"Tonto's Expanding Head Band were very early synth adopters. Tonto was an acronym for The Original New Timbral Orchestra which was a reference to what they worked on: the biggest polyphonic analogue synth in the world. Tonto was almost like a cockpit of synths arranged in a horseshoe shape. When they played it, they were inside the machine. Zero Time was hugely influential, most notably on Stevie Wonder who heard it, freaked out and asked them to produce his records. They ended up doing Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness' First Finale. They also did a load of Isley Brothers records, including 3 + 3. Zero Time borders on New Age in a way. I'd never really heard music like this before – totally instrumental, the whole record composed on synths. I saw them live when they played at the Big Chill festival in 2006. I hadn't known they were playing [a line-up consisting of the band's Malcolm Cecil and his son, DJ Moonpup, with a portable version of Tonto performed]. It was amazing, even if it was a bit odd because they interspersed songs with educational stuff, little bits of interviews with Stevie Wonder and other people they'd worked with. It worked though – what a show!"

"I’ve been listening to Channel Orange, and you know everyone has loved that album but I didn’t really get into it, and I am about to start this movie and it’s getting me into the zone of this movie. It’s just like really cool and it’s just a thefty album and just fucking cool. Man, there is the perfect synth and everything just tastes delicious on that album. The way everything blends, you just want to ride a car; it’s the opposite of Joey Bada$$ or Action, you just want to open the window and it to be hot and sunny, and listen to this guy be depressed."

"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?""

"The classic Led Zeppelin record. Again I got into that much later, 1995 or something. A guy who used to work at our studio was really into them. 'Stairway To Heaven' I knew because we used to play that at our guitar club. They were almost a precursor to The Sex Pistols, except they were better musicians, it was just very heavy rock & roll. We never had a synth club at school. What happened was when Depeche started I was playing guitar, Fletcher was playing bass and we had a drum machine. Then all these electronic bands started like Gary Numan and OMD, and we thought, ""you know what, maybe we can enter into that world instead"". Our guitar playing wasn't up to scratch, probably."

"Eurythmics were another band that I was introduced to through MTV. I think that's how I got into synth-pop music. Annie Lennox has an amazing voice but also the instruments that they use, the way it was produced was so cool and different and tough. As a kid I loved 'Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)' because it was the big hit, but later in my life when I went back to the record I listened to 'Love Is A Stranger' as if I'd never heard it before. It's just so amazing that I couldn't believe I didn't remember it from when I was younger. Among the DFA family it's a universally loved song. We all try to emulate it, some aspect of it, in some way in different things that we do."

"My eldest brother had Closer. I was listening to that from about ten-years-old onwards. Once I started to save money – working on a farm with my other brother, doing the milk round with him – that was the first time I had my own cash floating around and that money used to go on records. Unknown Pleasures was one of my first purchases. That was a key moment for me. It was my record. It hadn't been passed down. It was a completely new record in the household. That was me getting that experience first-hand, and it was such a brilliant record to have that with. The sleeve is another Peter Saville classic. The production on it is incredible. I know the band weren't happy with it, but to me it's a complete masterpiece. The use of space is evocative of Lancashire I think. The whole thing has this dank… I'm going to wheel out all the clichés now about empty warehouses and all that, but it is familiar territory for me where I'm from. Those smashed glasses at the end of 'I Remember Nothing', and the synth drones. I think that was around the time I got my first Roland synthesiser and it was another polarising moment. Something very powerful crystallised about what I wanted to do at that point. All I was capable of doing with that synth was making this huge powerful drone sound. It pointed the way. Having that induction – sat with the headphones on late at night... Music in the seventies was full of opposites. The stuff we heard on the radio was the friendly aspects of music. I wasn't looking for that. I was looking to be disturbed by it and that's something that I haven't really lost throughout my life."