"""Ben Vida is a composer and sound artist whose work I really love. This record he did pairing his idiosyncratic electronic voice with percussion is a favourite. I suppose everyone I have given on this list has a strong character. The thing I love about Ben too is that he's so good at synthesising sounds and he has such a strong compositional voice. But his music has such a great sense of humour too – some of the sounds are absurd. They are really high quality, well made objects, but in a lot of ways it's so funny. I'm always excited to listen to anything that Ben does. And it's great to get a chance to work with him too. He's been a long time collaborator. I also sought him out to work with me as a performer on my HIVE project. When I first started the project, it was this installation where there were these five wooden mushroom-like pods. It's a piece for three percussionists and two modular synths. Being a fan of his music and having known him for a couple of years, I asked him to do that with me. And so we ended up touring that around together. I ended up adding some vocals to some records that he did. He did a record called Slipping Control a couple of years ago, that I worked on with him. So it's been a very rich creative relationship."""

"We've been around them quite a few times in the last three or four years. They have a way of doing this hypnotic, simple, grinding-away thing. The guitarist, Ira Kaplan - he's crazy with all these delay effects, the way he's layering them up. We would end up listening to them almost by accident. There have been a couple of times where we would do these long drives and we'd put on a record like Boris or Yo La Tengo, and they'll have songs that go on for ten minutes, and you're getting into these big soundscapes that just dig into oblivion. We've really embraced that in the past couple of years: to find this perfect goal, a sound you can play over and over, and not necessarily get to a crescendo and back, but to get to the edge and stay there. And they do that great. There's a lot of good qualities about their group. They're fucking weirdos, they're just not a typical rock group. A lot of times, I feel like The Flaming Lips are a typical rock group. I mean, we're influenced by The Beatles. It's a bunch of dudes with long hair that do drugs. We're pretty typical. I try to remind ourselves that we like weirdos, although I don't always believe that we're weirdos ourselves. But we love the weirdos, and we love when they get the keys to the house and they can have their party that night."

"Jimi Hendrix is one of our local heroes in Seattle, and we only have a handful. He walked the same streets than we did. Interestingly enough, he had to come over here to break out. We were always proud to be from the same town that he came from. I remember in the very early days of this band, we would drive to the cemetery, go to his grave and crack a few beers or whatever. We knew that a lot of people did that too. So if we were low on weed, we could probably show up and always find at least a joint or two... Which we did more than a couple of times too [laughs]! People would leave guitar picks, half burnt roaches, sometimes full joints. And we would hang out with Jimi and smoke the pot that people left on his grave. He was a phenomenal guitar player. The band that he had, the trio on that record, it's legendary. Are You Experienced? is the first of his albums I was introduced to. And I still think it's the best. He was an innovator, he was extremely unique. He had a uniqueness that passed the test of time. And the only other guy, for me personally, to make that sort of a change, another guitar player of the same calibre that I kind of acknowledge as ""this guy is the fucking shit!"" is probably Eddie Van Halen, a couple of generations back."

"How about a comedy? The Devil Wears Prada. I love that film. I love Meryl Streep, along with the rest of the world. She’s the bad guy in this film, so to watch Meryl play a bad guy with all of the layering and the subtlety, still you love her in the end. It’s just wonderful. I love the couple of speeches in there ? Stanley Tucci has a couple of speeches in there, one of which is to Anne Hathaway. Anne comes in to him and tells him, couldn’t she be given credit for trying? And he goes off on her about the value of trying and whether, in fact, she does deserve credit for trying. Great, great speech. Then the other speech I love is the one about the blue sweater, where Anne Hathaway thinks she’s underplaying her fashion sense by wearing sort of nondescript, underplayed, like she?s not going to be one of these fashionistas, and Meryl Streep goes off on her about how many hours were put in by designers crafting the kind of underplayed, nondescript look that often people are… they try to represent themselves by looking like they don’t care about how they look, and they just kind of throw something together. She goes off about this blue sweater that Anne Hathaway’s wearing, and I just thought that was brilliant, and in the mouth of Meryl Streep, it was even more on the mark."

"I remember this from the time, but also my son, Sonny, who's five, is obsessed with this record. I first played it to him when he was three and he'd get his little guitar off the shelf and just go mental with it. When one of your kids likes it that means you have to listen to it about 15 times a day but I didn't mind. It's like, "Yeah let's stick it on, play it louder." It's just absolutely perfect and so heavy. And lyrically I get it now but I didn't at the time. You don't really get lyrics when you're a kid. You just think it's about horses. I always thought Jeff Beck's 'Hi Ho Silver Lining' was "silver lightning" - I thought it was about a horse. That whole thing to me is just a love song for a horse. Fuck knows what it's actually about. Drugs? Yeah, probably. One of my favourite memories of school is the school cloakroom full of tartan - that was for Bay City Rollers, but it just really reminds me of this era. My sister was a couple of years younger than me but she had Osmonds socks and an Osmonds lampshade. She had a couple of their albums. But 'Crazy Horses' is such a fantastic record. The first record that I ever liked was 'Billy Don't Be a Hero' by Paper Lace. I nearly chose that, but then I listened to it again and it's not very good."