"Murmur is the album that launched 10,000 indie bands. It had a vibe and a sound unlike anything that was out there. I'm a huge R.E.M. fan and I like a lot of their records but this one was something completely different and unique. It had a sixties sorta influence, the lyrics were elliptical - you really couldn't make out at all what Michael Stipe was singing. There's always touch and mystery and beautiful harmonies; there are churning guitars; it's psychedelic - all these things make it kinda hard to pin point what exactly the record sounds like. I don't know how they managed to pull it off. When I listen to this record I realise that this doesn't sound like any record ever. It really has its own sound. I don't think it had any commercial success but everybody who is a serious musician loved this record."

"Half a century ago in 1967 there were two Kaleidoscopes, one in the US and one in the UK. Both were wonderful, but the UK band sang endearing lines such as "My god! The spiders are everywhere!" so I'll just write about them for now. Probably the tinniest band of the 60s, they never achieved mass popularity but psychedelic fan lists rate them higher than the era's supposed classics, due to their ecstatic melodies and gleefully oblique lyrics. "Strawberry monkeys are smiling for Julie, with pearl button eyes that reflect velvet clouds. Can you hear them smiling?" They changed their name to the Fairfield Parlour and stayed just as great. Now that the competition is quickly disappearing, they should get back together and be the most popular pop-psych band in the world, instead of merely the best. If they're missing some members, they can just take them from Kaleidoscope USA. "

"This was probably the first Scott Walker song that I heard, other than Walker Brothers’ songs. “I was in a friend’s car in London around eight years ago and ‘It’s Raining Today’ came on. At the beginning I thought it was unnerving, this weird cluster of notes. At the end of it I turned to my friend and asked, “What was that? Is it modern?” When he explained it was a record from the ‘60s I was like “Are you kidding me?” The production and vocal sound is so clear and hi-fidelity. “I fell in love with the sound of it from a production point of view first of all. I’ve always been interested in the crooner vocal and all that sort of stuff, but once I got into the songwriting it blew my mind, because this is stuff that you can’t sit down and play on an acoustic guitar. “There’s this theory that you should be able to sit and play any good song on an acoustic guitar and ‘It’s Raining Today’ throws that theory out the window. You couldn’t do that song, and songs like it, justice on a guitar, because the orchestration and the chord changes are more psychedelic than any psychedelic record I know. I literally can’t work out any of the chord progressions, and I’m usually decent at sussing them out. I still don’t know what these extended chords are. Maybe if I was a piano player, I would. So, I find that very, very inspiring. “I absolutely love the string arrangement to the song too, it’s so harmonious, even though it’s totally inharmonic. I don’t know how to do that. It’s so brave to have that ominous thing going on underneath these beautiful cadences. There are moments where it’s just on the cusp, but because it’s an orchestra playing it they’re all moving together. If you did the same thing with electronic music or all of it separately, it would be very hard to get that movement and that swell and modulation."

"This is almost Devendra's Exile On Main Street. There's gospel singers on the song 'Saved', there's a song called 'Shabop Shalom' which is a satirical bar mitzvah song that he performs like Elvis. It has an epic jaw-dropping song called 'Seahorse' which alternates between psychedelic parts and jazz parts, a fuzzy roving ballad called 'So Long, Old Bean'. There's so much on it and I love that. Devendra was my neighbour in Brooklyn many years ago, and it was cool watching him become a superhero version of himself. He had that kind of bravery before almost anyone I knew, to embody their personal expression in this world. Devendra is a next-level master at combining musical, visual, and poetic aesthetics. For me he is a personal hero, his work is a benchmark of how much of your brain you can get out there it. We were born a few days apart, so we are really connected as peers."

"I don’t sit here, in my dad’s flat listening to my dad’s music, it’s not a fucking séance, but I don’t try to avoid it. I listened to a song of my dad’s the other day, a song he wrote called ‘Pam’s Moods’, and it’s so unbelievably brilliant writing. It’s a bit naively recorded and he’s got this faux-Jamaican-American accent going on, so he hasn’t quite found himself yet’ he’s not relying on who he is yet, so you can hear a bit of anguish about that. That muddies the brilliance of the song, but the song is so fucking good. The lyrics are so good, ‘Making wormwood of my soul,’ and it’s absolutely unbelievable delivery, and makes use of ridiculously long constructive narrative that still rolls off phonetically and scans well. That style of music got a bit rejected when he leapt to the more successful thing, but I more prefer that. It’s psychedelic."