"When I was a kid I heard all this strange electronic music that came from Germany on pirate radio and on the Peel show and it seemed like music from another planet and I wanted it. Then one afternoon I was listening to Radio 1 and Annie Nightingale played one whole side of Rubycon and it was life changing. I said to her, many years later, "that was incredible!" and she said, "oh John used to do that all the time, he was the first to do that." But it was like Annie became a pirate for one moment and took over the whole of Radio 1. That meant a lot. That was the spirit of making music to me. You do what feels right. If you want to play half an hour, you do it and accept the consequences but you have to do what the music tells you to do. Tangerine Dream made these extraordinary, electronic soundscapes. Is it an animal or is it a machine? Tangerine Dream crossed over that a lot. And then Annie played the entire side and blew my head."

"I was about 14, 15 when I first heard this. There was a period just before punk when I was at grammar school. Grammar school being grammar school they tended to like these white rock bands. That was where I got introduced to bands like Yes, Zeppelin, Tangerine Dream, that I also liked. For me, they are my favourite American rock band. Their synergy, the way they play together, and again the engineering of that album, I don't think was ever surpassed. It's got everything. I suppose the Beach Boys might be contenders, but the Doors are my favourites."

"Two films from the same year, each the start of my favorite run of movies from its director. Brian De Palma is my favorite director of all time, in the sense that I get more “if I was making films, I’d want them to look and feel like this” moments watching his movies than anyone else’s. For me, it’s with Dressed to Kill and then Blow Out that De Palma really homed in on the look, feel, and all-around aesthetic that I love from him and it’s something he brought with him to his next two films, Scarface and Body Double (which, along with Carlito’s Way, round out my favorites of his career to date). I love Thief for being Michael Mann’s incredible feature film debut as well as a blueprint of sorts for a number of films that came after it. It’s the first of my three favorites from him, rounded out by his next two films, the often panned but visually amazing The Keep (again with a great Tangerine Dream score) and Manhunter."

"Two films from the same year, each the start of my favorite run of movies from its director. Brian De Palma is my favorite director of all time, in the sense that I get more “if I was making films, I’d want them to look and feel like this” moments watching his movies than anyone else’s. For me, it’s with Dressed to Kill and then Blow Out that De Palma really homed in on the look, feel, and all-around aesthetic that I love from him and it’s something he brought with him to his next two films, Scarface and Body Double (which, along with Carlito’s Way, round out my favorites of his career to date). I love Thief for being Michael Mann’s incredible feature film debut as well as a blueprint of sorts for a number of films that came after it. It’s the first of my three favorites from him, rounded out by his next two films, the often panned but visually amazing The Keep (again with a great Tangerine Dream score) and Manhunter."

"My whole thing has gone playlist now, so I'll have this on my headphones now as I walk around because sitting down to listen to two sides of vinyl is less frequent in my life. But certainly when I bought Live Evil, it was the only record that I played for months! And quite deeply so. A friend had lent me an album on CBS, which had an inner sleeve and on this inner sleeve would be descriptions of other records. And on one of them was a journalist wordily describing this as something like, ""… an exploration of a sonic journey"", and that really set my imagination off. And the cover of Live Evil is fantastic. It just looked like a fascinating object, and it was a double album as well. It was a high-risk purchase. But playing this record, it was like, ""Wow! What is this amazing, glowing world?"" And it had these Hermeto Pacoal tracks on it that are really ambient – 'Nem Un Talvez' is one and 'Little Church' is the other – and those tracks really got me. Back then there was no particular place to start listening with what would become ambient music. There were pieces that were beatless but these were deeply coloured and were way before Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze records, which we didn't have much patience for. But there's so much bursting out of this record. Most of it is recorded live and the fact that John McLaughlin was on it really makes it for me, and he's just an amazing artist and guitarist. On this record, he's free as a bird and it's just mental. He just lights up this record. [Keyboardist] Keith Jarrett's on it, and he's a particularly complicated improviser. I jumped into that world and the ripples from diving into that pond, I just follow them. All the people that played on that record came out of Miles Davis' world."

"Full disclosure - I'm a little biased. They're on DFA, they're my friends, and one of them is my boyfriend. But regardless of that I think it's a really beautiful record. The first record they did was great but I know that they were still trying to hone their sound, figure out what they were and what sort of stance to take. So with Dynamics I think it's way more solid and way more confident. Knowing them, they're such an interesting combination writing-wise because one of them, if it were up to him, would make a Tangerine Dream record, and the other has real pop sensibilities. So together they can make this thing that's really lush, beautiful and complex, but also accessible. I feel the album was overlooked somehow, and I don't really understand it. It makes me question my musical sensibility. I think this record is amazing so why doesn't everybody think this record is amazing? But it is. I listened to it a couple of months before it came out and at the time I was touring a lot as a DJ, spending a lot of time by myself because that's just what happens when you're a DJ that has to travel. So it was getting a little bleak. Every day I was in some other place, alone, inside of a hotel room, inside a club, on an aeroplane. But I had that record on my iPod and I would have to go running just to stop myself from throwing myself under a bus. I loved every song and each time I listened to it I'd try and pick my favourite track but as each one ended another one would start that I thought was better than the other. It's a mystery to me though, because it's not like I was the only person who loved it. All of our friends, the whole of DFA, whose musical tastes I trust over anybody else, we were all in agreement that it was a great record. I think maybe I just don't know what other people want to hear, which is an uncomfortable position to be in doing what I do. But I know that they're very proud of the record and so I'm glad for that."