"This is off the back of Faust IV being my all-time favourite record. Fille Qui Mousse translates to 'Girl Foam' which is the best name for a project. I found this, again, about a year-and-a-half ago when we were trying to buy records for the apartment. I was in a record shop called Permanent Records in Eagle Rock [in Los Angeles]. I sometimes struggle going to record shops as they are often overwhelming, but in Permanent Records everything was in its right place and the staff would write little notes on the records. There was a sticker that said, ""Do you like Faust IV? Then you will love this record!"" That was enough for me, so I bought it. It's one of those records I put on when I have started cooking or something and I will forget that the record is on. Something will happen on the record and I will think, ""Oh my god, this is amazing!"" It is just the spilling out of someone's brains – it's playful and has hints of the United States Of America at points but then it is totally steeped in this weird jazz-Krautrock. There is a track on it called 'Magic-Bag' which is just the guy singing along to the drums and playing the same rhythm as what he is singing and there is water running in the background. The first time I took notice of the song I thought it was so shit. I don't know exactly what he is singing, but it sounds like ""I like my chunky rocky lane"" and then there is a huge gap and there is water running and he comes back singing ""I like my chunky rocky lane"". The fact that he liked his 'chunky rocky lane' made me realise it was one of the best songs on the album. It's a record that can suddenly surprise you. It's when you are trying to get your teeth into something and at the beginning it is difficult but it keeps reappearing and ends up being something absolutely incredible that you end up loving. It's hugely playful, weird and beautiful at points and abrasive at others. It's huge fun to listen to."

"This is from Live-Evil, which is a really intense and brutal album, but ‘Little Church’ is a little three-minute moment that’s a really beautiful, otherworldly, disorientating and extremely contained song within a crazy, fiery record. “It’s amazing what this pulls off in three minutes. The lead is somebody whistling in combination with a trumpet, there’s this moving, really melodic bassline and a crazy organ sound swirling around the entire track to this beautiful, almost Brazilian chord progression, but there’s no rhythm whatsoever. It’s so unique and I’d never heard that kind of tonality or sensibility. “It probably relates more to the kind of songwriting that we do rather than jazz, it’s not really jazz, it’s closer to Brazilian music or like writing a ballad, but without words. It’s another one of those songs I’ve always come back to, I still refer and think back to it when we’re making records as an example of a certain kind of energy, vibe and intensity. “It sounds like it’s on another planet, I couldn’t have imagined hearing anything like this before I heard it and as soon as I did it transported me in a way that I’d never experienced, it was like entering a dream world. That’s something I always think of as a goal in making music, entering a landscape, a dream-like state or trance, like accessing something outside of your own reality. I love when music can do that, it feels like you’re entering another reality basically. “I first heard this when I was fourteen and when you’re that age the serotonin in your brain functions so differently, everything means so much more. Your brain chemistry changes over time, it’s still fun, but you’ve got to work a little harder to make it as fun as when you were younger, but because I still have that memory, I can kind of conjure the same serotonin rush it gave me as a kid. “You learn to appreciate other sides of music as you get older, you can access the same kind of stimulation without it being this overwhelming serotonin blast."

"The last one I think might be the most unusual one and this is footage shot by Zora Neale Hurston, who we know as a writer, a novelist, the author of Their Eyes were Watching God (the basis for the eponymous film), which is her best-known work. [She] was also a playwright, short story writer, and screenwriter for a while in her career. Really a Renaissance woman. When she was a student, she was studying anthropology with France Boulez at Columbia, and she was doing her fieldwork as an anthropologist on the kinds of communities that she grew up in, in Florida. In the late 1920s, she had a car and a 16-millimeter camera and she drove down to Alabama and Florida and she shot footage, ethnographic footage, as a part of her research. We featured some of this material on the Pioneers of African-American Cinema box set that I co-curated that was released by Kino. The footage is not narrative and it’s not exactly documentary either, in the sense that she never put together a work that then she was sharing with other people — it was for her research purposes. But she shows men who are logging, for example. My favorite passage of the footage was when she shows children playing games. The can game, and games when they’re in a circle or square and trading off movement and those kinds of things. We can see she’s capturing information that she’s going to use to talk about these cultural practices in her academic writing. It’s also really clear in the attention she pays the children and the attention that she pays to the movements of women, the way that she captures, even in the silent films, the rhythm and the musicality of church service. We can see visually the style that she’s developing that then she folds into her writing practice. We can say, because we know about this work that Zora Neale Hurston seems to be one of the first African-American women filmmakers, and so it gives us a deeper sense of her creative practice and her intellectual practice as well."

"There are certain records that I know a lot about and others that I don't, and I think this one, for me, purely on a symphonic, musical level, it just is one of my favourite classical pieces. I think it's especially about the first movement, where the double-basses come in barely audibly, and it builds and they're just repeating their pattern. There's something about pattern in classical music, and that's why I've chosen Steve Reich as well: phrases and themes that get repeated and then get others on top that repeat, it's a cyclical thing that starts to happen with this harmony and rhythm, and it fascinates me. I also love double basses being bowed, there's just something about that that really pleases me. It builds into this huge thing and there's this moment where there's just one piano note, like a summoning, and the woman's voice comes in. I just think it's really soulful. I could've chosen Ravel's Bolero, which is also a really popular piece of music, but it's another one of my absolute favourites because again it's repetitive, it's almost like dance music, it's a repetitive theme that builds and builds. When I was going to see Underworld, off my face, in a tent - I think there's something similar, when instrumental music just builds and builds and builds. [Górecki] is really interesting technically as well as emotionally, which is the theme of this whole discussion almost: my greatest love is of people that have managed to walk that line between technical, competent songwriting or structure or understanding the art form and understanding the craftsmanship and at the same time imbuing that with reality and grit and fucking true connection to soulfulness and the universe. You can make a person cry because of what you're doing. That combination is just dynamite, isn't it? There's nothing better. You can sit in a room making a lot of avant-garde white noise and wanking over yourself, that's fine, or you can make amazing, soulful pop songs. Surely the artist's job is to be a consummate craftsman but within that be a complete child, innocent of expression and tapped in."