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In the spirit of KCRW’s ongoing Guest DJ Project and also in the spirit of the fact they probably won’t be calling me to ask any time soon, here is a list of ten songs that helped to shape me as a musician.

To make this easier I restricted myself to songs I discovered before college. I also decided not to include any classical choices, because those could easily make up a list of their own.

1. Andrew Lloyed Webber – The Phantom of the Opera
A bit of an embarrassing first choice, but I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t a major influence on six-year-old me. My mom had this on the original vinyl release and I listened to it more than anything else when I was younger. Michael Crawford, regardless of your opinions on his technique, has a hell of an instrument. For me, this song had it all: electronic drums, strings, vocal harmony, minor tonality, and of course a heavy freakin organ. I used to put this on and dance like a villian when no one was watching.

2. Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On?
As a kid in Houston, I heard a lot of RnB on the bus to school, a fact for which I’m still grateful to this day. Dad had the eponymous album on vinyl. I played it constantly. I think I’ve always been a sucker for strings, and no one I’d ever heard before could sing like that. I didn’t come across Al Green until much later. I blame that Marvin Gaye record for a certain stretch in fifth grade where all I listened to was Boyz II Men.

3. Michael Jackson – Smooth Criminal
My uncle Lahab gave us a VHS that had some claymation Mark Twain adventure and Moonwalker on it. Of course, I became obsessed with Moonwalker and I remember one week I watched the Smooth Criminal scene every night trying to learn the dance. I got pretty far into it, too, until the bit where the music stops and the cat walks across the piano. I always hated that part, it bored me to death. It was even worse than the dinosaurs in Fantasia.

4. B.B. King – The Thrill is Gone
My family lived in Saudi Arabia for a while, where the best you could hope for CD-wise was the occasional cool soundtrack. Every summer we’d go back to the States, and all I ever asked for from my parents was more CDs. Once for some reason I bought a B.B. King collection and played the crap out of it. This particular song blew me away. I love the simple arrangement, the way the guitar transitions seamlessly from punchy to wailing to weeping, and the strings filling it all up. Wonderful.

5. Live – White, Discussion
Throwing Copper was the first album I ever bought. I’d heard a remix on the Virtuosity soundtrack and then my friend Mike played the original at a pool party. I bought the CD off him then and there. Everybody has a favorite off of this album, and this is mine. In truth I love every song on Throwing Copper, it’s one of those rare perfect albums.

6. UNKLE feat. Thom Yorke – Rabbit in Your Headlights
I feel clever, because this combines DJ Shadow with Radiohead, thus saving me a spot on my list. I found UNKLE’s debut Psyence Fiction at a listening station while visiting my aunt in California. Mom bought it for me when she saw how excited I was. I listened to it so many times I think it eventually broke in half. This is one of the first really good proggy singer/hip hop dj mash-ups that I’m aware of and definitely the first I’d ever heard. Hell of a music video, too.

7. The Prodigy – Smack My Bitch Up
I first heard this in a club in Bahrain, just before my family moved back to the States. It was the summer between tenth and eleventh grade, and musically it was a really important time for me. I hadn’t wanted to move again and I think my parents pitied me, so they let me buy ten CDs at once on Amazon. I still remember it. It was like Christmas in July. Three of those CDs were Fat of the Land, Crystal Method’s Vegas and Propellerheads Decksanddrumsandrockandroll. I was astounded at the sound coming out of the stereo. That was when I started making my own tracks on our family computer, and I’ve been an electronic musician ever since. I’ve never looked back.

8. Squarepusher – Iambic 5 Poetry
Squarepusher is probably my biggest influence, and I owe his discovery to my small but indispensable group of friends from Franklin, Tennessee. I’m a bona fide Squarepusher fan, so much so that it was hard for me to pick just one song. His sound changes radically from one album to the next, so just check him out. He’s amazing. This particular track off Budakhan Mindphone is really laid back. It’s so different from anything else he’s done, which is probably why it sticks out for me. Because of this song, plus maybe Port Rhombus, I use vibes/xylophone in my music all the time.

9. Benny Goodman – Sing! Sing! Sing!
I played clarinet in the school band for years. My dad bought the Ken Burns jazz documentary, which was full of revelation from start to finish. I’d never heard anybody play the clarinet like that, and the rest of the band sounded incredible, especially Gene Krupa on drums. I came across an old static-y recording of their 1938 performance at Carnegie Hall and it was love. I played it louder than most people play metal.

10. Cornelius – 2010
I hardly ever hung out with the guy who introduced me to Cornelius, so it’s kind of funny that he pretty much changed my life. This quirky, fast-paced track introduced me to Bach’s Little Fugue in G minor, which became something of an obsession for me after high school graduation and well into my freshman year of college. I was originally a biochem major, but for months I sat in the campus chapel every night learning the fugue by ear. When I finally played it for the girl I was dating at the time, she asked my why the hell I didn’t just switch to music already. Two years later when I applied for a transfer to Florida State, I nearly bombed the piano section of the audition until I played this fugue. In large part because of that piece, the guy passed me and I went on to be accepted to the FSU music department.

