Skrillex

Around 2009, before his first release, Moore traveled alone to Groningen, Netherlands, to track down the Dutch drum'n'bass trio Noisia — he slept in their manager's attic and came away, he said, mentored by them. Building the "Monsters sound" that made him famous, he later admitted: "I was just copying Noisia's sound at first, their synthesis. I would hear their sounds and go, 'fuck, how the fuck do they do that?'" — the origin, by his own account, of the growling FM8 bass patches at the center of his breakout EP.

listen: upstream & heresource: UKF — "'They're pure art' ↗share

2010

Machine GunNoisia

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2011

Kill EverybodySkrillex

listen forCue Noisia's "Machine Gun" and then Skrillex's "Kill Everybody": both foreground a snarling, distorted mid-range tone as the lead voice of the track rather than a conventional bassline — the exact synthesis Moore said he reverse-engineered inside Native Instruments' FM8 while chasing Noisia's sound. Listen for how the tone itself, not a melody, carries the hook, mutating and stuttering through the arrangement the way Noisia's productions do.

The Fat of the Land was the first album Moore ever begged his parents for, as a kid, at Christmas. Years later, describing what he was chasing as Skrillex, he pointed straight back to it: "If you wanted to talk about the incarnation of what I'm doing now, that's the closest thing you could pinpoint," he told SPIN. "It's rock and it's electronic and it's visceral and it's emotional — it's everything, you know?" It's the earliest of his three named touchstones, predating both his Warp Records discovery and his Noisia mentorship.

listen: upstream & heresource: SPIN — "The Prodigy's 'The Fat of the Land' Gets Reissued, Remixed" (Prodigy influence quote) ↗share

1996

FirestarterThe Prodigy

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2011

BangarangSkrillex

listen forPut The Prodigy's "Firestarter" beside Skrillex's "Bangarang": both build the entire track around one aggressive, shouted vocal hook slammed against a maximalist, distorted electronic backing, aimed less at a dance floor than a room ready to lose control. It's the rock-and-electronic collision Moore named directly when he called The Fat of the Land the closest thing to what he does now — a chant-and-detonate structure Bangarang carries almost unchanged.

At twelve, in the Los Angeles home where he grew up, Moore found Warp Records and it rerouted everything. "I discovered Aphex Twin (and) became obsessed with glitch, acid house, IDM, Autechre, Squarepusher," he told NME — the first time he'd heard music built from broken, mutated sound rather than clean rhythm. That vocabulary of chopped, uncanny texture, absorbed years before he produced a beat of his own, resurfaces every time a Skrillex drop detonates out of a warped, barely-recognizable vocal sample rather than a straight buildup.

listen: upstream & heresource: NME — "30 Things You Should Know About Skrillex" (bio; Aphex Twin/Warp discovery) ↗share

1999

WindowlickerAphex Twin

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2010

Scary Monsters and Nice SpritesSkrillex

listen forPlay Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker" against Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites": both open by warping a vocal sample into something unsettling — pitched, stuttering, almost human but not — before lurching into a hugely distorted low end. Aphex Twin treats the effect as its own destination; Skrillex weaponizes the same glitch technique into a drop built to detonate a festival crowd. The kinship is in the sound design itself, not a shared song or sample — the audible debt Skrillex named from his Warp Records discovery.