C'mon who inspires you? Try and keep them to a ten list minimum just so we don't have some kid who floods the page with everyone in his downloads folder. So yeah go for it, ten. If you can, include why.
1. Pole: Pole practically nailed what I had been trying to do when I first started making electronic music, a real glitchy sound. Becuase he used a broken TR-909(or so I hear) his music has a weird, popping and cracking effect that I can't emulate as well as I'd like. His latest album Steingarten became one of my regular listens.
2. Philip Glass: No one nails repetative music like Philip Glass. Songs built around themselves, and as such, progress in a much more subtle way, but after listening to his string quintet play an Aaugmented arpeggio for 5 minutes when that top trumpet melody comes in it feels all the more epic. Koyaanisqatsi define film music for me.
3. Dust Brothers: The Dust Brothers are two of the best producers I can think of. Having done the Fight Club soundtrack, they sort of got under-rated under all the awesome hype surrounding the dvd release of the film. While the film is great, I consider the soundtrack better. With an incredibly inventive use of samples, and with the substance equal to their style. They really narrowed their music down to a catchy, dark caricatuer of modern life.
4: Aphex Twin. You can't have an electronic artist not have Aphex Twin in his top influances, it's unheard of. Drukqs and Selected Ambient Works contain some of my all time favourite songs.
5: Boards Of Canada: When I first heard them I thought it was all boring mid-range dirge, but then you sliten again and again and you hear litereally hundreds of things you havn't heard before. Smokes Quantity is my favourite song.
6: Miles Davis: Miles Davis' Bitches Brew contained some of the best jazz improvisation I've ever heard. And while you can't really improve while mixing and creating music on a computer, you can fuck about and record whatever you do and then try and mix it into whatever stupid thing you recorded 5 minutes ago. Brilliant.
7: Radiohead. Kid A/Amnesiac is what got me into electronic music, having only ever really heard Autechre beforehand, my electronic music knowledge wasn't very broad. But it was a great surprise to hear people doing this in a band, and executed so well. Kid A is one of my favourite albums, with Amnesiac containing my favourite Radiohead songs. Also, Kid A and Amnesiac spurred the greated Radiohead b-sides aswell.
8: Autechre. Ultra dub, synth-tastic, dance. The ultra low key dance songs really clicked with me. Focusing on the beat and everything surrounding it rather than the melody/vocal line over the top of it, it really felt like Autechre tried turning the properties of 90s dance music around. And while it had been done before. No one did quite like Autechre, quite as well, or quite as inventive and original.
9: Beach Boys. Now some people dislike me saying this. But Pet Sounds, was better than SGT Pepper's. I love the Beatles, but the Beach Boys just got it right, like perfect right. Pet Sounds is quite possibly my favourite album ever. Pet Sounds being one of the most popular experiemental commercial pop albums of all time, it set the bar for what could be achieved with imagination and patience. Using bike bells and recorders for melody lines rather than vocals. And then using vocals to soothe you through it all the way over the top. They experimented with themselves, as well how to write music. This also spawned lots of classical music in the 60s/70s to do the same.
10: Kraftwerk. Autobahn is why electronic music is so great. The versitility of it, the immense things you can do. And mroe importantly, the simplicity of it. Certain electronic albums create the feel of busyness to a point of confusion. And while making electronic music can be difficult, when learning coding for Max and Reaktor, and other music/macro creating programs. It's all relatively simple realistically. It's all things clipped together in certain ways, and this was what Autobahn was. A series of events, clipped together, really well. Kraftwerk made computerized music not just to make music with sounds people hadn't heard before, but to make it simpler, so that there were clear central themes you could focus on. While this isn't to everyones taste, thinking that they must be taken at face-value and aren't 'growers', they'd be wrong. Autobahn defined Kraftwerk for me, and really, you have to listen to it ten times to even begin to understand it.
ps: if there are spelling mistakes, fuck off. I'm not spell-checking all that.
