When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.

In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient – ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.

When I’m making music, I can hear all the parts, all the instruments. I can hear what it should be.

I want to produce the music to a movie that I’m working on, like what Prince did with ‚Purple Rain.‘

I knew the second I finished the first record – ‚House Of Balloons‘ – and had all this material leftover that a trilogy would be best.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones.

I spend just as much time on how people hear my music as I do the actual music, no matter how long it takes. I’m such a visual artist as well that it always goes hand-in-hand.

I would get out of school and go straight to my computer to create beats.

I’d been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it’s environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this ‚ambient music.‘ But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.

Probably the reason it’s a little hard to break away from the album format completely is, if you’re getting a band together in the studio, it makes financial sense to do more than one song at a time. And it makes more sense, if you’re going to all the effort of performing and doing whatever else, if there’s a kind of bundle.

People are so into digital recording now they forgot how easy analog recording can be.

Some people record onto tape, and then they pay for the tape, and download those onto a hard drive. Initially in a Pro Tools program. Other people go straight into digital, and use no tape at all.

I think sometimes – not always – I write songs that are accessible.

One of my most popular songs, ‚Satellites,‘ I paid $300 for that beat on SoundClick.

The way ‚Lux‘ was made is that there are 12 sections in here, though two of them are joined together. So there are really 11 sections, in a sense, and each one uses five notes out of a palette of seven notes, and my palette is all the white notes on the piano. That was the original palette.

Most game music is based on loops effectively.

It’s easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.

I’ve made over 25 studio albums, and I think probably I’ve made two real stinkers in my time, and some not-bad albums, and some really good albums. I’m proud of what I’ve done. In fact it’s been a good ride.

My songs always sound a lot better in person than they do on the record.

When you write a song like ‚Forrest Gump,‘ the subject can’t be androgynous. It requires an unnecessary amount of effort.

I have taken taking my music to labels for years, and everyone just thought it was creepy. They thought the images with the music were weird and verging on psychotic.

I play a lot of instruments. I write all my own music. I spend hours and hours a day in the studio. I’m a producer. I’m a writer.

I push myself in a lot of aspects when I write a song. I write a piece and where most people would stop and say, ‚Oh, that’s the hook right there,‘ I’ll move that to the first four bars of the verse and do a new hook.

There’s more good music being made now than ever before.

My brother had written ‚Ocean Eyes,‘ and we recorded it, basing all of the production around contemporary and lyrical dance. I think of most songs that way – if you can’t dance to a song, it’s not a song.

I’m a studio rat.

For me it’s always contingent on getting a sound-the sound always suggests what kind of melody it should be. So it’s always sound first and then the line afterwards.

If anything, a lot of electronic music is music that no one listens to at home, hardly. It’s really only to be heard when everyone’s out enjoying it.

All I do is make music.

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.

I work with my brother Finneas, and he produces all of my music in his little bedroom in our house. We actually tried renting out a studio for a month when we were producing ‚Don’t Smile at Me,‘ but it was really hard there, and we ended up just doing it at home anyway.

When my record comes on, you know that’s a DJ Khaled record. That’s my formula, and the people love it.

Tony Visconti and I had been wanting to work together again for a few years now. Both of us had fairly large commitments and for a long time we couldn’t see a space in which we could get anything together.

I put together amazing records, whether that’s finding the beat or putting the right hook on there, and picking the right artists on the record. That’s me being an A&R. And I’m making sure that they give me their best.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.

When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.

I’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip.

Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes.

A producer gets the whole vision done from top to bottom, to making the record to having the record delivered to the world. That’s a producer.

Yeah, anybody can go in with two turntables and a microphone or a home studio sampler and a little cassette deck or whatever and make records in their bedrooms.

Nearly all the synth work on Heathen is mine and some of the piano.

When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.

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.

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.

I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.

We’re making the music that the people are asking us for.

If I could, I would not do anything else. I’d just be in the studio for my whole life. I would never go to parties, events, and red carpets. I would rather just be in the studio for the whole time. I don’t even care. Nobody has to know what I look like. I just want to make music.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

Technology has allowed people to make records really cheap. You can make a record on a laptop.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

Since I was old enough to understand what a songwriter/producer is, I’ve had a curiosity about how Max Martin creates what he creates. I wanted to see that happen. I wanted to be there. I wanted to learn from him.

By the mid-’60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn’t want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. ‚Discreet Music‘ was like that, and ‚Music for Airports.‘ What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out.

Producing all my own songs and refusing to go to the hot producer. That’s the biggest risk I’ve taken so far.

It’s a weird thing when you make records. You try to hear it before you make it, so you walk into the studio with this idea of what you expect to happen, and that usually changes. That usually turns into something else, and that’s a good thing.

I feel it’s my job to continue being a student of music if I want to continue being an artist and a producer of other artists. You have to keep filling your mind with other music. You have to be ahead of the curve.

I made that first record in 2008, alongside the EP, but my label at the time waited three years to release it. They thought maybe someone bigger would buy it, but they didn’t, so in the end they just released it themselves.

I put out tapes, but I always kept saying, ‚Why am I putting all this energy into these tapes?‘ I was like, ‚I’d rather make just an album because I have a vision; I know how I want to do my records.‘ I always felt like an artist as well.

I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.

All of my records, I produced, put together completely. All of them. Maybe Drake might come with an idea, and I might finish it. You gotta remember what a producer is. Quincy Jones is a producer.