"I love David Cronenberg and everything he is about. He’s crawled inside my head and shown me dreams I never thought I’d have. His seminal 1983 psychodrama about the power of the media to corrupt and manipulate the minds of the people through sex and violence is as prophetic as it is horrifying. The mind-boggling effects dreamt up by Cronenberg and the master Rick Baker are a work of art unto themselves. It’s prophetic and horrifying and fascinating. Poetic, where other horror films are just gruesome and punishing. And Cronenberg gives a great commentary in conversation with longtime DP Mark Irwin. The edition also contains one of my favorite special features ever: Fear on Film, a half-hour roundtable discussion with Cronenberg, John Landis, and John Carpenter, who were all making classic horror films at Universal at the same time. It’s a nice little taste of what it must have been like to be around at a revolutionary time for American horror. I wish I had been there"

"I first heard it when I was a little kid. I thought, ""What is this?"", trying to get my head around it. You've got to do a dance as a little kid to figure it out, and with all the most interesting stuff it takes you a while to get it. It's so fucking modern. You could pick a number of songs, but the architecture of those songs, it's like these super-tight rhythm sections and it doesn't really go anywhere. The groove is the thing. Sometimes he goes, ""Take it to the bridge!"" and they change it, but then they go back to the groove. It's not like a traditional song structure. The streamlined simplicity of it, and not being distracted by harmonic development, strikes me as being so revolutionary and modern. It makes me think of painting. Sometimes he's just groaning and yelping, and he's kind of like Jackson Pollock over this very tight structure, this kind of animalistic thing smeared across the song. You can see the connection to the blues, you can see the connection to early jazz, but he takes it somewhere else completely different."

"I went to music school and this piece is probably given to every music student as a main example of what medieval music is, so it's not obscure in that world. It's almost funny that I'm putting it in here but I do love Machaut. To me, he's probably more notable for having written these secular love songs, which was pretty cool for that period. But I chose this piece because it's so powerful in an obvious way, just sonically, and what's cool about this performance is that they have these inflections in the voices which they think, I guess, is authentic. But I think that's debatable. It might be true, I'm not really sure. The singers bend the notes: they sing in kind of straight tones and then they bend the notes in a way that you don't really hear in other performances of this piece. It just sounds incredible, authentic or not. There are revolutionary things about this piece and why it's important but I don't remember what they are. When I was writing my song 'Marienbad', I was into madrigals and that straight-tone singing with lots of different voices"