Björk was like a gateway because she would talk about Meredith Monk in the press – for somebody in the 90s to be going to magazines and introducing people to Stockhausen and Meredith Monk is pretty wild. Meredith Monk was on ECM records, and after Lycanthropy was made I went on a huge ECM spree and brought a few albums down to St. Ives Bay for the making of Wind In The Wires. One of them was Till The End Of Time by Stephen Micus. Lycanthropy was so frenetic, there was almost no space, no silence – an incredibly congested album, in a dense, city way, almost claustrophobic.

While I was making Lycanthropy I was doing a foundation to lead to a composition degree at Trinity College, specialising in musique concrète, electronic music, and minimalist classical music. My tutor was a minimalist classical composer. I was asking to learn about system music, and what are the fundamental principles of it. I fell out with them at Trinity because they refused to entertain the idea that somebody like Meredith Monk, in particular, isn’t really meant to be studied because they release records on record labels – they’re not real composers. I was left on the naughty step of studying minimalist classical composition, I’m just completely stuck there and throughout my work I’ve returned to that basic thing: you can take one small element and repeat it all the way through a song, and it will work harmonically all the way through, which is a very fundamental, minimalist, classical compositional thing. The same with a drone.

Stephen Micus is a building block of that sound for me. I listened to a lot of his work and I’ve built a parasocial relationship with him – I don’t really know anything about him, but in my head he lives in a retreat up in the Alps somewhere, and comes down with an album every eight years and then disappears again. His albums are all complete and there’s such an autonomy to his sound, because he produces them all himself. Without Till The End Of Time I wouldn’t have made Wind In The Wires. They’re twins to me. I remember listening to Till The End Of Time and knowing exactly what album I needed to make.