1. Maurice Ravel | String Quartet In F Major (Performed by Budapest String Quartet)
A muscular machine of a piece, with the best string riff you'll ever hear at the opening. It's so restless and so inventive.
2. Kathleen Ferrier | I Know Where I'm Going (Traditional Scottish or Irish Ballad Cover)
A traditional ballad recorded in 1949, AND the title track of Powell & Pressburger's brilliant film. There's something so pure and fragile about her voice despite its technical strength. And I love Phyllis Tuckwell's piano accompaniment. I sampled Kathleen for the Grasscut track We Fold Ourselves.
3. Charles Mingus | Mood Indigo (Duke Ellington And His Orchestra Cover)
This is one of the best titled pieces of Music I know. In Mingus' version of the Duke Ellington classic you sink into the colour with every harmony and blend of the horns. There's so much discipline to this Music - it doesn't, like so much Jazz, just rely on the individual brilliance of the musicians, but ebbs and flows with a massive collective strength.
4. Gavin Bryars | Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet
This 25 minute piece based on a tape loop recording of a tramp singing dares you to look away. It emerges slowly from Silence, and then wrings every ounce of Emotion out of it. Stick with it, it just keeps giving you more and more.
5. Brian Eno | The Big Ship
From one of my favourite albums Another Green World, this fragment of an Electronic Waltz is so brief and yet condenses so much feeling. I love the CR78 drum machine, accordion-esque synths, and Robert Fripp's distant driven guitar.
6. Joy Division | Atmosphere (12" Vinyl Version)
Every sound is perfect, and makes so much more sense when you listen on vinyl. (Though I'm no vinyl snob. It just does sound better). Martin Hannett was a genius.
7. Robert Wyatt | At Last I Am Free (Chic Cover)
From his 1982 Rough Trade album Nothing Can Stop Us, this is such an elegant cover of the Chic original. Like all really great singers, Robert makes the song his own. I absolutely love the drum machine, ride cymbal, vocal, piano and toy organ combo. Magic. I tried to pay homage to this sound on our recent single Catholic Architecture, a cover of a Wyatt original.
8. Arvo Pärt | Fratres (Played by Gil Shaham & Roger Carlsson with Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra; Conductor: Neeme Järvi)
This is some of the best writing for violin I know. Pärt makes Music you want to have with you when big things happen. Beautifully austere and timeless.
9. Luke Abbott | Meeting Hill
This feels like son of The Big Ship to me. A wonderfully elusive, tactile piece of Electronica, I can never quite get my head around the rhythm, which I love.
10. Nils Frahm | Keep
I love the sound of this man's records. It's as much about Timbre as it is about Notes: he's as much a percussionist as a pianist. Brilliant.
