Sound / film / image / form
Not a ranking. Not one era. A lifetime of looking and listening.
Trying to reduce my musical influences to a top 20 is almost impossible. I’ve spent my life listening across genres and decades, and the list could easily be 200 artists long. These are simply some of the names that have shaped my taste, songwriting, production instincts, atmosphere, and visual imagination—not a definitive ranking and not a list of artists I’m claiming to sound like.
My early listening was shaped partly by access to my father’s library of thousands of records and later CDs: ’50s and ’60s music, classic rock and many different genres. My own exploration expanded into new wave, alternative, goth, industrial, psychedelic, dream-pop, shoegaze, electronic and other music.
Labyrinth. The Wall. 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The Shining. David Lynch. Horror, zombies, alien and space cinema, Alice in Wonderland. “Ordinary World”—both its video imagery and its emotional atmosphere.
Rock photography across decades: iconic musician portraits, editorial music photography, performance photographs, album and promotional images, and magazines including Rolling Stone. Tamara de Lempicka, art deco, surreal collage, impossible rooms, retro-futurism, subtly wrong vintage imagery, distressed print, film grain, and Earth-versus-space scenery.
’40s pinup, ’60s mod, ’70s glam and luxe, punk, goth, and ’90s/’00s scene and emo. Leather, latex, buckles, collars and dark military/mod shapes. Subtle BDSM influences in art and fashion: sensuality suggested through material and silhouette.
