My playlist includes absolute favourites that were seismic events in my musical awakening. When I was 11 or 12 my older brother came back from Glasgow Uni every once in a while, and he'd always bring me back music. One time he brought me home Classics by Aphex Twin, and I was absolutely transfixed. I was like, "Jesus, this is it, this is the way to go." From there, I tried to get my hands on everything I could.
By the time I was about 12 or 13 the internet was in our house – Dad was a very early adopter of anything technological. I dug deeper into IDM: intelligent dance music, which is an incredibly wanky title that everybody who likes that type of music hates, but it’s a good catch-all. I got really into Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher, Boards of Canada. My friends were into Blur and Oasis or the Spice Girls and Take That, so it scared people away a bit.
When you connect with a piece of music at 12, 13, 14 it’s so cosmically powerful. Movies, TV, music – all that stuff gets baked in. If you ask anyone their stand-out musical moments, they often seem to be those things that get sucked into the tractor beam at that age where you’re kind of a teenager but you’re not quite a teenager. You have absolutely no freedom, but you feel like you want some freedom. You’re too young to even understand most of the lyrical content of most songs, but you’re starting to.
In my case I didn’t know enough about music theory to know what was in the more abstract instrumental worlds of Aphex Twin or Autechre, but they entranced me.
Autechre, the first track on the playlist, are probably more famous for stuff that’s extremely abstract and formless, and they don’t have repeating drum beats almost ever. It can sometimes sound like noise, literally like noise, but then they can make a track like VLetrmx. which is so unearthly, serene and lovely.
Mira Calix is from the same Warp Records stable as Aphex, Boards of Canada, Squarepusher et al, and has an incredibly idiosyncratic approach to melody that I’ve always found superbeguiling. Hiccup is this weird, recursive melody made entirely from vocal samples. It’s creepy and haunting and doesn’t conform to any time signature you can think of. It’s a perfect earworm.
I started to listen to more hip hop in my teens: J Dilla, Beastie Boys, Busta Rhymes. Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See is the epitome of mid- to late-1990s chart-friendly rap, but it’s also incredibly esoteric, with interesting production and structure of the rhymes and the rhythms. It’s needlessly challenging, and it’s incredibly satisfying.
Since I Left You by The Avalanches came out when I was 15 or 16. I loved the premise of taking thousands of samples and making these sublime mash-ups that are perfectly coherent works of art. I just devoured it. Also, DJ Dexter of The Avalanches was the first gig I ever went to by myself, in Sandinos in Derry when I was 15. That was absolutely amazing – I got him to play Windowlicker by Aphex Twin.
Björk is one of my musical heroes, and someone whose work has been a constant in my life since I first got Homogenic. It was striking that her singles were so different from the stuff that moved me on her albums, which were spiky and weird and wholly unique, in different ways to her hits. She was also possibly the best gig I ever saw at Electric Picnic, in 2007. I'd cross the ends of the earth to see her again.
I adore Christine and the Queens. She has my favourite voice in pop music, with vocals you could hang your washing on. I always think, What would it be like to open your mouth and have that noise come out? I also have a soft spot for sung French, so the fact she does French and English versions of all her songs is a big plus.
A lot of the tracks are instrumental. I often felt like poetry is hard, and music is hard, and the chances of the poetry and the music being as good as each other in a song is quite low. My favourite piece of Bach is on the playlist. There is no poetry you could add to it that would enhance it, or even make it break even. You could only subtract from it. I’m willing to be proven wrong, but even at their very peak the absolute best singer-songwriter or rapper didn’t affect me on a pure gut level as the sonic scope of an instrumental track.
