"I originally chose the White Album, but then I thought, no, the White Album probably is my favourite Beatles record, but Sergeant Pepper is one of those records that everybody had and you heard it so many times that I didn't imagine I could ever possibly come back to it. But I have a librarian in me; some of the Wire things I've done I've made out of sources, to recreate something, and because EMI were so diligent about keeping all of the original material they were able to go back to the original 4-track tapes, put them all into Pro Tools sessions, get them all lined up and then start playing it back in a way that it was never played back. Because of the methodology of bouncing tracks- you'd record to a 4-track machine, then bounce it to another 4-track machine and whatever- by the time you'd gone seven or eight generations you're losing all of the top end on the original recordings. There isn't that kind of clarity there. There's clarity to Revolver that isn't in Sergeant Pepper because of all the layers of recording. And one of the remarkable things about the remaster of Sergeant Pepper is that clarity comes back with a vengeance. So the first thing that you can say about it is it actually sounds a lot more like Revolver than you ever imagined it did. And the second thing is they're right there in the room with you. It's completely present. The original recording was obviously really good. They were recording in Abbey Road with high end engineers. So what had sounded a bit mushy and indistinct is very clear. There are some things that I don't agree with. I don't like any of the tracks so much where they put the drums on one side because I hate that stereo picture, but they had their reasons for doing it. They tried to be as true as possible to the original mixes; that's the other thing, so you don't have a sense that this is a redo. You just have a sense that here's an ancient artefact that had been covered in grime and somebody's just cleaned all the grime off, and there you see the shiny thing in front of you."

"This one is an old classic: it's my foundation. Each song is a wonder. Each song tells a story. What sums it up for me is that if I'm happy I put it on and I'm even happier; if I'm sad I put it on and it makes me much happier. It has the ability to lift my mood or enhance a good mood. There's a quality of light and darkness, this association which I find really powerful and very impactful on my soul. It's a record to laugh to and to cry to. There's so much beauty. I find the string arrangements so moving. It goes so far into my being when I listen to it. It's a very big favourite and as I say a foundation to everything that I love, that hybrid. That's what is so attractive in Brazilian music: the fusion of cultures creating a new thing. That's really fascinating. It was in 2009 I think that I went on a hunt for this record, and bought it. I'd only heard certain songs; someone put some songs on my iPod a number of years ago, and then one day I realised that they were all part of a full album, which I bought when I visited Brazil some years ago, the first time that I played Brazil solo. And of course with Stereolab we were already cultivating that bit of land before we knew that it had already been cultivated and had a name and an identity. It's just an attraction, and you can't really explain them. They're doing the same thing in different parts of the world, or sometimes some things become so strong they go through your DNA somehow and you have them in your blood and they're not to be contested: they're there. But for me music has been the transformational tool. I know I've listened to records and I was one type of person before listening and after I find myself being transformed. It's the same with going to certain gigs: I walked in as one person and I walked out a different person. And I love that about music. You can't touch it, it's just there. There's a bit of a mystery behind it that makes it even more powerful."