As a kid, I thought movies were boring. My parents would hire VHS recorders for the weekend and watch Bollywood movies. I'd get bored and go out to Stoke Newington common to play football.

I've woken up from dreams and the whole song is there. I'm listening to it in my dreams. I consciously have to wake myself up and get a tape recorder because I hear it like a record.

I grew up around electronic instruments. To me, the turntable is an electronic device. At the same time, I had access to drum machines and keyboards through my uncle; then track recorders into computers. At an early age, I was messing with computers more than most hip-hop musicians.

My first synthesizer was the VCS3. I got it in Bristol in the late Sixties, long before Pink Floyd used them. I had to sell an acoustic guitar and an old reel-to-reel tape recorder to raise the money. You can do fantastic things with modern computers, but you cannot use them in the same intuitive, spontaneous way you can a VCS3.

Computers have virtually replaced tape recorders.

Like with me, like around '97, for Christmas my parents bought me an MPC 2000 sampler and a little eight-track cassette recorder. And I started sampling records and, you know, producing hip-hop beats. And it got to the point where I realized - I innately realized that the music I liked the most was made by people that played instruments.

Baby, when everything and everyone is telling you that you can't do something, there's still a way. When you get to the crossroads and start feeling like you can do it, but you can't figure out what's next, I want you to whisper this to yourself: Patricia Blackstock Johnson. I want you to remember that if Tab's mama can put a pencil in her mouth to hit record on her tape recorder, what can you not do? Where there's a will, there's a way. All you have to do is have the willpower to keep going. Even when it looks like it's going to be over or the storm is too powerful, honey, stay in a state of gratitude. Give God praise in advance.

I've got a full plate yes I do. That iPod that's nice. A phone recorder? Nicely done. All right I'm a bit of a tech geek. I have a subscription to Popular Science and I keep up on all this stuff.

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.

Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning you throw on your suspenders and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can't think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand usually and sing into a tape recorder.

My mom played the recorder. But not having electricity we had minimal exposure to music. As I got a little older we had Walkmans and things that were battery-powered but it would have been nice to be growing up in the iPod era. A tape only has six songs on a side.

I've woken up from dreams and the whole song is there. I'm listening to it in my dreams. I consciously have to wake myself up and get a tape recorder because I hear it like a record.

Computers have virtually replaced tape recorders.

I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.