"We’re back to opera, we haven’t left it — because Magnolia. If you think about the moment Keanu wakes up as a battery, the moment Lana Turner loses it in traffic and is in this insane hysteria of flashing lights that is completely unrealistic, and then you look at the moment where it’s raining frogs. I saw it, and was like, “Is this going to be one of those movies that I don’t like where he looks down on every one?” I think Alexander Payne and Todd Solondz are super talented, but sometimes I don’t want to sit through their movies because the bile is just unbearable. I didn’t really know PT Anderson’s work that well, or what was going to happen. And then, it turns out he loves people so hard that it rains frogs. There is actual opera in this one. Oh, and BT-dubs, there is a musical number. The license and the observation and the amount that he went for it. The craft and his ability to sustain that much — any one of these movies could have fallen into a puddle of pretension, but the mastery behind them meant that they never could. Jason Robards, who happens to be in two of the movies on this list, him actually dying of actual cancer playing a guy dying of cancer, giving that speech. And Tom Cruise giving the best performance he’ll ever give. It just felt so achingly, weirdly logical to me."

"It's everything that I love about music. It's hip hop, trip hop, acid jazz, alternative... I don’t want to call it R n B, but there's some soul in there. Very dark and tortured sounding soul, but soul nonetheless. It's fusion, is what it is. What I liked most about rock music, besides the music I make, is when I don't understand what they're talking about. Geoff Barrow... See, I've never seen Geoff Barrow. I don't know how he looks, although he probably doesn't look like he's supposed to be making this kind of music. I heard stories about it, how they’d record certain stuff to wax and then sample it. Just going through a lot of shit to make the record. It's just so grand, and you think of the artist - who gave them the blank cheque to go to that extreme!? Someone could have easily rapped on all of that stuff. It sounds almost like Wu Tang production, something RZA did. I can hear rhyming over it, but Beth Gibbons has this pixie-kind of vocal, with that ethereal and enchanted kind of thing. It's awesome."

"I see this as the mothership of a whole new century and a step further in the sexual adventures of pop culture. Antony means something to me emotionally. It was a perfect work of art, and people who I'd recommended it to, had despaired at my recommendation and couldn't understand it, and found it depressing, but it just came in a moment in my life when sadly my pet dog died, and it was just before its 17th birthday. He meant a lot to me and it was almost like having a child - a constant companion. I kind of cried non-stop for three months. I was in a gloomy cloud. But there was some sort of hope amongst the glamour and the gloom on that record, and a rebirth or coming out of a cocoon like a butterfly. I did get to meet him after the Turning show at the Barbican - and he's a big bird, isn't he? I also met Andy Butler [of Hercules & Love Affair] who was working on that tour and all the other glamorous characters. That was quite a special moment for me, the Turning performances. That was quite a momentous album."

"Both of Atom TM's records on the Raster-Noton label are some of my favorite electronic records ever made. Liedgut was his first one for the label. It feels cinematic without being pandering. Inventive and beautiful. Being that it’s electronic, and just that it in its own particular style, it’s a lot more having to do with texture and sound design. But then there’s this weird kind of melodic framework that goes in and out throughout the record, that’s very “hypermelodic”. Very consonant. It almost sounds like… you know those snow-globes that have a twisting belt? Like a music box. It’s texturally focused sound design. And he’s able to go back and forth here in a way that’s really compelling. And again, you can tell it’s very intuitive - he’s just going where the music takes him. In a world of forward thinking electronic music, where anyone can pick up a computer and do this thing, his voice is so unique. I'd be able to pick him out of a thousand records – his own distinct voice. I really love his records, especially the ones he did for Raster-Noton."

"So much nuance but he always has clarity in all of his music. Kieran's at the top of his game. He's such an interesting producer. Everything he does has this clarity and it seems very simple. But it's not, he has such a highly sophisticated sense of what should go where. You feel like he really understands the world that he's created for himself and works in. So you just hear him having fun and placing things around and you inherently trust him with whatever he does. It's like a new journey every time. Honestly, what I say about Beautiful Rewind could probably be applied to a bunch of his records. That's the kind of thrilling thing with him. He's the master of his domain and it's exciting to hear him play inside of that sandbox. Such a fun record. Fun can mean a lot of different things and it hits you in a lot of different ways. But it's enjoyable to get into something steady, that's the pulse of his tracks that are dance orientated. The production of it and just the way that he thinks keeps your mind spinning. So it's always fun unpacking what he's presented."

"As someone who’s really passionate about what he does, I have a lot of opinions about documentary films. A lot of documentary filmmakers don’t really think about their films cinematically, and some documentaries almost seem like they were just copy-and-pasted like Microsoft Word documents. I’ve always loved how Errol Morris takes a wrecking ball to those conventions. His films are constantly exploring the idea of what a documentary is. His films tweak and twist reality, and they don’t just try to serve the audience digested ideas on a platter. If I had to pick a favorite, it’s his transcendent 1988 classic The Thin Blue Line, which recounts a murder case and then riffs and re-riffs on it like a Bach fugue. It was the first film to really use re-creation and reeneactment scenes in a new and highly cinematic way, both to explore a case and to challenge a viewer’s own bias and subjectivity. Nowadays, its approach and editing style loom over every one of these multipart true crime series and podcasts. The Thin Blue Line is almost like the influential band that’s been ripped off so often that new converts may not realize just how significant it is."