"She’s a classically avant garde, experimental composer who was part of the 70s New York scene that people like Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell were also a part of. Her album Pipe Dreams, which was given to me recently when I was living on my own in the Lake District, became a soundtrack to the moments where I embraced the solitude of living somewhere quite secluded by myself. It has these beautiful drone sounds that interact with bass, and it adapts to your mood in a way. It’s completely transportive – an album to lose yourself in."

"There have been many biographies about The Who but this one is almost as entertaining as the group it documents. Dave Marsh, who was a founding editor at Creem magazine and an editor at Rolling Stone, writes as an unashamed fan of the band. No other writer, with the exception of Richard Barnes, has ever really understood The Who the way Marsh did with this work. In Before I Get Old the author analyzes their roots in "Mod" culture to their development into "the first avant-garde rock band". As a biography it is valuable piece of rock-music history."

"I remember going to my first “gay” film festival in the ’70s, with its tiny newsprint program, folding chairs for the audience, a complete underground experience. I asked my companion, “When do we see a lesbian movie?” Chantal Akerman’s avant-garde jewel was my first. My God, talk about ahead of her time. A proto-punk dyke protagonist, a butch, a whore, an outlaw, the unrepentant seize-fiend of all she sees . . . We still fight for glimpses of such antiheroines in the movies. Julie/Chantal is, regretfully, still a woman on the edge of antipatriarchal time."

"Wings of Desire, by Wim Wenders. The guy who wrote the screenplay, Peter Handke, is a playwright in Germany, and I was very much a part of reading the avant garde writers, be it plays or novels. I loved his writing, it was so strong and so sharp, and when the film came out, I just loved it. Everything about it was marvelous. Bruno Ganz was so brilliant. He’s brilliant most of the time. On our side of the ocean, let’s say, he was one of our stars, like Redford and Paul Newman and Brando were on that side. I had a few European actors where I went, “They’re so fantastic.”"

"It was the first record I ever bought with my own money. I was 12 and I chose it because of the cover: I thought David Bowie looked really cool. I loved how weird the album was: it’s a combination of avant-garde and some really great pop songs. I can listen to it endlessly and it’s still one of my favourite records. I think when I was a kid I was responding to Bowie’s androgyny but I just didn’t realise it because I was too young. There was just something about his image and the way that he presented himself that really rang true with me and I found that really exciting. I think that, for me, music is very genderless and that’s what I feel about his music specifically. When I write music it doesn’t feel like it’s restricted by any gender norms and that’s always what I look for in other artists as well."

"Once the Seattle scene exploded and the band names became living-room buzzwords, Dinosaur Jr. got a modicum of recognition. They deserve a little more. If there is such a thing left as the avant-garde – as you know, all of the foreboding walls of the forbidden zone have been removed – it seems to me that Dinosaur Jr. have a bit of an edge. Nirvana was everywhere you went at that time. I was living in Laguna Beach. Some friends stopped in for a visit and we wound up on Balboa Island. To get to the other side there were two routes: the roundabout way, or a small five-car ferry that makes the short hop across. I remember waiting in line to board the ferry and some cute young barefooted hippie chick walked up to the car window and, out of the clear blue, gazed in with a smile and said, ""It smells like teen spirit in here."" I was going, wow. Okay.
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"The idea of Stan Brakhage’s films being transferred to DVD once seemed heretical. The preeminent avant-garde filmmaker of the past half century, Brakhage made hundreds of intense films, many of them silent, that seem to be pure celluloid expression—poetic visual studies based on the play of light, tactile editing, and frame-by-frame editing. He worked mainly in 16 mm, but also made movies that were painstakingly hand-painted onto IMAX-size frames. Yet shortly before his death, Brakhage embraced the idea of a Criterion set, acknowledging the reality of a future (okay, present) where his films were more likely to be seen by an individual, perhaps on a laptop, rather than projected in 16 mm to a small film-society audience. The ability to study Brakhage’s films frame by frame, and to read Fred Camper’s superb commentary, also enhances the experience, easing the bittersweet film nostalgia for die-hard celluloid purists."

"This was really important to me as a teenager. I was 15 and my friend put these headphones on me - I think I've talked about this in other interviews. It's embarrassing because I always say the same thing. But anyway he put these headphones on me and he had Live-Evil on his Walkman, and it just blew my mind. It was this culmination of wild instruments. It was just the funkiness, the wildness - it was all so beautiful. There was crazy trumpet on top of funky bass. I had never heard Miles Davis before so it was a crazy thing to hear for the first time. It really inspired my sense of exploration. I was listening to avant-garde classical music - which I never listen to anymore - and I was really interested in dissonance and wildness. So this seemed to be about letting yourself go and not worrying about, or being restricted by, style."