"The reason I’ve chosen the Donna Summer album is not truly because it is a record I’ve played a lot. There is one song on it that changed my career. It’s a song that changed a lot of people’s perceptions of music and it’s, obviously, ‘I Feel Love’. I remember when I first heard ‘I Feel Love’, it sounded alien. I hadn’t heard anything like that before. There wasn’t anything like that before. Somebody had the forethought and the invention to actually come up with something with electronic sequencing that people could dance to. It pulsated in a different way. That person was Giorgio Moroder. I am very grateful to Giorgio Moroder for inventing this way of thinking and for the other records he’s made. I think he is a terrific talent and I loved the work he did on a lot of movie soundtracks, particularly Midnight Express and Cat People. I have all his work. ‘I Feel Love’ was visionary – that’s all I can say about it. The song, along with The Sparks’ album Moroder did [No. 1 In Heaven], was the sort of sound I wanted to make. I was just learning electronic music and how to sequence things. Without a doubt, between Moroder and Kraftwerk, those were the people leading the way – that paved the streets for me. Without ‘I Feel Love’ there wouldn’t be a lot of electronic dance music. That’s the DNA we all used. Moroder, for me, had a period where he was defining the future and it was very unnoticed by a lot of people, perhaps because he was more of a producer than a writer of a lot of songs. As for I Remember Yesterday, it’s a funny album as half of it is electronic and brilliant and the other half is very traditional and is okay. It’s a strange balance but a very important album because of that track."

"Varese is a universe. A dense universe of objects colliding, crystallising, dissipating and obliterating. I feel like I can relate to what I know of his temperament as well. As well as his obsession with the desert and need to rid himself of the historical baggage of the past is something I can relate to. That guy for me is the origin of a lot of ideas that I'm excited about. It's hard to even talk about him. You know when you've sat with someone for so long that it's difficult to even begin to say. He was one of the first major composers who transitioned into more of a sound artist. As people have said, he kind of liberated sound from the familiar tropes of Western music and turned sound into this absolute state. An appreciation of sound as object. Sound as environment or experience. So, he's that guy. He's someone who, as I grew up, getting into composition and trying to find someone who I can relate to because I love the music but the culture of classical music is stuffy and boring. And I don't give a shit about it. But he was such an intense, probably manic depressive, obsessive-compulsive, beautiful, frustrated, angry, passionate person – and all this stuff came through his music. And I love him for that. He came out of the whole Romantic orchestral universe, and this was pre-electronic age. So he was surrounded by Stravinsky, Debussy, these major models as far as orchestral writing goes. But there wasn't anyone who was taking that model, freezing it and laying to waste the baggage of history that comes with along with that music. He was able to erase all of that and push the idea of orchestral writing forward. If he was alive today, that's a question I would ask him – where are you coming from? Like Feldman though, he's very intuitive in his writing, so he just trusted himself."

"I listened to that record non-stop, it was a record that was in my house when I was really small and I knew the whole thing back and forward by the time I was six years old, as that's one of the many times we moved. I remember listening to the song 'So Far Away' in our station wagon as it pulled away from my neighbourhood and waving goodbye to my best friend. Throughout my life I've had a different favourite song on that record for a different reason and it sort of stayed with me. When I was a karaoke host, one of the first songs I did was 'I Feel The Earth Move'. I think her story is so interesting, too, of starting out as a songwriter and not feeling confident and then deciding to put out her own songs with her own voice. That was a really empowering story when I finally learnt it. I just thought she was this cool, powerful '70s woman with her curly hair and swirly skirts. I found her fascinating as a person as well, like a role model. She played piano, sang and wrote the songs, and everyone knew that, it was really implicit at the time, that it was her album. A lot of singers, male and female, were singing songs written by other people and Carole King had been writing songs for those people, then this album was like, "I'm writing it for myself." I didn't know she wrote 'Will You Love Me Tomorrow?' until I heard her sing it and her version was so different than the popular version that I'd heard and I was like, "Wow!" It was a great album in the vein of Thriller – every song on that record could be a hit. And it was like she made it; I knew a woman made it from start to finish and I knew I could write songs. It was something that everybody had that was very popular that actually still holds water and it's really good."