"This comes from a place that keeps coming back into my life, which is Chicago. So many records from Chicago resonate in my Mancunian hellhole! When we were picking up Sun Ra records in the bargain bins for 50p with all the corners cut off, you'd go for the cover of the sleeves because on the back they'd show them playing these car parks somewhere with all this pageantry and all these weird electronic keyboards. And you'd be like, ""Oh! That looks really interesting!"" You'd put it on and it sounded like this odd, aged, Biblical music; like the Seven Tribes crossing the Sahara or something. It's very percussive – there huge sections where it's just percussion clattering away, and then you'd be hit by this kind of big band swing thing. And you'd be, ""Oh! That's really odd!"" and then there'd be an electric piano solo in the middle of that; it was just totally confusing! This was one of those records that sat around for a while and there'd be maybe one or two track that you went for. Gradually, the album would then open up for you. And then your friends would have another Sun Ra album and these things gathered together. There was a gig in Manchester in 1981, and it was Sun Ra with what must have been a 20-piece band and they had [saxophonist] John Gilmore and [singer/violinst] June Tyson in it – the classic version of the band, really – and it was like a three-hour concert. The epiphany that came with it was they did this enormous timeline that included music from the 1930s, which then went all the way through to freeform electronic wailing and synthesizer solos that went on for 15 minutes, as well as battles between trombones and really structured compositional things. A few years ago, it was Sun Ra's centenary and there was a festival in Liverpool and we put a band together to do a Sun Ra tribute. So we learnt a lot of stuff from the Impulse label records – the 50s Chicago stuff – and you can get all the music from the Smithsonian. We put in enough time to making it sound good and it was a really rewarding experience to live in that music for a while. [Saxophonist] Marshall Allen once stayed at my house. He saw all the instruments lying around and he says, ""Oh, you play?"" And I was like, ""Sort of"" because at that point, imposter syndrome kicks in, but he was like, ""Can you play two notes?"" and I'm going, ""Yeah, yeah"" and he said, ""Well, let's do it!"" We ended up setting up a recording session and we made an album in the evening, and then went out and had kebabs! But it's interesting how popular Sun Ra's records have become over time, because back then, they were practically giving them away."

"I mentioned Johnny's record store, and as well as Suicide, which is ironic considering he killed himself, he got me to listen to Nick Drake. This is such a perfect record, the songs are perfect, the singing's perfect, the instrumentation (even though Phil Collins plays on the songs) is perfect. It was one of those records that didn't need any explaining. I walked in, it was playing, and I asked 'what's this?', I thought it maybe was a Cat Stevens b-side. He told me it was Nick Drake and that I should buy it and he gave me a discount on the record because he was such an evangelist for it, and thought it was one of the best records ever made and that people needed to learn about Nick Drake. I took it home and fell in love with it. It's been a constant for me ever since. I can't imagine a month of my life that's gone by that I've not listened to it. The funniest experience was the first real tour I did, in 1991, with the band The Shamen. It was the first electronic music rave tour of the States, and at the time I didn't drink, I didn't do drugs, I was a very naive little kid and I was on tour with the Shamen, who were all really partying quite hard. I think we liked and respected each other, but we didn't really have anything in common apart from a shared love of electronic music. One day I was in the back of the lounge listening to Nick Drake's Bryter Layter and the singer came back and you could see his face lit up, and you could see he was a huge Nick Drake fan. We bonded over that. The next tour I did was with the Prodigy and Richie Hawtin, and the one after that was with Orbital and the Aphex Twin. During these tours there was a rave scene in the early 90s, but compared to the UK it was much smaller. It certainly existed. One of the reasons why the rave scene in the States is how it is, is because a lot of the people involved do way too many drugs. You get these DJs and performers who get really into the rave scene and then do more drugs in one night than most human beings should in a lifetime, so the burn-out rate is pretty high. In 1996 I was dating this raver girl, and she had gone out and did three hits of ecstasy, three hits of ketamine, some acid and crystal meth and I just remember thinking 'how can your body handle that?' But I guess if you're 19 years old it can handle it for a little while. Definitely that type of drug use led to a lot of people burning out"

"This is such an important record. It spawned a whole scene of music. You talk to any electronic musicians from the 90s onwards, and they'll say that. And they were just two boys from Leeds. I haven't seen him for a long while, but we worked with Gez, G-Man, we released his records in the 90s and I know what kind of guy he is. But I'd also spoken to Mark Bell, and Mark was very different. When I talk to Gez, I just talk to someone who's made a record, and he's just talking about his music. Mark was very clever and he was obviously the thinker of the two of them. But that combination of the two of them, those two guys: the title track with that bass, and 'Simon From Sydney', again it's a record that we've listened to a billion times. Gez used to say that they were part of a breakdancing crew, they were just mates, and they were so young when that record came out. I think they were 19, and they had a song in the top 20 and somebody on Radio 1 said their music was awful or something like that. They had everything happening at once at a very young age. I'm sure it affected them. But LFO were lads, you know. It wasn't high concept. It was dancefloor. That was what they were trying to do: to move people's butts and shake the bottom end."

