"Fellini is a deep, deep master of film. As time goes by I adore him more and more. La strada is quite perfect. It is like “The Ancient Mariner.” A haunting film for all time; one cannot insult innocence without a lifetime of cost. I don’t know why it is, but it is so, a spiritual truth, that both Coleridge and Fellini knew and tell in their respective stories. Fellini is the most fluent filmmaker of them all. His shots and storytelling are so at ease and elegant, it’s as if he’s thinking his shots through a camera in his mind and straight onto a screen. I went to his funeral in Rome in 1993, where people in the crammed huge Piazza Republica gathered to salute farewell. It was also a time when no one wanted to see a Fellini film. Every year since then his legacy appears more remarkable and more incomparable."

"Science, art, and philosophy are never separate. If they seem so, it’s because one has implicitly absorbed the ideology of another. I think we’re in a moment now that’s making our nature documentaries worse. With HD, HDR, and CGI, they seamlessly illustrate already decided-upon science, making the un-human world seem as knowable and digestible as a Pixar fable. This is why, as impressive as they can be, they’re disposable. We abandon the HD doc when the 4K one comes along. In Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon’s aquariums, microphotography, and time lapses, you see how the scientists know, instead of a hyperreal demonstration of what they know. Rather than getting a God’s-eye view, you experience this other world as a limited human trying to figure it out. The visuals are murky and weird—they need interpretation, as much from background science as from poetic metaphor. There is a sense of discovery, humility, and mystery in these films, and for this reason, they convey something spiritual."

"It’s astonishing; one of those soundscape albums where the songs barely hold together, but somehow they do, so beautifully and so delicately. They’re like hymns, all of them. There’s a very spiritual quality to the chord sequences, straight from the church. It’s worshipful and soulful. In some ways it relates to Talk Talk’s last works. But they have that dark, dubstep feel to them as well. I just love the way he deconstructs songs. After I’d bought the album, it was on in a people carrier when we were being driven to a festival somewhere, and everybody was saying, "this is really dreary", but I had to pipe up and say, "actually it’s one of my favourite albums at the moment so can we leave it on?" I felt connected to it. I thought, "this isn’t dreary; it’s making me feel uplifted." I like what he does. I like anyone who takes songs and challenges the notion of song structures."

"I first heard Alan Lomax's work while I was at university. I did music with visual art and film, but luckily at that time, it was just before this tutor left that had run it for 25 years, and he was quite old school but great because it was still fairly shambolic as a course and there was some good soulful stuff. Alan Lomax did lots and lots of field recordings around America and archived folk, blues and negro music and porchstep music. This particular album is when he went to Mississippi and Louisiana state penitentiaries and documented the prisoners as they were working in cotton fields. They've got music in their blood and that's what came through, I think. It's just absolute badass, amazing rhythms and there's a sort of sex to the music - they're singing about [sings] "be my woman and I'll be your man!", because they're obviously randy as hell and stuck in a fucking prison and working under really difficult conditions in the heat. There are different tracks where you can hear a load of axes and chains, and they would sing along to the axes hitting the stone, choirs of beautiful voices of men. 'Old Alabama's a really good one and 'Rosie' and what's so interesting is that I would listen to that and instantly there'd be a spider diagram going out. PJ Harvey on To Bring You My Love's 'Goodnight', she just stands there with a stick and hits it and there's a guy doing slide guitar. Moby, embarrassingly, sampled loads of it for free. Nick Cave and loads of artists I've loved, you just see bits of it in their music, it's that deep, dark, gothic soul, blues music. This is the raw, concentrated, original bit. There's a kind of spiritual rawness to it, they're spiritual songs about missing love and family. "I'll spend the rest of my days in these four stone walls." The fact that this mad white guy from somewhere decided to go and capture all of these voices - I know there are a lot of rights issues surrounding Alan Lomax, but I think just in terms of being an archivist, I think a lot of that stuff would've been completely lost, so it's great."