Influences - Your 5 Thread

[Mister Natural]

curious as to everyone here's musical influences : if you were to distill your inspiration as a musician down to five composers/artists - who ?

for me :
Charles Ives (his Art Songs primarily)
Steve Reich
Todd Rundgren
Thomas Dolby
Boards of Canada

for you ?

[andrelafosse]

David Torn
Miroslav Tadic
Public Enemy
Yes
Jandek

[Frantz]

1. Michael
2. Jermaine
3. Tito
4. Marlon
5. Jackie

Runners up: Janet and La Toya

[bluedad]

the Beatles
David Bowie
Jerry Garcia
BB King
Chick Corea

[mellotronaut]

Brian Eno
Can
The Beatles
Brian Wilson
Autechre

[The_Hidden_Goose]

Just 5? Ouch...

1. Cluster / Harmonia (kinda the same thing)
2. Tangerine Dream
3. Emeralds (and related)
4. Stars Of The Lid
5. Rob A.A. Lowe (Lichens)

These just popped out of my brainbox probably due to recent listenings. There are so many others, but Cluster & TD will probably always be on my influence list.

I'd like a bigger influence list to do some others artists justice, but my inspiration list would HAVE to be bigger.

[el-bo (formerly ebow)]

as cliched as it may sound - everything i hear

however, i can cite my recent discovery of imogen heap as the biggest influence in motivating me to start making music again

[Sendy]

1. Rob Hubbard (shipping in 8-bit waters only) - particularly his style of switching around and manipulating raw waveforms, because that was all you really had with 8-bit music (the SID chip did have a filter, but it was very unreliable).
2. Boards of Canada - got me to think about sound in a completely different way.
3. The Orb - got me to think about space, and the crux of ambient: how space can be incorporated into the music to create musical locations.
4. Luke Vibert - his early stuff, especially as Plug, was quite similar to what I was doing at the time, but better, so it egged me on and forced me to up my game.
5. Dillinja (and other early 90's drum and bass dons) - Really hearing late jungle and early drum and bass completely changed my approach to rhythm (before that I was just programming in stupid pop beats, although I was experimenting with playing drum samples on different pitches beforehand). Started to consider the sampled drum as an instrument in itself. Dillinja and Photek taught me a lot about beat construction, grooving the grid (and sampling in a way that creates groove, i.e. having a version of a hit with some dead air before the impact), the space between the beats, etc.

All of these artists have been analysed on a waveform level, I looked at spectrograms and the waveform of their music, timing, synth programming, etc, and I learned and aquired so much.

I might have to mention Pet Shop Boys and late 80's pop for introducing me to synth pads as well

[trimph1]

mmmmm

Tangerine Dream
Misfits
Gong
Magma
T.S.(Tony) McPhee/Groundhogs...

And numerous others

[Aleatoriac]

Tangerine Dream (all incarnations)
Jonn Serrie
Delia Derbyshire
Genesis (all incarnations)
Jewel

[foosnark]

On a different day I'd give a different 5, probably with mentions of Jazz or Finnish folk music or Reed Ghazala or the taiko group I played in, but with my current mood, you get these:

Isao Tomita - my first profound exposure to electronic music. Though he was still "realizing" classical music rather than composing his own abstract soundscapes, he took it farther than anyone else at the time; he was playful with it but also made deep listening experiences.

Skinny Puppy - from the first syllables of the vocals on "Rabies" I thought my Walkman was melting down and destroying my new tape. But when I realized it was really the music, and put my homework aside to really listen, I was hooked; here was surprising depth and a kind of beauty I had never really fully experienced before.

My dad - cliche or not, he isn't/wasn't even a musician or a serious music lover, but he was the one with the 8-track collection of weird stuff, gave me rides to the Florida West Coast Youth Symphony for rehearsals every Saturday, encouraged me and bought me my first synths, and and still expects me to send CDs of each album and the upcoming remix project I'll be doing.

My brother - an artist, not a musician. But for a while he wanted to be in a band with his friends. He told me about "Fruity Loops" about five years after the last feeble attempts I made at music production, and that was the spark.

Kemetic Orthodoxy - yeah it's weird to list a religion (especially one I don't even belong to anymore), but if my brother's comment was the spark, this was the fuel. They had a tradition of intensely energetic drum circles and encouragement of creativity of all sorts. For a particular festival I got it into my head I should write and record (instrumental, electronic, generally abstract) songs for each of the five gods involved with it, and went from there to "that went well, why don't I make a whole album and sell that as a fundraiser?" and from there to "why don't I just keep making albums?" And here I am working on my 16th album. I don't care about selling them, just about the creation process and having something I enjoy going back to and listening to later. This is what launched me from being someone with music as a hobby, to being like a musician again which I hadn't since high school.

[Robmobius]

In no particular order.

The Exploited.
Swellbellys
Ed Rush + Optical.
Bad Company UK (early stuff only).
Konflict.

[VariKusBrainZ]

In this order over time with alot missing.......obviously, but these are the ones that clearly mark out time and my major changes of direction as I got bored with genres though there are alot of underground bands missing in my tween years such as The Misfits, Napalm Death, White Zombie and Alice Donut

Elvis - 4 years old
Michael Jackson - 9 years old
Metallica - 13 years old
Red Hot Chilli Peppers - 17 years old
Autechre - 21 years old

Now nothing - 43 years old

[el-bo (formerly ebow)]

thinking about this a little more, i should mention the influence that mike oldfield's tubular bells has had on me. i used to listen to it back-to-back as a kid, and likely wore out my folk's cassette copy

tubular bells was responsible for my feeling that 4/4 is one of the most unnatural of time signatures

i did at one point intend to record a cover of the entire 1st part, but that's still to be done. did get the intro done, albeit with a really embarrassing dance 'bent'

[harryupbabble]

Not sure if "influenced by" is the right phrase. Maybe "impressed by" is the better phrase. It would be a miracle if someday I could write songs that are as as good as theirs.

1. David Bowie - I have his Fame and Fashion CD. Track 1 doesn't sound like track 2. None of the tracks sound like each other. Conversely, I have a lot of "greatest hits" CDs by other bands and all of them have tracks that sound like their other tracks.
2. Robert Smith - He can write happy pop songs but he can also write moody depressing, gothy stuff. Bipolar?
3. Roger Waters - I think that the Dark Side of the Moon CD is not overrated, it definitely is a masterpiece, to me at least.
4. Jimmy Page - Only his guitar riffs and solos can trigger release of natural drugs, probably adrenaline and testosterone.
5. The Beatles - I read on a lot of forums, and sometimes even here at KVR, that "if you want to write pop songs, check out the Beatles". So I did.

I couldn't leave out the sixth one.

6. Stevie Nicks - People sometimes asks "what's so good about America". Besides freedom of speech, lately, the second thing that I think of for an answer is Stevie Nicks, especially her younger self that wrote these three songs: Rhiannon, Dreams, Landslide. All 3 songs were written before she got into cocaine, the drug that created a hole in her nose and changed her voice for the worse and for ever.


Yeah, obviously, my radio dial is pretty much stuck at the classic rock station.