"I came to this record through the Encyclopaedia Of Jazz. As a teenager I played a lot of jazz piano, but more like learning how to play bop or more traditional types of jazz. And I was getting to the point where I was starting to find out about Sun Ra and some of the weirder stuff that was out there, and I was working through the encyclopaedia and I crossed every record off the list if I thought it would be far out and interesting. We had a scam going at the time. HMV in Toronto was pretty relaxed and you could return things for cash value immediately. So I'd go in and buy a stack of ten CDs and I'd just got a CD burner - this was like 1997 - so I'd take them home and burn them all and then take them straight back. And they'd be like, ""You've got the entire recorded work of The Beatles here - you didn't find anything that you liked on there?"" And I'd be like, ""No these are all rubbish, sorry."" And I did the same with John Coltrane. Then I can remember getting to the Albert Ayler page of the encyclopaedia and you know how there's that snooty canonisation thing with jazz music where somebody like Wynton Marsalis or one of those conservative types would be like, ""This guy lost the plot. He went off the deep end."" But this record blew me away. I got this and Interstellar Space, the John Coltrane album, and they both have long periods of free-form wildness on them. But the thing I loved about Albert Ayler is the melodies on the songs - again, a lot of them sound the same, but they feel so elemental to me. It's another record where I feel like those melodies have been there since the beginning of time and it just took him to play them. The sound of his saxophone is so amazing. It's super far-out and forward-looking. If that's too out there for you, there's this album by him called New Grass, where he hired a rock band, and it's like some A&R man had tried to make him have a hit record. There's a song on it called 'Heart Love' - it's less far-out but it has his crazy saxophone playing on it, but with a beautiful melody and this free-soul singing on it."

"When this record was released, it was our whole life at that point. All of our life's experience was in there and it was so important to us and to our hopes. This album opened up everything for us as a band and our dreams suddenly started being revealed. It opened doors for us to do things we wanted and it changed all of our lives forever. We didn't pick up a tour for like six months after this came out. Back then, you would build a record on the underground for a while in front of like 30 people and then it would start connecting with people on different radio stations via different DJs in New York. Once the shit started getting crazy and once people starting knowing the music, it got a buzz round it which eventually made for our first exciting tour experience. We'd been doing back yard parties since 1987 and we'd been doing lots of shows. When we got to touring it, we were ready. About this time we were doing demos off other people's records and I was just playing the records back and forth. I got down with this other group from Brooklyn called The 7A3; I wanted to learn the music business and they helped with that. They had a song, they got signed on a major label and put out an album. Just going through that process and not really understanding what it was yet, I learned a lot of mad shit. Afterwards, when I came back to do Cypress, we were [still] working on a demo but then we really started to become a band after that because we knew what we were doing more. We'd each learned so much shit about how everything operates that it just made it all easier. That's why we came out with everything all pretty fucking together really. We knew this shit was banging, we knew it was dope and that gave us confidence. But when you're so close to something you need to take a step back sometimes. When we put it out fully and people I respected and admired became fans of our music, it was incredible and life-changing for us. We also liked the same music and the same shit – many of the records in this list is what brought us together in the first place. This album started everything."

"I’m obsessed with 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I’m not jealous of the director who directed it because it was so much work. I’m sure he was working 20 hours a day for five years, with the very best people he could find on this planet to create a cathedral of cinema. The movie is a cathedral itself. And also when you read about how the reception to the movie was, how much he suffered, everybody was picking on the movie besides the young audience, that you don’t envy Kubrick. You envy his talent. But if there’s one director that I really envy, it’s Buñuel. I wish I was in his head when he had shown the movie he co-directed with Salvador Dali, because it’s just a short movie, a 17-minute movie, but that still is his most famous movie after a huge career of fabulous movies. And it’s the first movie that I know that really used the language of dreams and nightmares. The opening scene of the movie, of the short film, with Bunuel cutting the eye of a woman — even if the close-up, they replaced the eye of the woman by the eye of a cow — is so shocking that I wish I could have been in the audience, if I could not be behind Bunuel. If I could see the reaction, I’m sure there’s never people turning more crazy in the history of cinema, than the first audience that that movie had. Really it was not as banned as his first feature, L’Age d’Or, that was more anti-religious than this one. But yeah, there’s so many documentaries about the Second World War, about the First World War, about the things that happened in the trench, but why didn’t anybody film the opening day, or that first premiere of Un Chien Andelou? I’m sure that it was a general state of shock. And the movie is so beautiful, so political, that it’s a real piece of art. There’s not many directors you can consider as artists. Of course, Kubrick’s like an architect, the most famous architect in the history of cinema, but as a poet or painter, Bunuel is an artist. Also, he was co-directing a movie with Salvador Dali, which makes sense. You can say Kennith Anger is an artist. But there are not many filmmakers that you can consider artists."