"I was quite a late-comer to Moodyman's music. I didn't really hear it when it was new to other people. Joe recommended Mahogany Brown to me. When I was in Germany on tour I brought a white label that had the track 'Pray 4 Love' on it that's on the Picture This album. I just fell in love with the sound - the Fender Rhodes and that kind of swung, half-time rhythm that is quite slow to this sort of disco groove, and it keeps going back and forth between those two rhythms, and being quite natural in the way that it does it. It suggests that it's going to explode into something, and then it just drops down into half-speed. It's a very teasing record in the same way that 'Shades Of Jae' by him was. He really understands the dancefloor, and a record that replicates sexual build-up. It's a very sensual and playful record. That in itself is a bit like Prince, but it's all sample-based stuff, and then the vocals as far as I can tell. Sometimes I'm playing in clubs where the expectation is that you'll just play very digital and harsh, abrasive music. I don't really like being known as an electronic artist because I don't think of myself like that. I like everything, predominantly soul music and music that is soulful, rather than just from the soul genre. Moodymann's inspiring because of his approach to production, and he's very inventive."

"Now I’m in New York, in a band with Chris Frantz and his girlfriend, Tina [Weymouth], and we didn’t have a super-duper plan. I had ambitions to be a fine artist and show in galleries, but I was also writing songs. This club, CBGB, had opened around the corner, and there were bands like Television playing, and Patti Smith was doing poetry readings. We thought, If we learn some songs, we can play there. I had a day job as what was called a “stat man” for a company that designed Revlon counter displays. So I worked in a little dark room in the middle of this office—which meant I had a little radio in there, and I could listen to music. And nobody else would bother me. Bowie was on the radio a little bit, and he was a huge influence for a lot of people. I was aware of all the Ziggy Stardust stuff, and then him moving onto the Berlin stuff. Somewhere around this time, in the late ’70s, after we made our first record, we met Brian Eno, who had worked with him on Low, and that was very cool for us. In 1980, I went with Toni Basil to see Bowie in The Elephant Man. He was reading the collected speeches of Fidel Castro at the time, and he gave me the book and said, “You might enjoy this.” I dutifully read it. Castro could really ramble on. Really ramble on."

"One of my favorite mini-genres is the B crime movie from the late fifties and early sixties. It was a unique period in American cinema that gave birth to these half-cocked, no-budget movies that were made by some visionary filmmakers. They’re all super raw and gritty, very existential, and absolutely innovative in technique. It’s no wonder that the French New Wave filmmakers all discovered them and ripped them off (I’m looking at you, Jean-Pierre Melville). Movies like Don Siegel’s The Lineup and Irving Lerner’s Murder by Contract (both of which have popped up on the new Criterion Channel recently!) embody this subgenre, but the high point for me is Allen Baron’s Blast of Silence, which seems to grow in stature every year. It’s hard to describe it. Imagine if Orson Welles was a crazed junkie on the Bowery in the late 1950s and somehow conned someone out of $20k to make a bleak movie about a hit man. It’s sorta part Point Blank, part Taxi Driver, part Shadows, and it’s as hardboiled as they come. It’s also one of the great New York City movies, with amazing time-capsule photography in all the boroughs and near pristine documentary coverage of streets. The Criterion disc also unearthed another absolute gem: a 1990 documentary in which Baron visits all the locations from the film. Oh, and the Criterion cover art, by comic artist Sean Phillips, is maybe my favorite cover! And the edition also includes a graphic novel based on the film! (Damn, should I have put this first?)"