"I always like when I hear something that I think is trend–setting. I believe that he’s inspired. I’m listening with the same ears that I listen to Stravinsky, Ligeti and Zappa with. What I’m hearing is someone with the ability to layer timbres and sounds on an electronic field in the same way that Stravinsky did as an orchestrator. My kids come home with all this dubstep stuff and I go to raves occasionally –not too much but I’ve been to a few, and a lot of that music is emulating everything else that’s around and it’s really good but it becomes insipid because it lacks a certain depth of vision. But listening to Skrillex I hear the layered quality of it although it isn’t exactly my favorite style of music. Things have dynamics, things have places bearing in mind what’s going on around them so that it doesn’t all just sound like a mess and I’m very impressed with it."

"This was a record that Chris Taylor or Chris Bear introduced me to in college. We were eighteen or nineteen in New York, they were studying music and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing! I was trying to be serious about linguistics but I was kind of bullshitting myself. “I’d started writing songs but I was very secretive about it and didn’t take it seriously. I played them to Chris Taylor, he was probably the first person who heard anything I’d done, but I refused to admit to myself that I took it seriously in any real way. When I went to college I decided I wasn’t going to do music, because there was no reason for another white kid to play jazz guitar. I ended up finding songwriting instead and it became a different thing. “This is a reference point we’ve talked about over the years, when one of us mentions this record, everybody knows what we’re talking about, we talked about it on Painted Ruins in certain places. The whole basis of the groove is built on an organ drum machine and the sound of it is very ahead of its time. It’s very groovy but it’s not beating you over the head, it’s an emotional tune that has this subtly danceable beating heart. There’s a soulfulness and dreaminess to it, it accesses the emotional part of you with this really pointed and tight rhythmic quality. “We never wanted to approach music from a folky songwriter’s standpoint. Certain parts of our music have come out that way because of what we play, but it’s remembering what it was like as a teenager, being really into music from a players’ perspective and finding the emotional quality in that, trying to build something that’s soulful and hits you without beating you over the head. I love it when people can pull off that subtlety, where they’re barely touching the instrument but there’s this rhythmic quality to it. “’Aht Uh Mi Hed’ is a touchstone that’s stuck with us, it’s an aspect of music that we really appreciate. We don’t actively strive towards it, but it never quite leaves our minds."

"When I was making this list, I kept questioning why I was choosing individual records. There are [other] records that influenced me as a kid but in this moment, when asked for this specific list, I was on tour and we were driving around America in a van, just the four of us in the band, the core of the Babelsberg record, the three musicians: Steve Black, Osian Gwynedd and Kliph Scurlock. Kliph has got a real high-resolution digital file player so he made a playlist that lasted a month. There were certain records we returned to as a group that chimed with us during these particular moments and one of them was this record. I like that Davis has dismissed the trumpet and taken up a synth instead - it's a good example of how to grow old radically rather than mellow out and it informed our tour so, if in doubt, we'd refer to this record live. It makes an interesting case for what works on a high-resolution file or what needs high-resolution [to sound as it should]. I might recommend this record now but if someone listens to it on Spotify, half of the quality of the performance might be shut out due to the frequencies [lost in encoding]."

"It's one of the classic records of all time, but I remember when this came out I wasn't particularly a Stevie Wonder fan. He'd done the singles and he was a Tamla pop artist really, wearing a suit, and I thought I'd got him labelled. But then this record came out and it was like his coming of age almost. It's like a small journey, listening to this album. It has a very positive beginning and ending, from side one right through to the last track. And that whole thing of here I am in New York, that wonderful idea of bringing in sound effects of street sounds that gave a different atmosphere and set the scene for what you're about to hear. I think most bands wanted to do that kind of thing but it was very easy for it to take over, so it was mostly left to the Pink Floyds of this world. But for somebody to do it just on the one track worked really well. And he played drums on this album, too. That was the weird thing, because when you listen to the drums it doesn't sound like a drummer. The things he plays aren't instinctive, so there's a different kind of musicality to what he's doing, and where it goes and where he puts things and where he hits the toms and where he does crashes and stuff like that. In some ways it was very brave of him, because let's face it he could've got any drummer to do it. But it gives it what I suppose these days you'd call an artisan quality, but I think of it as an earthy feel. Otherwise everything would be too perfect on this record. You have to have imperfection to give it character and personality. I think there's something about imperfection that puts you more in touch with what you're listening to, because you're not alienated by something that's unachievable. This record has that by the sack full"

