"La Promesse, for me, was like a lesson in minimalism. Just how little you needed to tell a really compelling, honest, and important story. The subjective single-camera perspective, and just how simply you could tell a powerful and substantive story."

"The restoration of this film came along right when I needed to be reminded of the difference between simplicity and minimalism. This one (and its follow-ups) are as simple as can be and as full to bursting as a movie can get."

"Black Moon is a quintessential “surreal” film. What interests me is that so many films that we would label surreal were made in the sixties and seventies, decades (and many art movements) after surrealism’s inception. By the time so many of these surreal films were being made, the prevalent trend in art was toward conceptualism and minimalism, approaches aimed at stripping away the non sequitur . . . which is, in essence, the guiding principle at work in Black Moon. What is also interesting to me is the tenor of most of these films. While Zéro de conduit captures a certain joie de vivre and sense of humor, which, I feel, is indicative of the early surrealists, the nature of many later surreal films generally seems much darker—more Max Ernst than, say, Magritte."

"Neu! has to represent Cluster, Conny Plank, Kraftwerk, David Bowie, Brian Eno. It's an extraordinary piece of work. I was introduced to it when I first went to art college. There was a guy called Tony Fowler who was the polytechnic DJ and he was a little bit older that everybody else. I wheedled my way in and became the sorcerer's apprentice or whatever, thinking I could get my taste on there instead. He played me this and at the time I was very confused by it. I thought I was quite... I listened to Captain Beefheart and Pink Floyd and good stuff, but this was really challenging, the minimalism I guess. I can honestly say it didn't make me go, 'Aha! This is ze future!', but many years later, after I'd had it in the car stereo, I remember Klara saying, 'Papa, you've been playing 'Hallogallo' for two years, can we hear something else?' I was going: 'But it fits! It fits! It's perfect every time!'"

"I'm an enormous Terry Riley fan. For me, Steve Reich and Terry Riley are the twin pillars of minimalism. Simplicity, harmony and repetition: they're very important things in what I do and what I really like. And I chose this album as opposed to A Rainbow In Curved Air because I heard that both John Cale and Terry Riley hated it, and I think it's a record that deserves love. 'The Mirrors In The Great Hall of Versailles' is a fantastic track and one which I just listen to over and over again. It's a really beautiful record. For years I hated the song. There's a song called 'The Soul of Patrick Lee' on it. But then I heard it somewhere and I thought it was quite good. But it's a strange hybrid record, and you can see how Terry could be dissatisfied with hearing something that has repetitive riffs and drums playing underneath it, and how John would feel like it didn't really accord with anything he was doing. Someone had obviously decided that they would make a good pairing because of their history. But they never made another record together which kind of tells you quite a lot. There hasn't been a Church Of Anthrax Revisited. Also it's a fantastic title. It's very dystopian."

"I picked Steve Reich because I think it changed the parameters of how I thought about music. At the time I was 17, playing in The Edmund Fitzgerald and I hadn't really ever been aware of modern classical or minimalism and it inspired me and also reinforced stuff that I intuitively liked in music, such as points of sounds and structural emphasis. The band Youthmovies introduced me to Reich - they had a quite formative effect on me in a sense that, up until then, I still listened to music in a tribal way, as in I had to identify with whatever subculture was going on, so I listened to Skinny Puppy and really plunged my identity into that, for example. I was in that teenage phase of tying up your fashion and your self identity with music. They also played me Gwen Stefani, Missy Elliott and Stars Of The Lid and they showed me that you didn't have to only identify with one tribe - they broke that way of thinking down. So that record was really important. And on a more simplistic level, it's just stunning. It's the kind of record you can listen to in any environment, unbound by context - it induces a trance-like state. It's a particularly good record to listen to when you're on the Underground, it's soothing - the perfect soundtrack to seeing thousands of people walking past you. He's one of my top five favourite musicians of all time."

"That's like a bookend thing really, because it's one of the latest records I bought, only two months ago. Side one is the best side, sometimes he gets a bit busy, but the first track starts so sparsely, it's incredible. I saw Terry Riley recently when I was playing at the Primavera Festival. Everybody ends up staying in the same hotel near the site and a lift door opened and I saw him and he went 'hello Jarvis', and that was a very proud moment because I've only met him once before. Mark Webber, who was the guitarist in Pulp, he knew Terry Riley a bit and we actually did a performance of 'In C' with him at the Barbican years and years ago, and he remembered me from that. I was really touched. I think it's a really romantic record - none of these records have to be for any purpose but I have to say if you want to get it on with someone, it's a good one to put on. When Mark first introduced me to minimalism I thought 'there's not much happening here', but it makes you listen to music in a different way, you're listening to the actual sound of it. That expands your mind. Persian Surgery Dervishes is using that weird tuning, with loads more notes, it's questioning the idea of the Western scale, saying we can find notes within the notes. It's a long way from pop music, it's exciting, it's good to know you can be enthralled by music in which not very much happens. 
"

"I heard this when I was living up in the North East by listening to Kid Jensen. I had On The Beach, but hearing After The Gold Rush... Somehow Jensen had it, it was released in the States before it came to Europe, and I remember being really impressed by the sound and content. I think Neil Young is an example of somebody who is successful and very curious, and I think the freedom that he got, financial freedom as much as anything, he took that and turned it into his obsessions, his railway collections and whatever else. That meant he could go, 'I can do what I want to do, so I will'. It's still the tone on the guitar, and the two-note guitar solo, it's astonishing. Why have more when you can sound that good? He's in Wire's minimalism, and you can see his influence go right through - I'm not saying people are trying to emulate him, but you can see it in Earth, in Sunn O))), it's there. The only person who is comparable, and they're totally different, is Scott Walker. It's this obsessive curiosity of wanting to find out what would happen if I do that or apply this to this. And courting failure; publish and be damned. In that way I was going to name him, because I couldn't have Blue by Joni Mitchell. Look I've snuck that one in there. The happy thing with being in Wire was that we could talk about these records, because there was more to life than punk's ground zero, or whatever it was supposed to be. How many great punk records are there? First Ramones album? You know what I mean."