12. Laurie AndersonHome Of The Brave

I don’t know too much about the concept around the record other than I find it an incredibly moving piece of work. And on a more technical aspect, it’s all made of MIDI. It’s made of this very crude form of electronica, made at the dawn of MIDI as a technology in the 1980s. We use MIDI a lot. Because you know what? I don’t credit myself as having, really, any kind of innate gift or natural talent, but I tend to write in a way that shortens the distance between an idea and the realisation of it.

For me MIDI has always been a simple and crude way of shortening that distance. Going back to Leonard Cohen, and how his tool was a crap guitar with an A chord and an E chord – you can do what you need to with that. Laurie Anderson’s record is the same, but instead of using a guitar she uses a MIDI keyboard but still creates these works of great imagination.