"This was also quite a challenging record for me. I bought the 7"" of 'Ceremony' when it came out, and I thought that's what Movement was going to sound like. A very pretty, emotional, bucolic record, and of course it has moments like that, but in a strange way it's almost darker than Closer. When I was 14 or 15-years-old I was full ensconced on the cult of Ian Curtis, so when I got Movement I listened to it and tried to decode it... how many songs were influenced by Ian Curtis, how many songs were written by Ian Curtis, were they trying to communicate with Ian from beyond the grave. It's certainly the darkest of all the New Order records, and after this they became much more melodic and happy. The first track on the record is quite uplifting, then everything else is quite dark. One of the things I've always loved about Bernard Sumner's voice is there's a naive, vulnerable quality to it. I was at an airport the other day and 'A Perfect Kiss' came on, I hadn't listened to it in about 25 years, and it's such a perfect song. His vocals are sing-songy, like a nursery rhyme, but they're so effective. Each of these records that we've talked about, one thing they have in common is that they're all primarily electronic. At the time I was completely surrounded by very traditional rock music, and it felt interesting and subversive to be listening to these records primarily made with electronic instruments. I think that affected me a lot. I was a guitar player at the time, and I was so bored and frustrated with playing the guitar because it didn't do that much. I couldn't figure out how to make a guitar not sound like a guitar, and then you hear all these electronic records with all these textures and atmospheres and sounds that I'd never heard before, and I found that quite exciting."

"When I heard Girl Talk I was already in Bikini Kill, towards starting my solo Julie Ruin thing and I clicked with everything with a female performer on it. I was always aware of Lesley Gore and her songs and Joan Jett had covered some of them and I was like, "Oh, these are actually kind of feminist." The things that I learned from her from that album in particular was that there was a certain quality to her voice that told a different story than some of the lyrics. The lyrics could be about one thing but the way she sang; her singing had such an amazing tone that you really can't duplicate. I was just listening to the tones of her voice, thinking about the voice as an instrument and thinking – this is when I was doing my solo record — "It's not just the lyrics you're singing, it's how you're singing them." And so much can come across in the way you're singing that can either underline or scratch out the lyrics or amplify them. So I started to realise there were all these nuances there and her voice just viscerally affected me. I started playing with that idea a lot on the solo record. Some things didn't really have lyrics, I was just singing made-up nonsense stuff, it was just the way I was singing that was getting across, I was just going for a feeling. I was really focused on the lyrics in Bikini Kill and getting across these certain ideas and then listening to Lesley Gore I started realising it's not just the lyrics but the tone. That you can make the song sound like a sunny day and you're driving in your car having a great time and you can make the song sound like it's been raining for the past year; that was a new thing I found in my tool box."

"Well, I think one thing is I love seeing the 15th century in black and white, in the 20th century. The physical imagery… that scene in the balloon at the beginning of the movie, the way that it’s cut together and the way that it functions and what he’s looking at. The sound, the music. Tarkovsky is one of my favorite directors and I think there’s just a great abstract quality in his films, where you see something and, as you’re looking at it, it transforms in front of your eyes. Things happen that you can’t believe you’re looking at — a horse falling down a flight of stairs; all of a sudden there’s a moment where you’ve got Christ, in the snow, carrying his cross up a hill. The kind of subliminal violence that occurs — when this guy gouges the eyes out of one of those journeymen, artisans that are leaving the reconstruction of a church; the apathy in the violence reminds me of the W.H. Auden poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts.” The old masters, they really knew about human suffering. And I guess in that particular film, what I’m thinking about is the length of the takes, and the surprise of what you actually see being filmed. The way slow motion is used in that movie also; the way that movies are not like that anymore. The scale and the depth of field of what you’re seeing is vast. So there’s a poetic quality to that. I’d have to mention The Passenger also, because there’s a moment when Antonioni has Jack Nicholson sticking his arms outside of a cable car, and for that moment you just have this sense of observing observation — that’s a big part of moviemaking to me, or painting. That kind of filmmaking, where the camera is still but everything around it is moving, and moving at different speeds, is something that I’m attracted to."