"I used to want ‘Primavera’ by Ludovico Einaudi played, but I realised it’s used on an advert for a horrible bank. I don’t want everyone sitting there in the pews thinking of fucking Santander! So now I want ‘Metamorphosis One’ by Philip Glass. I don’t want anything with lyrics. A beautiful piece of instrumental music communicates your emotions in a way words never can. ‘Metamorphosis One’ has a dry melancholy to it that’s also uplifting"

"Bill Foege is one of my heroes. Among his many accomplishments, he was instrumental in ridding the world of smallpox, which is still the only human disease ever eradicated. This book gives you a great view from the front lines of that battle. Bill was a mentor to Melinda and me in the early days of our philanthropy, and he continues to give us great advice today. I also recommend his deeply moving Gates Notes article about fighting river blindness. It’s a fantastic story that gives you real insight into how he thinks about his work."

"This came out when I was probably 19, 20. I've always loved it, it was a big inspiration on me. It's sort of classy, another cocktail and cityscape record. Her voice is equally soothing as the music, and it's rare that you have a singer with that sort of voice sits so well over the music. I've recently been really into saxophones, and I thinks that's why I'm drawn to the Bohren record as well, and there's an instrumental on this album that's so pretty and carried by the saxophone. The saxophone is almost like a voice to me, it sounds as if somebody is saying something through the instrument."

"It's a beautiful record. It's the Neu/Can supergroup in a way with Jaki from Can on drums and Michael on guitar. It's the pop end of Krautrock and sounds like Utopian sports montage music or something! It evokes the future, even still, for me or my idea of what the future would be at that time. It's a record I listened to a lot in recent years and just a record that I really recommend. I wouldn't have heard any of this stuff until the early-1990s but it was something we listened to a lot of as the Super Furry Animals. I quite like listening to instrumental music as it means I can still think over it without lyrics interfering; there's a time and a place for lyrics!
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"This was an insanely important record for me and a whole generation of bedroom producers. I was probably into Nirvana before that. Even though it doesn’t have lyrics, it taps into the mind of a teenage boy. It’s perfect, you can get lost in it. A lot of the first music I tried to make on my own was trying to sound like DJ Shadow, that was the blueprint. You might not be able to hear the influence so much in Metronomy, I think by my first album I was finding my own sound, but I think the biggest thing I took from this record is in terms of instrumental music and what it can be, the fact it can be even more emotive and emotional than lyrical music, it gives you quite a lot of room to think about a lot of stuff."

"I think everyone has a complicated relationship with Michael Jackson, but if you listen back to his stuff it’s insanely unique. Nothing sounds like it, people might have a similar voice, but in terms of the kind of music, it’s very particular. It’s the first record I remember singing along with. I remember having a seven inch of ‘Another Part Of Me’ which had an instrumental on the other side and I realised it was just a karaoke opportunity. It was a huge pop record from when I was young, and very influential in a way; the same way that The Beatles teach you about music, Michael Jackson was like the first pop person I was aware of, and Kylie Minogue in our house was the female equivalent. An insanely successful guy who isn’t a macho guy, but is captivating in some way. Then you’ve got the ‘pinnacle’ of Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson together!"

"This is another circumstantial choice from my long drive across America. Some of the tracks on this are twenty minutes long and perfect for a seven hour drive! It's good to have that time to let a song build and, because they are metronomic and electronic, it's great travelling music. There's a song called 'Patchwork' that Kliph played over and over again. It's maybe a portal into the records I've been listening to over the past decade, bands like Emeralds. I've got kids of various ages and records like these are compromise records because I can put them on to get them to sleep and I also like listening to them, though one baby didn't react to meditative music and I had to put on head-banging music to get them to sleep. I could head bang away! I listen to a lot of instrumental music in the house, loudly. I enjoy not having a voice to interfere with my day."

"It's a funny one, this record, because I think of it almost as an instrumental record. I don't listen to the lyrics, I don't know what they are. I listen to Mark Hollis's voice and it sounds like a trumpet. Words as sounds. I don't know what any of the songs are called. I listen to this almost like I listen to Music For Airports, it's a mood piece. It's interesting where it came in their career path: they started off as this pop band and then ended up as a very obscure avant-garde group with Laughing Stock. Spirit Of Eden was the interesting bridge between the two. Slow Attack, the album I did with lots of woodwind, was massively inspired by Spirit Of Eden and the sense of drama in it. It's very mellow in places but again never easy listening. It's pagan folk. Folk music isn't about men in silly jumpers with fingers in their ears and all that clichéd nonsense. There's something really earthy and pagan and Wicker Man-ish about it."

"I guess there is singing on it, but it's still instrumental music that opens your brain. It starts out almost sounding like weird pots and pans that I guess, my theory is, they're speeding up and slowing down their four-track so it's like [makes hissing, distorted sound]. So it does that for probably ten minutes, you're just sitting there, it's like psychedelic meditation, like you could tone it out. It's definitely analogue, it's probably four-track because, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you feel something lift up, like it un-pause and start to record again and it's just like [makes skronky sound] and there's this weird guitar shit. But then they just have a good thing with mood where it just takes you on this weird textural journey and then somewhere along the way, it gets really heavy and the drummer starts in, and you don't know what he's saying, so it may as well be instrumental. The first Dead C record I ever got was Trapdoor Fucking Exit, which is an amazing title and an amazing album cover. That came out on Siltbreeze, which is a Philly label, so that's close to home. My buddy Richie, who I worked at this brewery with, he turned me on to that kind of thing and he made rethink how the... he basically hit me on to how my path in music should be, which would be: some people can jump up to a decent-sized label, but other people have to do it themselves, much like The Dead C, where you just start small and make it your own artform and then eventually, bigger labels aren't going to be able to ignore you because you're doing it yourself anyway. They can decide, if they like you, you're going to be doing it anyway. So I got that Tusk record pretty early, but I remember listening to it on the airplane in-between touring/recording for this new album and it's just another that just opens your brain and opens your mind. They're just as passionate, or they come off that way, about their music, except they're from Bumblefuck, New Zealand, but they put out tons of records, so it might as well be jazz - they're definitely influenced by that sort of thing. I have no doubt in my mind - but of course I could be wrong - that they're influenced by those psychedelic jazz records."