Michael Giles Quotes

The music that I make, the younger musicians are referring to it as 'stretch' music.

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.

I've never played it safe on my own music.

Anything that catches my ear, I'm into. Things that are different, that change what you're listening to.

I make music with no boundaries.

My more risky or avant garde music is not that well known to a wider audience, but I wish it was.

People think I take some sort of masochistic pleasure out of putting out music that's gonna be unpopular.

But we got up there and decided to stick to this mix of power chords and funk and that's where it really started for us. In having the courage to take that decision. To take a gamble not just with our music but our lives.

I'm always trying to come up with something new and unique. I do a beatbox with a harmonica.

I come from an art-school background, and I still feel that in my music, it's about exploration and challenging myself, about putting myself in a place that's frightening because I haven't been there before.

To some degree, yeah, because I have to play a certain number of originals that might be considered avant-garde material. I realize though, that only a few people in the audience actually know what that music is, or understand it.

I think the first person who kind of broke my mind was probably Jimi Hendrix. Listening to him opened my mind up to where you can take music and how far you can take rock n' roll.

My intentions have been, and are always, to just really get behind what my ideas are musically and to just ride this thing out, cause it feels good, and I think for the most part it's good music. Even when it's not, I'd like to still search for something that could be even like a little bit mind-blowing or shocking to me.

If you want music that speaks to you, that LISTENS to you, you have to go out of your way, which I enjoy actually. I'm constantly on a private-eye kick to find the totally obscure.

I like to think of my style as pretty versatile. And I'd like whatever I record to reflect that to be mostly genre - to be just something that people want to listen on to see what I'm going to come up with next. That's the kind of music I'm into.

I don't think my music's as traditional as people make it out.

As a DJ, it's my job to break new music. And instead of it just being the stuff that's coming from the major labels or the big pop records, I've always gravitated to something that's just different, you know?

I don't think there's ever been any music quite like what we came up with.

Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.

He helped make Living Things even more crazy than I wanted it to be. He added old-fashioned piano and classical folk music - that weird otherworldly vibe - all these elements got onto the record.

We made music that wouldn't be in synch.

I feel that when you care about your music, taking risks is something you should do to keep things exciting.

It's an album that is a little bit different and probably isn't easy to get out. It's not likely that a major label would have picked it up and said that they had a smash hit record.

I love playing instruments that I don't know how to play or am not familiar with. I like the idea of danger and innocence that comes from it. As an artist, I feel I should be able to do something with anything I get my hands on. The music becomes minimalist because of my limited knowledge.

The Zombies were really unique - they had elements of jazz and classical music in their songs and songwriting. They had a very, very different sound compared to a lot of their contemporaries at the time.