"I’ll pair this with Mouchette, because they are beautiful, and if I remember right they were released only a year apart, an anomaly for filmmaker Bresson whose films often had many years between their respective release dates. I tried to go to college; in fact, I did go but did not come very close to completing a degree. The highlight of my attempt at formal higher learning was a seminar led by Michael Silverman on the movies of Robert Bresson. At the first meeting of the seminar, Silverman told us that he was still intrigued, confused, and puzzled by Bresson’s movies, even years into the experiences of witnessing them. So, he said, we would take this opportunity again to explore together their density and power. Balthazar and Mouchette slayed me, maybe Balthazar most of all because I identified more with the ass that was Balthazar than the angel that was Mouchette. Both movies are pitiless and intensely compassionate. They say, “This is how bad it is. Let us love until the end.”"

"I was living in Cornwall just after art college and lots of mates back home in Cardiff were really getting into kosmische stuff. One mate sent me a tape of this album. Amon Düül were a radical commune band, something which seemed a pretty out-there idea when you're living in Falmouth. I love this album, it's so varied. It's got pastoral music and very hard psych stuff on there side by side. I heard this record before hearing bands like NEU! and Cluster; it helped me get into the fact that the German bands of that post-war era had a year zero which was very appealing – by disregarding American rock & roll they created these amazing new templates. As with so many of these records, I'm drawn in by the artwork. The sleeve for Wolf City is amazing. I found out years later from Andy Votel that they created the sleeve by taking a photograph of an image created by several slide projectors overlapping onto a wall. You'd spend ages trying to get that right in Photoshop."

"I mean, all of them. I remember the first night my parents let me stay home alone I rented Metropolitan for the sexy VHS cover—I stayed up till morning trying to talk like those characters. And The Last Days of Disco is low-key brutal in its honesty about post-college party life. But man, everything really clicks into place with Barcelona—Cold War Spain, super early Mira Sorvino, prime Chris Eigeman, the stylish but not mannered cinematography, a broad eighties definition of “jazz.” I’ve been thinking about what’s so liberatingly beautiful about Stillman’s dialogue. It’s how everyone is trying to be so precise—and hearing that thought process is very rare in films. And how that extreme precision generates its own excesses and poetic absurdism. Like the crystalline moment: “Plays, novels, songs, they all have a subtext, which I take to mean a hidden message or import of some kind . . . So subtext, we know . . . But what do you call . . . what’s above the subtext?” “The text.” “OK, that’s right, but they never talk about that.”"

"I was always interested in classical music but not conventional classical. When I was in seventh grade I had a music theory teacher who was teaching me how to write music while playing me Mozart, Beethoven and Bach – the classic, romantic –styled composers and I got it. Actually, I didn’t get it. It was too simple, too predictable and I didn’t resonate with predictable music. What really pushed my buttons were things that were completely unpredictable, so when I went through college and finally heard Stravinsky, I thought he had dropped acid or something. This was a guy who for many years of life had composed relatively traditional music and then he wrote the ballets and they were monumental pieces of music for the Twentieth Century. They were pivotal pieces within a genre. Of course it’s impossible to mention Stravinsky without also mentioning some other composers like Varese, Ligeti and Berio who all really excited me. These guys all functioned on a different level, but Stravinsky…he had the biggest dick."

"Being from the South and being from that whole No Limit/Cash Money movement you’re a Wayne fan. You give him his props just for being associated with the Hot Boyz. It was at a period when I had just gotten to college. ""I had a suitemate that ended up being one of my good friends in life, and he was putting me onto these Lil Wayne Squad Up mixtapes. I started really noticing his lyrical ability. I noticed that something had changed between his younger Hot Boyz days and then. ""After that, we got out and went home for the summer. He was like, ‘Did you hear this Lil Wayne Tha Carter?’ and he sent me his album. I’ll never forget hearing that intro thinking, ‘This shit is crazy.’ That album and his first Dedication mixtape was what got me sold on him to the point where I was going out and praising Lil Wayne, like, ‘This nigga is the best.’ This album represents that time when he started to hit that monster level."

"I got really into reggae music in high school. Her vocals, her phrasing, everything taught me so much about how to put emphasis on different syllables, the way to punctuate things, making something sound extremely effortless when it wasn't. She's having fun and goofing around but I know that it takes a lot of work to make it sound like that. That was something that really appealed to me, wanting things to sound alive, effortless and fun while still touching on heavy issues. She just has a fucking great voice, as a singer she's just inspirational. I hadn't started doing anything yet, that was before college, I probably didn't own the album to be honest, I just taped stuff off the radio. I couldn't afford to buy a lot of records and my parents never had a lot of records. We'd buy singles at this place called Roxy Maxis for 99 cents. I taped all of the stuff on cassette so I'm sorry that I didn't pay for it."