Plus it actually is 2010 now, so that makes it relevant. Got your own list? Feel free to drop it in the comments below.

Having heard legends of the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the flawlessness of its acoustics, I was very excited to see such a fearsome foursome as the Kronos Quartet, Matmos, Mike Einziger, and Terry Riley all in one go.

First off, the WDCH does not disappoint in the slightest. We sat in the cheap seats behind the orchestra. Despite the fact that the performers are facing away from you, these are by far the best seats from which to eavesdrop on an electronic duo’s setup, not to mention hear an organ performance since you’re sitting directly under the pipes. Even given our weird positioning, the sound was so clear that as the orchestra played full tilt alongside 12 guitar amps for Einziger’s piece, we could still hear a lonely cellist turn a page.

The night, which kicked off the West Coast, Left Coast Festival, had a rolling cast. It began with the Kronos Quartet, who performed a piece by Thomas Newman. It involved live electronics and Newman’s trademark melodic rhythmicism, dissonanced up here and there to ensure no one forgot they weren’t listening to a film score. The Kronos Quartet has a sound so free and yet cohesive you’ve got to see it to believe it, and David Harrington is nothing short of a rock star.

Following this, Matmos and the Kronos Quartet performed two pieces, which to me was a highlight of the night. If you’ve read other articles around this site, you’ll know that I’m obsessed with quality reconstruction of electroacoustic music without any prerecorded tracks. Matmos, whose myriad influences date back to tape loops and musique concrète, seamlessly blended their infectious grooves and quirky live sampling with the furious sawing of two violins, a viola and a cello. The quartet dutifully supplied samples to Matmos when required, shaking rattlers, baby bells, and even smacking their own violin with a bright red squeaky hammer. This is how the future of electronic music should sound: masterfully beautiful with a twinkle in its eye. I have had it up to here with contemporary chamber electronica always taking itself so damn seriously.

Matmos then performed two tracks to video. I can understand how such music can be underwhelming to those expecting a more club-oriented electronic duo like Plaid or Autechre, but I was delighted by the freedom inherent in their soundscapes. I felt it was a celebration of sound more than a celebration of themselves, a sentiment too often lacking in musicians the world over.

Next, we had the privilege of hearing Mike Einziger’s Forced Curvature of Reflective Surfaces, a through-composed process piece inspired quite clearly by the shape of the concert hall in which we sat. After an (extremely) short introduction by the ever low key Einziger, the piece began with a series of rises and falls, one side of the orchestra mirroring the other, interspersed with bits of tonality here and there. The guitar amps surrounding the string players like the earth’s crust included that of the composer himself, placed surreptitiously at the end of the row. Suzie Katayama, who conducted his piece End.>vacuum in the past, conducts with an easy, flowing style perfect for such an amorphous composition. At one point, when the song got to the big bulbous part of the building near the center, the incredibly long fall drew chuckles from the audience. Sure, Mike might be the guitarist for the pop alternative band Incubus, but don’t let that get in the way of the brilliance of this infinitely curious and tirelessly humble artist.

Matmos returned and jammed with Mike for a while, then Kronos and Terry Riley joined them for a session that really knocked me out. There I was, watching eight musicians who probably never expected to be so popular or successful, still down to earth and inspired by life, no one soloing wankily over the other, in one of the most acoustically perfect rooms in the world. What a treat! Terry Riley, as the elder, definitely seemed the Patriarch, Wise Man, and Shaman of the session, immediately setting up a bluesy ostinato and running over it, left and right and up and down and across and under and through. The cellist took up the hook and everyone just went off. When Terry Riley began singing a raga a la Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, it really took the performance to a level usually reserved for sex and prayer. I am ever impressed by the voice and to what heights (or depths) it may take us.

Terry Riley then left the stage organ and moved slowly (he is 74) up to the big organ roughly 15 feet to my left. The eccentric woman on my right remarked, “It is a gift to music lovers everywhere that the best seats in the house are the cheapest!” Terry played for one glorious hour, which we believe only involved 3 songs. Some people left, to my shock and horror, and some stayed until he finished at 12:30. Unbeknownst to me, he has been known to play concerts well into the sunrise, which were attended in the old days by acid trippers and families with sleeping bags alike. His music is not for the faint of heart, but to the heart of a thinking person it is undeniably a celebration of life and deserts and oceans and people and an endless stream of universal loveliness. He constantly toyed with rhythm, and not just in the conventional hey-look-5/4 sort of way. Sometimes he’d just skip a beat, so I would often be tapping along for a good bit before I realized I was now on the off beat. He plays music as if life were overwhelming, yet beneath it all is a beat that goes on and on despite the supersaturated humdrum of it all. Which is true… especially in Los Angeles.

Here’s a song by Terry Riley called A Rainbow in Curved Air, which someone synced up to 2001: A Space Odyssey because Youtube is funny like that. Happy Thanksgiving!

Just finished this track with the graphic this morning. Some time next year this will go on album #2.