"In 2000, I went into the shop and I bought some jazz that I knew I wanted to get, and I said to the guy, "what else can I get?", and he pointed out this album with camels on it. I thought, I'll give that a try, and it was this Nubian music, which I got really into and also I bought another one, which was an Algerian CD. I listened to that for a bit and then I just kind of stopped and didn't really listen to world music for 10 years. Ali Hussan Kuban was the doorway to all the rest of them. I heard that in 2011 and I've basically been searching ever since for anything else that feels that way. A few years later, one of the things I found was this track 'Baba Ramdev'. It's just so incredibly joyful and it feels like an epic adventure. There's something absolutely epic about it, to me. It sounds like they're outside. How you seen any of those YouTube videos of the Gypsies of Rajasthan, the colourful dresses they wear and the dances they do? It's pretty incredible. And they're always in some really remote-looking rocky outcrop, somewhere in the desert. And the cover of this album as well, the guy with the amazing moustache. I love that whole spirit, really wild and free - that's what the song feels like to me."

"The first film would be The Professional. I think in France it’s called Léon. Natalie Portman, Gary Oldman; it was one of the first films I saw with Jean Reno and man, it just had this cool vibe and assurance. It was about this assassin with a heart of gold trying to take care of young girl he doesn’t even know – and Gary Oldman is giving this insane performance [as the villain]. [It was] the first time I discovered Gary Oldman, and I was like, “Damn, he’s like a dope actor. I’d like to be on that level one day.” Plus, it was shot in New York, and I was raised in New York and in Jersey as a young boy, up until I was 10, so that’s an element of familiarity to it. I grew up fighting, and both my parents were Marines, so I’ve always been into this element of super-spying and assassins stuff; and there were so many just cool, chilled-out moments in there where Reno was just so cool, man. He was the man. I just loved what he brought to it. I loved the whole film, and again, I loved the way Gary Oldman played this role, because he was the villain, yes, but he wasn’t any typical villain; you believe that he thought what he was doing was absolutely right. That performance was great."

"I didn’t know anything about this film; I decided to just try it. I loved it. An old-style movie, and Mifune’s wild-man performance gives it special stature. There are not many actors with his charisma, a true strength, and humor, vulnerability, and truth. The film is well told, strong, honest, and simply filmed. I found it refreshing to be reminded that these simple qualities made the film, now fifty years old, beautiful and alive to me; a classic just like you promised, Crit"

"Wolf Creek, the Australian independent film that has such great locations and great music. A very simple premise, and it’s surprising. It starts out in this sort of idyllic setting and situation, and it just falls like dominoes into this horrific situation. Your hopes for the characters are dashed, one by one. I just love when I see a little independent film that’s got all the elements of good filmmaking done on a small budget with extremely powerful performances by the two lead characters in it."

"This is another one that really stuck out when I got into psychedelic music. It’s got all the elements. It’s got the distorted, orchestral thing, you’ve got flangers, tape phase and various other production techniques. Again, the vocal is just slightly twee and whimsical, but the rhythm section is like hip-hop. It’s got all of these weird elements, even though, being the late ‘60s, it was way before all of that. There’s stuff in the ‘50s that has phasing and flanging unintentionally, with tape speeds and certainly when they started multi-tracking there was definitely some cases of accidental phasing. But there’s a lot of talk about ‘Rainbow Chaser’ being one of the first examples of a phaser being intentionally used throughout a song. I don’t think there’s a definitive answer to that though. As much as I like this song, I didn’t delve too far down the rabbit hole with Nirvana. It’s very hard with stuff that’s on compilations, because you will go down avenues, but you can’t go down all of them, especially if you’ve got a boxset like the Rubble one, where you’ve got something like six CDs with twenty-odd tracks. I don’t have enough time in the day to do it, and some of it you just can’t get hold of. There probably are pressings of that single with a B-side, or maybe they didn’t do an album that was released. Because, believe it or not, not everything is on Spotify or Apple Music!"