"This is one of the first songs I can remember listening to over and over again as a little kid. I had ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ and ‘Without You’ and they were my two favourite songs. I remember I would sit on the living room floor with my dad’s big headphones on, we had a massive CD player set and I would put it on and I’d just be… [gasps] I’d listen to it on repeat. “That was my first love of a pop ballad and I think those feelings were my first feelings of love in a way. I would just play it over and over and I think that was my first longing for wanting to create, but maybe not knowing that yet. Just being like ‘Oh my god, this is what I love.’ “It’s quite cool that it was Harry Nilsson, because I was just listening to what my parents were listening to at that time. I fucking love Harry Nilsson, he’s one of my favourite artists. Mariah Carey is a diva and she kills it, but it’s a different experience with the Mariah version. I love a diva and I love a good belt and an intense dramatic thing, but I like the more understated, simpler versions of things sometimes too. It’s like the Dolly Parton version of ‘I Will Always Love You’, there’s something so fucking beautiful and understated about that.”"

"Great record from a great band. I read somewhere that Quaristice was based more on systems they used for their live set at the time and the results are more spontaneous and less edited. I don't know if that's correct or if that was someone else's assessment but each idea feels really fresh and exciting. Usually people like an artists earlier work but I really love their most recent records the most. This is a group where anything they do, I love, but they're one of the few groups where I really like their newer stuff as opposed to their earlier stuff. I think that they've set themselves up to really do anything they want. And you kind of feel that in the way that they work now, particularly with these last five. They got a lot of flak for the previous record, before elseq 1-5, the Exai record. Everyone was saying "Oh it's too long, it needs to be edited!" so the next record they do is five records, four and a half hours. It was such a fuck you. They're operating on such a different terrain, it's exciting. But I like this record in particular because it has a feeling to it which I haven't heard in their other stuff. It did feel more live – it didn't feel as polished, not that their stuff necessarily feels polished, but their version of it. It felt more spontaneous, and it's just a great, great record."

"In the recent documentary Gerhard Richter Painting, the painter speaks at length about being a young artist emerging in post–World War II Germany. He says that he always considered painting to be nothing more than a trade that one dedicates oneself to day after day. Working is, above all, very respectable. Perhaps this attitude can be attributed to the fact that postwar Germans were faced with the arduous (but perhaps liberating) task of writing a new history for themselves—trying to come to terms with the past while simultaneously looking toward the future and the endless possibilities therein. With such daunting business at hand, a workhorse spirit would be a must for all German artists. Fassbinder most definitely had that spirit, leaving behind forty feature-length films and playing countless other roles over the course of his short career. Lola alludes to some of these particular pressures and concerns. Lola herself is a woman with a troubled past pressing forward with her life. It is a great, classic story, and a lot can be read into it. But on a purely aesthetic level, Lola is a sumptuous visual journey. So many textures and colors . . . if Zéro de conduite is a Dadaist masterpiece and The Scarlet Empress is expressionism on film, Lola is pure Technicolor pop art, and one of the best late Fassbinder films. Coincidentally, Rainer Werner Fassbinder died the day before I was born."