"Hip-hop has always been such a big thing for me, particularly hip-hop production. So many of my favourite producers growing up, and the reason why I wanted to make produced music, came from people like RZA, Premier, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, Timbaland and early Neptunes, early Kanye even - and Madlib and J Dilla are both right up there. I picked these two albums [J Dilla's Donuts is also on the list] that came out on the same label and from the same scene rather than say, Illmatic, because at that point in my life there was a sense of like, no matter how much I liked Public Enemy or A Tribe Called Quest records, I was coming to them late. But I can remember Madvillainy leaking way in advance and thinking it was so exciting being there for it happening. I think it will be remembered as a classic record. I've got to know Madlib since then, which is amazing because he's an absolute hero. I'm coming to hip-hop more from a production point of view rather than listening to the MCing or the lyrics - that's because I produce music. But this is a record where the Doom part and the Madlib are so perfectly matched. It's like the greatest hits of beat producing - every track is completely insane. The way he cuts up the samples is so, so heavy! I think it's pretty much perfect. It's so eccentric. There aren't that many genres of music where eccentricity is embraced in the same way. This is a really, really weird record, but it's totally canonised as being a classic record. That's wonderful. Maybe in the same way Theo Parrish's music is - people embrace that weirdness, but there are other genres of music where they don't. The feeling I got when I made Swim - and it was a little revelation - was that if you asked your general public person about dance music they'd say it's all the same and formulaic, there's got to be a repetitive beat and blah blah blah. But the fact that there is a kind of repetitive rhythmic element is actually quite liberating - so long as it's got that framework you can do anything else on top of it. You don't necessarily have to have something that functions as a song. And hip-hop's the same thing - so long as there's a beat that moves you, the other things around it don't really matter, you can do what you like. You can have a sample of a Pakistani singer over the top or an old soul record or even just random drum machine hits firing off all over the place - there's a crazy variety of things Madlib does when he's producing. But because it still makes your head nod, you can leave that area and be more free."

"The Shining. It was the first movie that I saw when I was a kid that, like, really traumatized me. It was mostly the two little girls as well as being in room 237. That was one of the movies that I remember really, after watching that movie, having a problem sleeping. But as I’ve sort of grown up with that movie, what’s been so inspirational about that movie… if you watch that movie, like everybody watches that movie, it’s terrifying, it’s one of the scariest movies of all time. And what I think’s great about it is that it’s not only a horror movie, it’s more a movie about an alcoholic man who hates his family, and then it’s a horror movie. To me, all the best horror movies are a regular movie first and then they’re a horror movie. That’s true with the The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby as well as The Shining. But what’s most exciting to me about The Shining, and there’s a famous quote from the Vivian Kubrick documentary, from Jack Nicholson, where he says he’s been spending his whole career trying to make his performances real, like no one’s ever seen realness onscreen and he’s going to be the one to make it real and he’s going to do something no one’s ever seen before, this quest to make it authentic. And then he’s like, “Then you get someone like Stanley who says, ‘Yeah, Jack, it’s real, but it’s just not interesting.'” After I heard that conversation, if you watch The Shining and don’t get sucked into it just being a great scary movie, if you walk into it and just watch the choices that are being made, it’s an insane movie. Like, everybody’s performance is, like, the stakes are so high, as if every line they say is the end of the world. Every shot is so grandiose. The locations are so unbelievable, and they’re all built, which is also totally insane. It’s like this constructed movie that’s so hypnotic because every time Shelly Duval comes on the screen and screams, “[falsetto] They’re trying to kill Danny!” and it’s like, in any other movie that would just be like a joke. Or Jack Nicholson, if you look at every take of his in the movie, [it] shouldn’t work. It’s all so extreme with his performance. But it’s consistent and, I guess as Stanley Kubrick said, it’s interesting. Because it’s consistent, the movie has this very hypnotic tone to it and it’s something that Kubrick is obviously very known for. It not only is an amazingly terrifying movie and one of the best horror movies of all time, it also is just this really unique approach to filmmaking that I’ve always found really fascinating. It seems to, across the board, raise the stakes and make everybody just operate on this much higher level, and that’s always been very hypnotic to me."