"This next one, there’s an actress tie-in. The next one is Alien. So, I clearly have a bit of a Sigourney Weaver fetish. I love the movie Alien. I wouldn’t say… I mean, I like sci-fi movies – I’m open to them – but I’m not a huge sci-fi buff, I guess. I really love watching the older sci-fi films that had the man-made special effects, the pre-CGI practical effects, and I think that Alien is one of the greatest examples of that. I think that movie is so cool. For the time when it was made, the effects, I think, hold up completely. You know, the scene with the alien popping out of the guy’s chest. It’s gripping. And also, it’s very dramatic as a film. It’s not as action-heavy as you might think it should be in your mind; because you’re setting up the whole thing, there’s a lot of silence. There’s a lot of people alone – you see them on their own. And obviously Sigourney Weaver is so incredible in it. I don’t think it was the first time I saw it, but the first movie that I saw in the Cinerama Dome at the Arclight was Alien, so I think it just cinematically took my breath away. You know, by that time, The Matrix is getting made, and you’re having these cooler effects and other things going on, and I still found it so admirable that something like that holds up and cinematically is so beautiful."

"Around the time of Poses, which is 2001, and a bit earlier, I discovered Oum Kalsoum. The song itself, 'Poses' is based on her kind of vocal sensibility; the end of the choruses [he sings 'Poses'] is this Egyptian moment. I didn't rip it off – I was just influenced by her. I would say that arguably of all the singers on this list – and we're talking some heavy hitters with Caballé, Domingo and Callas – I think she would probably 'win', in terms of the voice. She sang for a long time, and is basically to this day considered the greatest Middle Eastern singer that ever lived. And she only performed in the Middle East – I think she did one concert in Paris and that was the only time she ever sang in the Western world. There's just stuff she could do with her voice which is just mind-boggling, and also soulful at the same time. It's very sacred. I don't know if she's a religious singer per se, but it's obviously in the music she sings. It's traditional so I guess it's religious. There's a sacred quality to it that is pretty frightening, but also beautiful at the same time. She was also a real character, and not a nice person. She dominated the scene for her entire career and no one else was allowed to eclipse her. In fact, there's some story where some young beautiful singer started to become well known, and she very quickly and mysteriously died in a car crash."

"The more I read about the Tropicalia movement, the more it influenced me. I admired the way they worked against a military dictatorship. The official artists, playwrights and poets got together and put on full-on shows rather than just play gigs. They'd put on theatrical events with a theme or have a provocative backdrop that would get them arrested! It's a portal into so many worlds, like when Rogério Duprat had been studying with Stockhausen in Germany and bringing this back to Brazil, Can would also have influenced him in Germany and maybe someone like Cornelius Cardew who was like a British outpost. There's an amazing story about Cardew touring when he eventually turned against Stockhausen and wanted to bring his music to the people. He decided to tour the Isle of Anglesey in 1970 with the Scratch Orchestra and he got kids throwing stones at him during his gigs. Anyway, they ended up recording a few records in Brazil and this is one I play quite a lot, especially a song called 'Relance'. It's a few years after the Tropicalia explosion but Costa comes across really powerfully; it's like the artwork almost points to the Slits artwork but a few years beforehand. She comes across like a really powerful personality and there's a really unusual musicality on the record. This song ['Relance'] has a really heavy rhythm but it's driven by an accordion, which I usually find really off-putting but it seems to make sense here."

"I saw this one as a kid on PBS, I think. It was weird timing for that movie when it came out, and it was perceived in many different ways. I think it was probably one of the boldest statements from Charlie Chaplin. And I remember as a kid being very confused because I was terrified of Hitler. My mother’s family, her aunt, went to Auschwitz and a couple other places. And she wasn’t Jewish, but she was captured and thrown in with everybody else and went through some pretty heavy shit. So all of the stories I had heard, and the symbol of that being Hitler, was terrifying. I knew what he was trying to do, which was show the absurdity of people who have so much power built off of insecurity and what they’re willing to do, and then just showing him as an imbecile. As a kid that was an important thing to see, because it took the mickey out of something that was incredibly terrifying. I don’t think any other film can really touch what he did, and I don’t think you can really do that again. It was a first in a way, and there is not really a comparable thing in history that’s so singular that you could make fun of. So I think for me, as a kid, it was nice to know that you could disarm something so terrible. I was a huge Charlie Chaplin fan, and I loved seeing all of his slapstick comedy, but that one did me in."