"When I was growing up, hip-hop was pretty new. My oldest brother was really into it. Also, we had MTV from about 1990 onwards, so you'd see all these different people - A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy and Gang Starr - just became a soundtrack to whatever we were doing. I picked that one because I love DJ Premier's production, but also Guru's voice. I'm a big fan of the experimentation within hip-hop. Nowadays, people feel hip-hop has gone mainstream or whatever, but at that time, people were making records that were sampling very out there, experimental music, but combining them with parts from classical or jazz recordings, resulting in this very dense collage of sounds that is at times not even very melodic, but it's always got an amazing groove to it. It was those aspects in combination with Guru's voice, I just found it really inventive and exciting. Also, I would listen to it, and want to know where the samples had come from, and then I would go on missions to try and track things down. I think there was a Monk Higgins sample used on the track, 'Code Of The Streets', and that's just very alien-sounding. It's very basic, but it uses this beautiful violin part all the way through the track. They must have just been listening to such a wide variety of music, and what they've come out with is much more interesting that what came out post that era of hip-hop. You get some songs where there's a whole song taken, with just new lyrics added on. Back then though, there would have been as many as forty songs sampled in one song sometimes."

"Laurie Anderson I discovered in college along with a whole other collection of artists, like Philip Glass, John Cage and Pauline Oliveros. I took an experimental music class when I was 18, which opened up this entire world of music I'd been missing. In high school I listened to Einsteurzende Neubauten and I'd pick up weird-looking found sound records from the used record bin at my local record store, but this was the first time I'd really studied it. Looking back at the vast majority of music that influenced me as a teenager, 99% of it was by boys. Before, my female influences had been Cyndi Lauper and Madonna and Alison Moyet. But Laurie Anderson was just playing an entirely different game. She was just making the bizarre music that she wanted to. She didn't need to glam up. I just remember looking at the fucking album cover of Big Science and thinking 'This is the coolest fucking woman in the world.' She looks like she gives no shit about what anyone thinks of her, in a way that surpassed Riot Grrrl or anything like that. And the fact that she had a powerhouse intellect and was a storyteller... she set a new bar in my head. She was a performance artist, which was what I wanted to be when I was 18. I imagined that I'd do something with theatre and music, probably both. I never thought as myself as any great shakes as a musician – and I still don't – but I thought of myself as a great creative performer. What Laurie Anderson and Pauline Oliveros were doing was taking the instruments they'd been taught and transmuting them into this beautiful, strange world of art. They were taking that stuff and fucking it up, and that gave me a lot of hope."

"He's a Swedish multi-disciplinary artist. I chose that to represent all of my friends, composers and people that I know who make extraordinary experimental work. On one hand it is a drone, and it's a really fantastic drone. It's a copper pipe on a pillar driven by it's own amplification - it's a fantastic sound. The other part is a reading of an autopsy of a Dutch queen when she dies. It's an old autopsy so it's got this great formality: it talks about the 'colouration' of the skin. The poetry is in the age of the language. It's something that's absolutely fascinating but it also has no relevance, all it is is about it. It's a composition, it's a piece of imagination. One could mention 'The Gift' by The Velvet Underground. I remember the first time hearing that and it was split in stereo and thinking: 'God that's extraordinary'. Why do I not always sing my own lyrics? It seems to fit better to me. It's the proof that sometimes it's a good idea not to think about things too carefully. The way things roll is sometimes good. It's a funny thing to Wire, it's not what we thought about, it was a practical solution to a time when we were in need of writing material. I never learned to play the guitar, and it turned out to be an incredible device, this distancing, which threw it into interesting spaces. It gives it a theatrical quality that's not drama theatrical, but theatrical in the same way as you'd have with someone like Pinter, where you'd have very normal speech but because of the context that you put things into, suddenly you have something that's quite peculiar."