I probably would have made different selections. But you have to accept what people bring to you. I’ve worked with collage a lot. And there’s this chance thing that happens—you don’t always control things. Why did you find this today and not this? But you’ve got this thing, and you make it work. It’s the way life is, I suppose. Whatever happens, you deal with it.

It was quite a long and drawn out process, writing Crooks & Lovers. We were a bit blocked for a while. And then we decided to go down to a wind tunnel near where I live that goes into the sea with James Blake and recorded about two hours of natural sound. James was singing. We were throwing things against the wall, making echoes. Having that material really helped, because it felt like we were doing something towards it. Not just sitting at a computer, trying to pretend to be an artist. That was the moment that spurred us to completing the album.

The kinds of rewards games give you can be very insidious, and very addictive. But I’ve come to a point in my life where I’m much more able to walk away from a game I’m playing out of joyless compulsion. Times when I’ve been down in the dumps, or frustrated—games were very attractive to me, then. Which means that I was fleeing something else to play games, rather than being drawn into games by virtue of their addictiveness.

It is important to understand that skipping is in many cases a result of resonance, sort of a resonance catastrophe. The mechanical system made up of pickup, headshell and tone-arm has its own resonance frequency and the movement (in fact the music) coming from the grooves introduces oscillation into this tone-arm system. Depending on the individual setup of each turntable, this can lead to various kinds of interference, including resonance mode. If the oscillation of the tone-arm becomes too strong it will skip.