"Nina Simone is special to me because of her voice, the fact that she sings very low. When I listened to her voice for the first time, I asked my husband, 'who is this man?' and he said 'no, it's a woman!'. I told him: 'no, it's impossible, she's got a voice like a man!'. That was my first impression of her voice and of her music. I like to sing very low when I'm in the studio so I felt very comfortable listening to Nina Simone, because this is the way that I wanted to write my music and sing. Also, the fact that she wrote a lot of protest songs. 'Feeling Good'- you can interpret it as you want. When I listened to this song for the first time, it was my introduction to Western music. I was in Paris, and listening to this song was like freedom to me. Freedom, because when I left my family [in Mali], I ran away."

"My son listens to Frank Ocean, so I started listening to this through him. I started with listening to Channel Orange and I thought that was fucking amazing. At first I was displaced by the thin-sounding R&B American-ness of it, but when you get into it you realise it’s brilliant. What I like about it is the nature of what Frank Ocean’s singing about, his little introspective vanity subjects. He doesn’t go outwards, like ‘the big wave’s gonna crush us, save the animals’, he just talks about vain things. It’s good. It’s brilliant actually. He’s just a really weird guy singing about weird subjects. There’s that tune ‘Super Rich Kids’, which is just fucking brilliant. ‘Too many bottles of this wine we can’t pronounce’, there’s little moments of discomfort like that, turned into a chorus. I much prefer that to someone’s big treatise about, I don’t know, Assad. Or the coronavirus."

"I always like when I hear something that I think is trend–setting. I believe that he’s inspired. I’m listening with the same ears that I listen to Stravinsky, Ligeti and Zappa with. What I’m hearing is someone with the ability to layer timbres and sounds on an electronic field in the same way that Stravinsky did as an orchestrator. My kids come home with all this dubstep stuff and I go to raves occasionally –not too much but I’ve been to a few, and a lot of that music is emulating everything else that’s around and it’s really good but it becomes insipid because it lacks a certain depth of vision. But listening to Skrillex I hear the layered quality of it although it isn’t exactly my favorite style of music. Things have dynamics, things have places bearing in mind what’s going on around them so that it doesn’t all just sound like a mess and I’m very impressed with it."

"This is another circumstantial choice from my long drive across America. Some of the tracks on this are twenty minutes long and perfect for a seven hour drive! It's good to have that time to let a song build and, because they are metronomic and electronic, it's great travelling music. There's a song called 'Patchwork' that Kliph played over and over again. It's maybe a portal into the records I've been listening to over the past decade, bands like Emeralds. I've got kids of various ages and records like these are compromise records because I can put them on to get them to sleep and I also like listening to them, though one baby didn't react to meditative music and I had to put on head-banging music to get them to sleep. I could head bang away! I listen to a lot of instrumental music in the house, loudly. I enjoy not having a voice to interfere with my day."