of that... when I hear purely digital music there's that kind of in-the-box quality that just sounds slightly plastic and hemmed in in the way that a microwave dinner is hemmed in. It's nice to let stuff breathe a bit outside that. There's a huge array of different sounds on the record. I saw a list of different sound sources you used on the record and it was crazy. How did you go about putting all this together? It's a really long editing process. There were so many hours worth of jams -- loads of stuff that people will never hear, and I'm really glad they'll never hear because there's lots of false starts. It was just chiselled down from this wide range of stuff. For "The Pining", the first mix I did of it was around the time of Turning Dragon where I was playing a lot of guitar and producing drums that were just completely inappropriate -- just kind of electronic. So it took a long time to find the right textures that fitted all of that work. It was really satisfying when I did finally manage to make it all fall into place. I've got a drum kit in my cellar and used that for a few tracks. I had some recording sessions in studios that went quite badly... I always find I'm better recording myself rather than having an engineer -- something about being relaxed, and the flaws in my recording technique ended up working for