"I can't pronounce it either! It's a fantastic record. It's got such a gorgeous mellow vibe to it. It's kind of accessible to people who aren't familiar with jazz, but it also has kind of this free, loose thing. It's not free jazz, it's definitely modal. It's got Pharoah Sanders on it. It's lush and gorgeous and kind of takes you to a different place. Sometimes Alice Coltrane plays the harp, which sounds dreamy. It's one of my go-to's in the morning at work (in Sub Pop) I just kind of put it on to get me going. I probably drive some of my co-workers crazy playing it. You know, there's not a really obvious influence in our music that comes from jazz. I know I'm influenced by it, but I'm not sure how. I don't like all jazz, but certain things I love to death. That's the problem with this list: I can't stick Charles Mingus on it, or Andrew Hill, or Ornette Coleman, or Albert Ayler. One of the things I feel lucky about, my high school friends and I who formed Mr. Epp, we would go to our little record store in our suburban town and the guys there turned us onto The New York Dolls and Ornette Coleman and Ayler and The Velvet Underground, Brian Eno. I feel really lucky to have stumbled into that, at that time."

"That one was quite deep for me because again, growing up in church and being a believer; my family being from the West Indies - my mum’s side from Jamaica, my dad’s side from Dominica - I remember going to church and it was authentic West Indians there in their 40s, 50s that now live in the UK but have kept these traditions, they were singing these songs just without the drums. So when I first heard this, something just went - ‘Hang on?’ I remember being four and hearing this person sing that song but swap Selassie for this or that. It had that same spiritual element I was so used to, just in a very different form. It was like a weird full circle thing for me. It was almost like going back home. These drums are taking me somewhere, but also I'm being carried by these songs I know. It was beautiful to check out more of what Count Ossie was doing and people that were part of his band like Cedric Brooks. He was infusing a lot of the jazz elements that he's hearing from Coltrane or Ornette Coleman. That's deep, you’re deep in the heels of Kingston, aware of Ornette and them man. Like Duke Ellington had to come and visit him, you know, there’s a photo of him and Duke Ellington in the bush. You know he's got something that's important, not only important for culture but it's spiritually important for the Nyabinghi tradition. For me when I heard that record, particularly Grounation, where they’re going through loops for 20 minutes, it’s that thing again with soundsystems where you ‘wheel up a riddim’ or at church when the tune would just keep going. It was something I’d never heard but I also felt like it wasn’t foreign, those experiences are so wicked and that influenced the whole fascination with drum culture and drum languages, spirituality connected to drums, music orientated around the drums. I got into Batá and music for the Orishas and things that are all over the Diaspora in West Africa, the Caribbean, South America. And when you listen to it, the recording’s so rags but it just couldn't work if you put it in Abbey Road. It gave me a bit more confidence when I was doing my record that if I go to someone’s house and I show up with a handheld recorder, as long as it feels right it doesn't matter. Big studio, small studio, my phone as long as it’s got that feeling that I was going for."

"It’s early 70s, with the Master Musicians of Joujouka. That’s partly why I chose it, because they’re on a couple of tracks. That record is one of the earliest jazz records I found myself listening to a lot. Somebody handed it to me and I was really impressed by it. I didn’t know anything about these Joujouka guys at that point except for the fact that their name always came up in relationship to the Rolling Stones and Brian Jones. At that point I don’t think I’d even heard of that Pipes of Pan At Jajouka record that Brian Jones recorded but I started to get really interested into Dancing In Your Head. Ornette went to Morocco with this music critic named Robert Palmer. Palmer was a really important music writer and I’d read some of his stuff, so when I saw his name on the back of that record I was even further intrigued. It was a kind of an early avenue into free jazz for me, because this record led me to Miles and to Coltrane and to Thelonious Monk and Albert Ayler and all this other stuff. I think probably at the same time I was also listening to African “world music” as they called it later, and a lot of Gamelan was really important to me. I was looking for world music that I felt I could find stuff in, that could inform my interest in rock & roll and certainly the Gamelan music had a lot of that just because it was metallic and loud and it had these furious beats and Dancing In Your Head did too because it was really drone-y in ways that reminded me of the Velvet Underground and was also really loud. It also tied directly with jazz music because The Master Musicians of Jajouka playing those rhaitas were circular breathing in the way the jazz players were, just going around, you never felt like the music broke for breath. They were just going around in this endless loop, which also tied it in with my interest in tape music and tape loops and things like that. It wasn’t really until I went there and played with these guys in the 90s – we went to the village and spent a couple of days there and kind of played all night long with them – they had a cheap generator and an electric guitar – I could see that it was loud and kind of stomping in a way that related to rock & roll but it also had this circular trance-y thing where you started to lose track of time. Had it been going on for ten minutes or forty minutes or whatever it was? It had a very druggy quality with or without the drugs. There was just something about Ornette Coleman and when I heard this record I felt like I was hearing someone who was a great force. He did all these amazing ground breaking records and it opened up the whole world of jazz for me."