When I'm working with pictures, with images and storytelling, it's really about the sentiment and the emotional trajectory of the characters. That's really where the music lives, I think. That's what I'm focused on; that's what I respond to most strongly.
'Spring One' probably has only four bars of Vivaldi in it, but it feels like it's all Vivaldi. It's odd. It's a bit like walking around a sculpture, you just sort of see it from a different angle.
If somebody says, 'Well, what are your favorite composers?' really, what they are saying is, 'What are your favorite composers apart from Bach?' Because obviously, Bach is your favorite composer if you are involved in music at all.
I was living in a suburban town north of London, dutifully practicing my Mozart sonatas. And the milkman who delivered the milk in the mornings was kind of milkman by day, composer-artist by night.
When I was a student, if you accidentally wrote a triad in a piece of yours, it was just sort of like you were breaking the law! You just couldn't do it. And that just meant you were a bad composer.
I lived in Scotland a long time, and I became aware of Mogwai really from the beginning. They seemed to be fusing hard music structure and sort of raw sonics. They're just very creative thinkers, musical thinkers.
When I was a kid, there were really only two possible futures in the foreground, which were Orwell's '1984' and Huxley's 'Brave New World'.
'Sleep' is a project I've been thinking about for many years. It just seems like society has been moving more and more in a direction where we needed it. Our psychological space is being increasingly populated by data. And we expend an enormous amount of energy curating data.
I came from a Conservatoire background where the idea of complexity was very much bound up with good music - good music was seen as complex and difficult to understand.
I assumed no one would ever listen to my music, and for quite a lot of years, I was right.
When you make a piece, one of the interesting things is hearing what other people think about it.
When I got the call about 'Arrival,' I was doubtful because the piece had had a life on cinema already, and we were getting to the point where the original context was sort of lost, and I didn't want that to happen. On the other hand, 'Arrival' itself is a political film because it's about unification and getting beyond boundaries.
Sleeping and being asleep is one of my favorite activities. Really, what I wanted to do is provide a landscape or a musical place where people could fall asleep.
Often, especially young artists, you feel like you should be doing something. And I think that can be very destructive because creativity is about connecting with the stuff that's deep inside you and making something out of that.
It's true that many of the best-known composers were German or Austrian, but we should remember how good the music tradition is in Britain, too, because it has an informality and a fluidity that should really be celebrated.
You can get away with a lot more in a film or television score. It is contextual.
All music is just a collision of sounds until you know its internal conventions and understand the nuances. It's a question of familiarity.
People have written about 'Sleep' as if it were some kind of record attempt, but I could just put repeat marks at the end, and it would be 16 hours. It's not about that.
Traditional methods for falling asleep work. Non-taxing, repetitive mental tasks have a lulling effect, and I built those patterns into 'Sleep'.
