"My entry into Gong would've been the Camembert Electrique album, which I bought for 50p or something like that. A lot of people at school had that record and, in fact, my first entry into being in a band at school was a band that just did Gong cover versions. It was an interesting education as I was dabbling around on an electric violin, and what with all those interesting time signatures. We did a street party for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977 and just played Gong covers! Later, down the line, one of the guys who was in the band became a member of Gong in the 80s, a guy called Graham Clark, and we got to the know them quite well. We were that much of a bunch of fanboys that we would make our way into the dressing room. There was a point when Gong founder Daevid Allen was playing with Here And Now, which was like this festival-type band, and every time they came to Manchester they let us play on stage using their instruments. We had this group called Danny And The Dressmakers and we'd play the worst noise you could possibly play; it was like an anti-band. We went on tour with Here And Now in a converted ambulance and did three gigs with them. And so we built a strong allegiance to the brand of Gong, which has carried on throughout my life. We also performed at the Gong Family Unconvention in Amsterdam at the Melkweg many years later, and Daevid Allen stayed at my house a few times. He was a very interesting character and proper musical melting pot in terms of where he comes from. I picked Angel's Egg because it's when the band was still experimenting. There are tracks here that are real improv, while others are really composed. There are tracks where certain members take a lead on it. They recently put a box set called Love From Planet Gong and listening to the re-mastered version of Angel's Egg, it occurred to me that this music couldn't be dreamed up in most people's imaginations. It's a fascinating record."

"There was a record store in the Times Square subway station, and another one on 42nd Street, both of which had big “international sections,” as they called it. It included everything from the rest of the world, all on vinyl, but with no information. You’d look at the cover and go, What’s this like? It was a total crapshoot. But occasionally, I’d hear something that would blow my mind, like a Fela Kuti record; the first one I picked up was called Expensive Shit, and obviously I picked that up because of the title. The covers were the best—like Cambodian pop records with a bunch of people in traditional garb, all holding electric guitars—and you’d look at them for clues. You’d think, What in the world could that be? You’d buy it, and it would be pretty cool. In 1986, I did a fiction film called True Stories. I guess you would call it a musical comedy. We were doing the mixing in San Francisco, so I’d go down to the big Tower Records on North Beach and go to the international section. One day, I came back with a whole bunch of Brazilian records, because I had maybe heard of a couple of the artists, but didn’t really know what their records were like. One was a Caetano Veloso record called Muito, and then there was a Milton Nascimento record, and probably a Gilberto Gil record, and those blew my mind. They had elements that were psychedelic and that had a Brazilian feel. They were really beautiful, but then I dug a little bit more and found out they were also really political. These guys had been exiled, thrown in jail. I was connecting with it, and I realized that my generation didn’t know any of this music. So I asked our record label, “Can we license this music, and can I make a compilation of my favorite cuts?” That one record led to another one: There was a Brazilian series, then a Cuban series, because Cuban music had not been available in the United States for decades. And I started my own label, Luaka Bop."

"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."