic footage, as a part of her research. We featured some of this material on the Pioneers of African-American Cinema box set that I co-curated that was released by Kino. The footage is not narrative and it’s not exactly documentary either, in the sense that she never put together a work that then she was sharing with other people — it was for her research purposes. But she shows men who are logging, for example. My favorite passage of the footage was when she shows children playing games. The can game, and games when they’re in a circle or square and trading off movement and those kinds of things. We can see she’s capturing information that she’s going to use to talk about these cultural practices in her academic writing. It’s also really clear in the attention she pays the children and the attention that she pays to the movements of women, the way that she captures, even in the silent films, the rhythm and the musicality of church service. We can see visually the style that she’s developing that then she folds into her writing practice. We can say, because we know about this work that Zora Neale Hurston seems to be one of the first African-American women filmmakers, and so it gives us a deeper sense of her creative practice and her intellectual practice as well."

"I was in hospital this year and I made a point of listening to Exai and Oversteps, and Oversteps is amazing. I completely missed it at the time because I thought they'd disappeared way up their own arses. Academic music for academics. There is an element of that, I think. But those EPs remind me of walking around London completely off my head. It's the best music for that. For me, they represent coming back to electronic music after doing my homework. I immersed myself so much in the idea of the heritage of where my music came from that I missed out on rave culture and a whole scene that I belonged to, having come out of that whole electro/breakdance thing. I felt like I'd taken a wrong turn. But coming to Autechre… What I heard in them was Sonic Youth in electronic form. You've got that whole thing of mutated music turning itself inside out. Destroying itself as well. It induced a bit of a head rush and a panic that was actually quite enjoyable. Walking around London with a huge pair of headphones on completely off my tits listening to Autechre is the city experience for me. I like the overload of it. But they are also capable of beauty – I think that's what makes them so real. I have struggled with a few of their records. Chiastic Slide was one I bought when I first moved to Kilburn and I really didn't think much of it at the time. But what's amazing about Autechre – even at that point when they hadn't become IDM gods – was you knew that you had to persist with them; that it wouldn't reveal itself on first listen. You had to dig a bit, the same with Sonic Youth. I persevered with Sister and it became a favourite after a while. Chiastic Slide is now my favourite Autechre album. You can't rely on them to just do what's expected. Picking the EPs is a bit of a cheat, but some of my favourite tunes are on them – 'Cichlisuite' and 'Envane'."