Jean-Michel Jarre Quotes

I always like to say that the music I'd like to make is somewhere between Pan Sonic and Scott Walker. But I don't sing anything like Scott Walker.

Hearing things like 'Wake Up' by Lora Logic, or the Raincoats' 'In Love' - that was something I wasn't prepared for. I couldn't hear anything that came before it in the music, and I didn't want to. I was absolutely in love with its out-of-nowhereness.

The Geezer album, Black Science, had a lot of keyboards and it did not work.

I'm into heavy duty, psychedelic, foreign music. That's what I like listening to.

'Oxygene' was one of the first, if not the first, popular electronic music album.

The 11-minute 'Colouring of Pigeons' takes The Knife's experimental, cerebral side to new heights.

I guess you could call my music progressive, pop, rock.

I've put out records over the years, whether it's with Blackfield or No-Man or Bass Communion or Porcupine Tree, that are pop records, ambient records, metal records, singer-songwriter records.

I hated most music in the 1970s, especially disco, but Bowie was edgier.

So the ideology was that: use sounds as instruments, as sounds on tape, without the causality. It was no longer a clarinet or a spring or a piano, but a sound with a form, a development, a life of its own.

I was real into Devo, Pavement, Captain Beefheart, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

New Age is a very small box. It was a term that was brought in by the music industry to classify music that is neither jazz, classical, pop or rock. They didn't know what to call it or what to do with it. So they threw it all together under this one name.

Musicians like James Blake were a big influence on me. How he uses his vocals is amazing. And then Yeasayer and Animal Collective, who aren't pop bands exactly, but they do something that is so catchy and undeniable and so much fun.

With guitar, I'd always mixed more sounds that occur in hip-hop, or occur on Crystal Method records, or occur at the zoo - so I've never been sort of tethered or have limited myself to the traditional rock n' roll vocabulary.

Prince turned experimental music into pop music. 'When Doves Cry,' the whole 'Purple Rain' soundtrack - he was inspired by the Cocteau Twins and new wave pop and brought it into R&B when he first started, and then it became this cool, next-level, kind of hard-to-digest music. Which is what I felt 'House of Balloons' was.

What I did with Slash and the Conspirators was a very different kind of music. Genre-wise, it is a step in a different direction.

Pan Sonic sound like they are playing music of the future made with the electric instruments of yesterday.

I really loved the hardcore alternative vibe Prince had on 'Dirty Mind.'

I like Philip Glass. I think he's made some really great contributions to his field. I love his style of playing - it's very loop-style.

'Europe '72' was a super influential record full of fantastic songs and amazing experimental musicianship. I always valued both of those aspects in what Sonic Youth has done through the years - being able to get very abstract and very concrete within the same song.

I was doing the Klaus Schulze noise-kid thing before it became interesting to people.

Bjork's album, 'Homogenic,' it's got beats, strings, traditional Icelandic stuff. That's my benchmark for what an album should sound like, right up there with Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme' and Marvin Gaye's 'What's Going On.'

Bands such as LiLiPUT and Essential Logic were just as unorthodox as Gang of Four or Wire, even taking their sounds a step further with shrieking vocals and saxophone.

For more than 15 years, Mogwai has built a reputation on its monstrous ambitions for rock music.

I've always felt that all the music I've made is psychedelic, including Throbbing Gristle.