"Another incredible record. Was I always into electronic music? Well, I've always liked all kinds of music but I really like pop tunes. I don't think there's any more validity to an Al Green record over an ABBA record. Some of the ABBA records are absolutely amazing. I met one of he guys who drummed on pretty much all of them and he's a phenomenal drummer. Ludicrous! His name is Per Lindvall. And I kind of think the musicianship is all there, it's just that they were very, very, very, popular records. It's one of the curses of certain bands. They become so big that people don't take them seriously anymore. I don't think anyone is going to take me seriously any more because my first record was 'Never Gonna Give You Up' which is a pop – of its time – dancefloor filler. Handbags on the floor, Saturday night record. That's what it is. And I think once you've nailed [your colours] to the mast, you ain't changing that. I never tried to fight it. It's also why some people drive themselves mad. I'd like to be known as someone who can write a tune and sing one but if people want to put me in a category that other people see as derogatory, I probably don't fight it because I don't want to hurt myself. I played every note on my last record [2016's 50] and it went platinum. Does anybody care? I don't know."

"I've been a fan of his since the start, when I heard ‘Didgeridoo'... At our age it was an interesting time, because it was the start of dance culture as we know it, but also I was young enough when I first heard it that I didn't differentiate between hearing a Mary Chain song or hearing an Orb song or a KLF song or a Loop song. I guess of all the bands or musicians that I heard around that first wave of electronic music, I think Richard James is the guy that's continued and kept a high standard and evolved what he did. I mean, that Richard D James record, if you went and listened to half of the brand new IDM vomit they'd be shitty copies of that. What makes his music is so special is that as well as being amazing at concocting interesting sounds and rhythms, he's also musically always doing something brilliant. The piano songs on the Drukqs album are unbelievable. Talking about that, it's completely irrelevant to this, but the most annoyed I've ever got at a music review is the review of Drukqs in Uncut where the journalist said there's no point in making solo piano music because you'd never do anything as good as Satie or Chopin. Well let's just fucking go home then! But anyway. To be able to marry the playfulness with the beauty and the melancholic element, that's just incredible."

"""Ben Vida is a composer and sound artist whose work I really love. This record he did pairing his idiosyncratic electronic voice with percussion is a favourite. I suppose everyone I have given on this list has a strong character. The thing I love about Ben too is that he's so good at synthesising sounds and he has such a strong compositional voice. But his music has such a great sense of humour too – some of the sounds are absurd. They are really high quality, well made objects, but in a lot of ways it's so funny. I'm always excited to listen to anything that Ben does. And it's great to get a chance to work with him too. He's been a long time collaborator. I also sought him out to work with me as a performer on my HIVE project. When I first started the project, it was this installation where there were these five wooden mushroom-like pods. It's a piece for three percussionists and two modular synths. Being a fan of his music and having known him for a couple of years, I asked him to do that with me. And so we ended up touring that around together. I ended up adding some vocals to some records that he did. He did a record called Slipping Control a couple of years ago, that I worked on with him. So it's been a very rich creative relationship."""

"Revelatory meditations on a classic FM synth sounds. The end of an era and the beginning of one. I came to his music maybe later in my life, and he's one of those guys where you just slap your head and go "Oh man, how have I not known about this guy?" Only in the last couple of years have I approached him. He does micro-electronic stuff, kind of like preceded a lot of labels that have since flourished with that, like Raster-Noton and Editions Mego. What he's done - and I think this must be a running theme of things that I like – as far as liberating an idea from its historical context. Like Feldman and Varese, it's him taking these dance sounds, these FM synth sounds that you hear in techno even, and isolating them, turning them into this simple object which is hanging on your wall. And in doing so, it's reduced to something so pure that it's profound and it's absurd. And it's powerful and funny. It's so simple, the idea behind it. Production-wise, he has his own methodology that I'm not too sure about. It's not basic, but it's so obvious in its clarity, that it makes you ask, "How has someone not done this already?" So profound in a way. It's so simple, this idea. It's literally one pulsing sound. You understand it, but you are thinking "How do I listen to this? What is it for?""