"Christy Moore is one of my mum’s favourite artists and I listened to this so much growing up. He had a record, Live at the Point, which we would always listen to on journeys around Ireland and Irish music was the first music I experienced live. My mum was born in Dublin, we would go to Galway and go in taverns all the time and it soundtracked my childhood. “I just recently fell in love and ‘Black is the Colour’ was the song that I really liked and listening to it recently I felt like I was like inside romance. I was like, ‘Ah, I’m so in love right now’ [laughs]. I’ve been quite starved of romance for a really long time and I felt I was in it. I was ‘God, this is so romantic and this is just kind of fucking insane’. I’d forgotten the importance of it and how much I wanted it, so that’s why I put the song in here. “If you get the Live at the Point version, at the beginning he says that he’d heard this beautiful song by this guy and at the end he’s ‘gimme that song!’ He wants it and I love that, that’s so cute - that’s what this is about, it’s sharing stories. Christy Moore heard this guy sing this beautiful song and he’s ‘Come on, give it to me, I want to play that tune, I want people to feel that way’ and how beautiful is that? “I’m Irish, so folk is my origin, sharing songs, telling stories and someone else passing on that story. I’ve been really looking into folklore in the past year, that’s one of the reasons that I really wanted to go to Ireland because I was ‘I need to find a record that’s related to this, this is my culture and this is where I grew up.’ As a kid I played the tin whistle and the Bodhrán. I was winning trophies for Irish dancing, I spent my holidays there and I went around playing in fucking fields with cows. And yeah, I’ve been researching fairies and mythology, I love it so much. “There’s so much ancient, beautiful, really respected and protected traditional stuff in Ireland. The traditional aspect can be so cool, there’s so many amazing musicians that just go down to the pub and play and it’s like breathing to them. I stayed in this little hotel with eight rooms in a town called Kilkee, it was in a bay, it was so cute and there was a family playing music in the pub. There was an eight year old boy just staring off, he was playing the accordion and it was so natural - just a bored eight year old that is a fucking genius and has no idea. And then if someone sang an old traditional song a cappella, everyone in the pub would go silent. It was like a movie or something."

"It’s just timeless space-age music. Music that was recorded with so little technology, and yet it sounds so technological. It’s spontaneously recorded and spontaneously mixed, and yet it sounds like it’s been arranged, by four thousand producers, four million Trevor Horns. But it was just two blokes pushing faders up and down with a couple of space echoes. It’s an amazing sound, and it’s amazing what they did in Jamaica, especially people like Lee Perry and King Tubby. Sonically, they transformed music. It was quite difficult to get hold of at the time: there was one shop in Finsbury Park, which was quite a threatening place to go if you were a young spotty skinheaded kid. I remember Johnny Rotten used to go there, but he was a bit more fearless I think! But there would be house parties where you’d hear a bit of it, and it would filter into places like Rough Trade, and spread to Rock On in Camden Town, and you’d end up, er, borrowing lots of records that you never gave back…"

"Even though this album is instrumental it kind of feels like there are lyrics telling a story. But I couldn't really tell you what the story was. It isn't the same as certain atmospheric music. I can kind of understand their telepathic instinct with playing with Bill - there's a certain communication there. With Gunn-Truscinski Duo, their songs are worked out but then they do improv within that, I guess. - Kim Gordon I've known those guys for so long that I've gotten to see them grow and change as a duo. I think I set up one of their earliest shows. I've known John (Truscinski) since we were 18-years-old, so we've been playing music together since we were kids. So I've got to see the band develop like that and on this new one, I just feel like they're really stretching out in these really interesting ways and approaching the compositions differently than the first two records do. It's just exciting to hear them keep working. I don't want to speak for them but I'm pretty sure it's all written in advance, but with little moments, especially live, that they can stretch out and play with. They have really good chemistry. As usual with music like this, the record is partial ideas of what they can do live. Seeing them live, they've been playing together for a really long time and they can push at different points and it's really cool to see."

"Then I got into film school at the age of 17. Because I was young, the day I turned 18 my mother wanted me to see [Pier Paolo] Pasolini’s Salò. She said now you are old enough to see a precise portrayal of human cruelty. Maybe because my parents escaped Argentina during the dictatorship to avoid ending up in a torture camp like their friends ended up, she had a particular concern about the portrayal of human cruelty and torture. So she said, “You want to know how bad life can turn? Come with me and see this film.” And I saw it. And I know that movie stuck to my mind for, like, 12 years in a very precise, shocking way. And I never felt, for 12 years, the need to re-watch it. I said it was great to see it, but I was not ready to admit the perception of how bad people can be. It’s those very hot and cold — how do you say the people who study insects? -– entomologists. Sometimes you feel almost like an entomologist describing the life of ants. But the vision is sharp. The lesson is sharp. And also what I like about the movie is that, although the movie is about masters and victims, Pasolini — he’s not on the side of any. He’s just — like a dark situation, sharing the pain of one, or the dark joy, or the dirty joy, I don’t know. It’s almost like they’re above the character that they’re describing and they don’t identify with any particular one. You can also have that in The Battle of Algiers. But in any case, at 18, that’s a very major movie. I think nowadays that’s one of the very major movies in the future of cinema. It’s something strong that has not been copied in any way since. And that’s why, in my movie, I wanted to put Pasolini’s Salò poster above the bed, just to remind me that whatever I will do, my movie cannot shock, because of some people before us who made these extremely daring movies that really shocked their time. When people tell me I’m provocative I know that I’m not at all, compared to these masters of cinema."

"I didn't really grow up listening to Buju, I kinda got into him a couple years ago, I would say. But soundsystem culture is interesting in that respect, same with soca, same with some of grime, a lot of dancehall, where you’ll go into a party and you’ll know the tune but you don't know who it is. I’ve always had that kind of relationship with Buju. When I really started going through his discography was the same time I got into Count Ossie and The Mystic Revelation and listened to a lot of Nyabinghi - spiritual music that’s not for entertainment. Then later finding that this record was when he was converting to Rastafarianism, but when I listen to this tune it always stuck out to me because how do you sound like the deepest gunman in Kingston, but yet also like the poet. It's perfect man. I'm getting married later in the year and was telling my fiancée ‘You know I’m gonna walk down the aisle to some Buju?’ And even she’s like I can’t really say you’re wrong. We get it as well, if you’ve grown up in London soundsystem culture is so important, there's something you just get. It feels like you’re listening to Kano or Dizzee cos they’re borrowing from it. That album just has a sound, it's really emotive, when you listen to it you feel everything, you know. Whether it's the way he's recorded the guitar or the choice of mic, it all adds to that sound world. It’s more than music - that was really influential to me, I would say."