"The avant-garde comes to the mainstream. At the time, Terry Riley was an avant-garde composer. He still is, but he's probably more so known for his work in the late '60s. Indian music at the time was coming into focus because of The Beatles and psychedelic music. So his compositions - especially this one - were really hypnotic, very mantra-esque. I think Terry Riley influenced more in a pop sense than in a rock sense, and I think A Rainbow In Curved Air has probably equal influence to Sgt. Pepper's. And you can quote me on that! It's obviously where The Who got the name 'Baba O'Riley', where the band used synthesisers - that's from Terry Riley. We cut our teeth in Buffalo, NY, in the early '80s and in that time the place was at the height of avant-garde. They opened a music school where they featured all the greats - Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Tony Conrad - just a ton of avant-garde composers, who later became more famous. It was such a central point for the electronic avant-garde movement, one that hadn't been around since San Francisco in the late '60s. It influences everything that Grasshopper and I do. We have strange polarities of the melancholy, romantic side of us. Then we also have the avant-garde side of us. The rock & roll side of us is probably the least prominent in our music. One of our albums, Snowflake Midnight, is also our homage to that bygone era of electronic music. Once you put it on, you think, ""Oh that's where all that William Orbit and Moby stuff comes from."" If you look all the way back, that's Terry Riley. It was the beginning of synthesisers, arpeggio synths also, which eventually became modern dance music. It was his motif of making it more hypnotic."

"We've been around them quite a few times in the last three or four years. They have a way of doing this hypnotic, simple, grinding-away thing. The guitarist, Ira Kaplan - he's crazy with all these delay effects, the way he's layering them up. We would end up listening to them almost by accident. There have been a couple of times where we would do these long drives and we'd put on a record like Boris or Yo La Tengo, and they'll have songs that go on for ten minutes, and you're getting into these big soundscapes that just dig into oblivion. We've really embraced that in the past couple of years: to find this perfect goal, a sound you can play over and over, and not necessarily get to a crescendo and back, but to get to the edge and stay there. And they do that great. There's a lot of good qualities about their group. They're fucking weirdos, they're just not a typical rock group. A lot of times, I feel like The Flaming Lips are a typical rock group. I mean, we're influenced by The Beatles. It's a bunch of dudes with long hair that do drugs. We're pretty typical. I try to remind ourselves that we like weirdos, although I don't always believe that we're weirdos ourselves. But we love the weirdos, and we love when they get the keys to the house and they can have their party that night."

"Many of the bands on this list are British. I was heavily influenced by British bands. At that particular time [Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, etc. were releasing music] there was just an overwhelming amount of great music from across the Pond, from The Beatles forward. There was so much quantity and quality. All of these bands, in one way or another, either spurted out each other or inspired each other or created a split for somebody to go a different way. That sort of environment, using my own experience, with what happened in our small town with a handful of bands, it was a healthy level of respect and competition at the same time that kind of spurred the growth of all our bands. I'd assume it would be the same for a lot of these UK bands. To all metalheads, British Steel is one of the flagship records of all times. I dunno how many times I've been hanging with Dimebag [Darrell] and Vinnie Paul [from Pantera and Damageplan] and be cranking that record. You know, Dime always had a razor blade [pendant] around his neck and that's because of this record. These are some of the first riffs I started really learning how to play. K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton are one of the all-time great dual guitars in metal, for sure, and Rob Halford is just the best. There's nobody like him."