"This is a record that I found from trawling the racks. It was the cover that intrigued me – a guy playing electric guitar in desert robes in a tent. I had to find out more. Tinariwen were a band that had an extended tribe, so people would come in and take over the vocals. They had different players. Later I learnt that the leader would take his guitar and go off into the desert and write the album under the stars. Years later I met up with them and discussed me and Brian Eno going out and spending time with their tribe, the Tuareg, and recording with them in the hills of Mali. We talked about it and started to plan it out, and then Underworld went on tour and that was that. Brian and I still talk about it. I listen to a lot of African music, that fantastic polyrhythmic, joyous tumbling sound which, for me, was techno. They did it so beautifully and made it sound haunting. They are a phenomenal group. This album was their first – it was recorded by a French group who had heard about their music and just went out to the desert and found them. It’s crudely beautiful."

"Revelatory meditations on a classic FM synth sounds. The end of an era and the beginning of one. I came to his music maybe later in my life, and he's one of those guys where you just slap your head and go "Oh man, how have I not known about this guy?" Only in the last couple of years have I approached him. He does micro-electronic stuff, kind of like preceded a lot of labels that have since flourished with that, like Raster-Noton and Editions Mego. What he's done - and I think this must be a running theme of things that I like – as far as liberating an idea from its historical context. Like Feldman and Varese, it's him taking these dance sounds, these FM synth sounds that you hear in techno even, and isolating them, turning them into this simple object which is hanging on your wall. And in doing so, it's reduced to something so pure that it's profound and it's absurd. And it's powerful and funny. It's so simple, the idea behind it. Production-wise, he has his own methodology that I'm not too sure about. It's not basic, but it's so obvious in its clarity, that it makes you ask, "How has someone not done this already?" So profound in a way. It's so simple, this idea. It's literally one pulsing sound. You understand it, but you are thinking "How do I listen to this? What is it for?""

"I did an Apple iTunes show at the Roundhouse, and they asked me 'if you could have anybody in the world playing with you, who would it be?' And I said 'oh, Silver Apples'. I'd seen him play the Knitting Factory in New York, and I thought that if I asked him to play with me his response would be a resounding 'no', but he was really enthusiastic and happy to do it, he's just this cool guy with a nice hippy girlfriend. Everything about them, the fact that he invented his own equipment, and he did kind of single-handedly invent electronic dance music. You listen to 'Oscillations' and maybe someone would challenge me on this, but I think that's the moment when... before that, electronic dance music didn't exist. It's got the four on the floor kick, all the different synth textures, even the subject matter, singing about technology. That's techno in 1968. Silver Apples came out of that Lower Manhattan performance art scene, starting as them playing music for artists on LSD dancing in lofts. There's one song that they've done that I've always wanted to cover, the song 'I Have Known Love', and every couple of years I go back to it and try and cover it, but every version I've tried to do of it is terrible. At some point in my life I want to try and find someone to do it with because it's a really beautiful song... Maybe I should just accept the fact that the original is perfect and it doesn't need to be covered."