"I remember first hearing 'Xtal' - that is the sexiest ambient electronic song for me. I remember being in my first year of university in Brighton and moving away from home and being a bit lost and lonely in some ways, in this tiny little halls of residence room. This album, Ambient Works, was just constantly on my Walkman and I'd been exploring Björk, The Black Dog, Aphex Twin and Boards Of Canada, all this electronic music, this world that was opening up to me from the early to mid-nineties, which I was discovering it a bit later. I'd actually at that point bought a QY-70, which is a Yamaha sequencer - I remember reading Björk had written Debut on it and Tricky had one. Listening to Ambient Works, for the first time it seemed possible that I understood how those things were layered up - beats and beautiful little melodies and there was no singing on it, which for me at the time was great because I was very shy about singing. I remember just hearing that and then going to my QY and hearing little synth sounds that sounded similar. Although Aphex Twin's synth sounds were, in hindsight, put through loads of pedals - I can hear that he's got field recordings layered on top of stuff and probably synths he's made himself - but it made sense to me and encouraged me to go and make my own ambient songs. I remember meeting Aphex Twin around that time at a Björk Vespertine concert. I'd met him once before and I went up to him with my MiniDisc player, which I used to put things I'd produced on, and I played him a song at the bar. I kind of knew him at the time a little bit by face, I think we'd met at some nights he was doing at a warehouse in London and me and my boyfriend at the time liked dancing and going out, and I played it to him and he said: ""I think it's really good. The production's quite good for a girl"". [laughs] That's what he said to me! I didn't take it as a bad thing. I was just like, ""cool"". I mean, Aphex Twin liked my production skills, so whether I'm a girl or not, it's fine. But I just remember thinking how funny that was - but I took it like ""that's a real stamp of approval for me"". I do think he's been a really pivotal figure and an important person in my life, because he does electronic music and it's really sexy and emotional. It wasn't cold like some of the other people, like Stockhausen, but I felt like he understood the dance movement and got the loved-up aspect to ambient music. There's a darkness to it, and a light, but a real twisted, disgustingness in what he does, like 'Come To Daddy' and 'Windowlicker', this rank Englishness, [adopts croaky drawl] ""come to daddddyyyy!"", all that weird shit. He's got a sense of humour and just seems to be one of the modern day composers of our time that understood emotionalism in electronic music. Dirty, disgustingness and kind of surreal, how to fuck with your mind, and his body of work is huge. So, yeah, I think he's a dude."

"Definitely my favourite song on that record [Yeezus]. I think it's a great record, if you can get past the ""bitches"" and what's that about Chinese pussy? Kanye, fucking grow up man, you're not 15. I was talking to Michael Azerrad, 'cause he's got me to do a couple of podcasts for him. And his clever little thing is to get musicians to review other albums. In conversation, I mentioned this track, and he said he got Lou Reed to write about the record. He said Lou Reed was in tears listening to this track. It's a very emotional track and it's very clever. He switches between making jokes and sounding very desperate indeed. One minute he's being very flippant, and I guess it's like being drunk and not drunk. The drink and the comedown, the hangover, whatever. Really beautiful, but also powerful, and quite punk in a way. And the arrangement is so clever and unexpected and unusual. He'll give you one thing and then give you something quite different, but it all works from section to section. I heard this while I was making What Happens Next and I was really impressed with the synth bass sounds, so I ended up having Thomas [McNeice] in, and we worked out where there would be a mixture of his bass playing and some electronic bass. You know, Lou Reed's point is that Kanye is demonstrating what he can get away with, which is good. I think there's quite a few ""I can do what I like moments"", including talking about ""sweet and sour pussy"" [sic]."

"I did an Apple iTunes show at the Roundhouse, and they asked me 'if you could have anybody in the world playing with you, who would it be?' And I said 'oh, Silver Apples'. I'd seen him play the Knitting Factory in New York, and I thought that if I asked him to play with me his response would be a resounding 'no', but he was really enthusiastic and happy to do it, he's just this cool guy with a nice hippy girlfriend. Everything about them, the fact that he invented his own equipment, and he did kind of single-handedly invent electronic dance music. You listen to 'Oscillations' and maybe someone would challenge me on this, but I think that's the moment when... before that, electronic dance music didn't exist. It's got the four on the floor kick, all the different synth textures, even the subject matter, singing about technology. That's techno in 1968. Silver Apples came out of that Lower Manhattan performance art scene, starting as them playing music for artists on LSD dancing in lofts. There's one song that they've done that I've always wanted to cover, the song 'I Have Known Love', and every couple of years I go back to it and try and cover it, but every version I've tried to do of it is terrible. At some point in my life I want to try and find someone to do it with because it's a really beautiful song... Maybe I should just accept the fact that the original is perfect and it doesn't need to be covered."

"I'd already bought the single, 'He's Misstra Know It All' and played that to death. I bought this album on the day that it came out in Woolworth's, when I was on holiday in Eastbourne. And then I had to wait a week to listen to it. I spent that time reading the back cover about Moogs, ARPs and other synth sounds and I didn't even know what those words meant! My imagination was quite engaged because he seemed to have played all of the instruments and that was unusual back then. But I've always liked records that have that much of a one-man stamp on them. The sound of Innervisions was different from what was around at that point. There wasn't anything that sounded as colourful as this album. These new synthesizers sounded sensuous and they were moving in a very animalistic way while being chest-resonators with humanistic kind of sounds. It was fascinating when I was first getting into music. It was a more sophisticated kind of pop music compared to what was going on at that point. All these complicated chords that Stevie Wonder was using were very intriguing to me. The sonics on this album really hit me and some tracks are more fruity than others. Then you had tracks like 'Visions', which are more jazzy and quite guitar-orientated. They gave me feelings that I didn't understand as a teenager, and even after over 40 years, Innervisions keeps on giving. I keep going back to it because it's got so many emotional layers: there's anger there, there's tenderness and there's a lot of commitment to the music. Stevie Wonder seemed more real and that was something you could align yourself with."