"I've been a Cope fan since I was 15. He was a guy that nobody else was into, at least in my town - I'm from Temple, Texas. When you're that age and there's something you know about that you love obsessively and no one else is into it, it becomes a personal thing. I had all the records. It seemed like every time I would go down to Austin and went down to Sound Exchange there would always be a new Julian Cope record. Something older that I had never heard before or something new he was putting out that was not a main release but sort of a side release or he was releasing it itself. It sort of fed the obsession a bit. And then he was really into The 13 Floor Elevators and The 13 Floor Elevators were from Austin and then he put out a record called Droolian which had an Austin PO Box on the back and I didn't understand why that was. He wasn't here but somehow it had an Austin PO Box. I had a weird personal connections to those records. Out of all of his records, why pick Jehovahkill? I picked that one because that to me is the peak of his experimentation. It's also really great songwriting. It's a very, very kraut-influenced record. it's an expansive record. It was three sides. Not a full double album but it was three sides and on the fourth side you had an etching. He was always doing things like that. He was putting thought into it. He was the first artist I ever listened to that ran music in the run out grooves of the record. He wrote little inscriptions in the run out grooves of the record and there was all these hints and mysteries and all that stuff adds up to something. I'm not sure what right now but at the time I was just obsessed. I used to cover 'Upwards at 45 degrees' at solo shows, it's a great one. "

"Varese is a universe. A dense universe of objects colliding, crystallising, dissipating and obliterating. I feel like I can relate to what I know of his temperament as well. As well as his obsession with the desert and need to rid himself of the historical baggage of the past is something I can relate to. That guy for me is the origin of a lot of ideas that I'm excited about. It's hard to even talk about him. You know when you've sat with someone for so long that it's difficult to even begin to say. He was one of the first major composers who transitioned into more of a sound artist. As people have said, he kind of liberated sound from the familiar tropes of Western music and turned sound into this absolute state. An appreciation of sound as object. Sound as environment or experience. So, he's that guy. He's someone who, as I grew up, getting into composition and trying to find someone who I can relate to because I love the music but the culture of classical music is stuffy and boring. And I don't give a shit about it. But he was such an intense, probably manic depressive, obsessive-compulsive, beautiful, frustrated, angry, passionate person – and all this stuff came through his music. And I love him for that. He came out of the whole Romantic orchestral universe, and this was pre-electronic age. So he was surrounded by Stravinsky, Debussy, these major models as far as orchestral writing goes. But there wasn't anyone who was taking that model, freezing it and laying to waste the baggage of history that comes with along with that music. He was able to erase all of that and push the idea of orchestral writing forward. If he was alive today, that's a question I would ask him – where are you coming from? Like Feldman though, he's very intuitive in his writing, so he just trusted himself."