"I'm not really a 'going out' kind of person."

So you speak Japanese?

Yeah, but it's something you have to do all the time or you just forget. Especially the reading and writing and the vocab- if you're not speaking it all the time you just forget it. I've gotta brush up 'cos I'm going over there in March. I'm doing a couple of gigs with Simian Mobile Disco, and that's where the link with Jas came in, who's mixing my stuff with me. They're on Wichita and I supported them at the Roundhouse at an iTunes festival gig, we just got on really well and they were into it.

If your music could score a Japanese film, which one would you pick?

Oh God....there's a Takeshi Kitano film called 'Sonatine' and there's a scene on a beach where they're playing this game- there's this game where you fold up origami sumo wrestlers, put them opposite each other and bang the table and they move around- the one that falls over loses. They have a scene where they're playing it themselves and everyone bangs the sand on the beach and they move around.

When you were in Japan were there any particular musical hotspots for you?

Well not really you see, I don't really go out, I don't really go to clubs or gigs. I find it really difficult being in a room with loads of people, I'm not really a 'going out' kind of person. So I didn't really get to experience a lot of musical hotspots in Japan but some places in Osaka were pretty good, especially for hip-hop. Like, Japanese hip-hop's pretty mental- half of them just want to imitate the Americans but there are some really good underground Japanese artists.

Is there anywhere you go in London for musical inspiration?

Yeah, I go to the Barbican and sit outside and have a cup of tea. If you go out the back, you've got all the waterfalls and stuff....When you get a drum machine and it has that 16-step bit on the bottom, if you look around there's all these circular bits that are repeated and it just reminds me of that, how you see a song and how you make it using sequencers and blocks. Walking around London is good. Any walking, tea drinking, getting depressed [smiles sheepishly].