The Quietus Baker's Dozen: Roly Porter's Favourite Space Records

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I'm not sure when I first heard this track but I was a massive fan of DJ Krust at the time. They had a regular night at The End, a club near Tottenham Court Road, which was amazing. Whether I first heard it there or on vinyl instead I can't remember. I think there's something about the space and emotion in it that's really unusual, and for me that hasn't really been bettered in electronic music since.

'Future Unknown' or 'Soul In Motion' could have easily gone in this slot as well but there is something about the scale of this tune that just about beats them. DJ Krust was a huge influence on me and this tune represents the peak in the evolutionary journey of jungle. Uniquely heartbreaking and bad as fuck at the same time.

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Other than the fact we've done some compositional work together, me and Paul kind of write in tandem. We'll be sending ideas back and forth and sending each other stuff through the compositional processes of our albums. We share a lot of the same conceptual ideas I suppose. Anyway, as I say, I've worked closely with Paul for the last few years and when you're close to something it can be easy to miss it.

When I saw him play this album at last year's Atonal festival I was shocked to find that he had achieved everything we had been looking for over the last couple of years. It was the highlight of the festival for me although the whole thing was great - it has this cathedral-like experience. It took seeing that album in its complete form for me to realise how good it was. The combination of his music with Tarik Barri's visual work was almost unbearably emotionally intense. The heartbreak of Arvo Pärt for the next century – proper future music.

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'Twin Stars Of Thence'
I was into early Mo' Wax and loved the U.N.K.L.E. EP, The Time Has Come. A lot of trip-hop has aged quite badly, but there were elements of the early Mo' Wax stuff that work really well. At the time I was totally in love with it. There are crossroads between breaks, hip-hop and early electronic experimentation with sort of dubbed-out influences... some of it stands up really well.

It was only later on that I tracked down the sample from 'If You Find Earth Boring' off that release to Sun Ra's 'Twin Stars Of Thence' and was introduced to the madness. It's almost like a funk track... When you listen to this and then move on to other Sun Ra stuff, you realise how completely crazy it is! I still don't know whether I really enjoy lots of Sun Ra but it was definitely essential in my formative years. This is actually a relatively easy listening Sun Ra track; repetitive and more traditionally melodic. It served as a good gateway into his world (or universe) before listening to Heliocentric Worlds. As the only human to have travelled to Saturn, Sun Ra definitely deserves a place on the list.

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Piano Concerto No. 5, second movement
Because I understand very little about both maths and music theory, I can indulge in romantic ideas about them which aren't tied to having to be true. When I first heard this piece I literally stopped dead in the street. I remember walking along the Bristol to Bath cycle path and feeling like some kind of mathematical truth had just been explained to me. The piano melodies weren't just musically pleasing – it wasn't a matter of taste that I liked them, they were correct in some kind of universal way that I couldn't put into words. I know how that sounds but I just can't describe it in any other way. Listening to Beethoven is the thing which makes me question what music actually is the most.

There is a great scene in the otherwise awful Day The Earth Stood Still remake, where the alien who is sent to destroy us is convinced there is hope when John Cleese plays him a piece by Bach... It demonstrates some higher mathematical or philosophical understanding that we had otherwise failed to convey as a species. It's a crap film but a good idea. I should check out the original.

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'You Know You Know'
Jamie [Teasdale, Kuedo] played me this when we first met at school and apart from the Massive Attack references I have always loved the sense of restraint in this track. It's a welcome respite from the usual chaos of Mahavishnu and gives me a feeling of being adrift. This is a real oasis of calm compared to everything else. It's very much the standout track on The Inner Mounting Flame… The rest of it is more traditional – faster, more chaotic Mahavishnu. Billy Cobham, the band's drummer, is a genius too – he was prolific.

When you've spent your whole life working on electronic music and processing things meticulously... hearing someone play an instrument, especially a rhythmic instrument, with that sort of precision – it's just an incredible feat. Whatever happens, and however long humanity exists, someone dedicating years and years of their life to being so precise and so excellent at something is always amazing. The rhythm tracks on the Mahavishnu stuff are always so insanely precise; it's the counting that blows my mind.

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This one comes from a similar time period to when I was listening to the Mahavishnu and Sun Ra – when I was younger and spending a lot of time with Jamie Kuedo. In my mind when I was younger Queen were this awful thing to be avoided at all costs. I get why people can't stand Queen and I'm not going to defend them, but the Flash Gordon soundtrack is a crazy synth space opera masterpiece, and to hear some of the ambient moments and some of the synth moments was just a shock. Some of it's genuinely beautiful. 'Ming's Theme' is a killer but the strings at the end of 'Execution Of Flash' followed by 'The Kiss' are the real highlights.

Everything about the entire film should be awful, I don't know why I love it! It sits completely outside of this list – music for me is so serious. I was always accused of being no fun about music – everything had to be massively important and serious. Obviously Flash Gordon doesn't really fit into that mould but I think it's a genuinely great score!

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I listen to a lot of Ligeti and I was trying to decide whether I would have the same kind of relationship with it that I do, if it weren't for equating it with 2001 and lots of those sort of ideas. The two are so inseparable in my head. When you think of hurtling through the void, that's what you hear. There's a lot of connections between this and the way I process the vocals in Third Law. The strange thing is that a lot of people relate these sounds to horror and feelings of tension, but actually when you listen to more of that music it does become beautiful. In those tiny moments where motifs resolve, you get this sense of relief and beauty that you become a bit addicted to.

It's difficult to say whether I would love Ligeti and associate his music so strongly with space if it weren't for 2001, but it doesn't matter because the combination is so good. There is so much genius piled into every aspect of 2001 that it's impossible to write a few lines about how important it is, but the use of music is still groundbreaking. Ligeti and the monolith are my defining image of space.

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'VLetrmx21'
This tune is so completely epic it destroys pretty much everything else. I think it's strange because Autechre are so massively influential. You'd be hard pushed to meet anyone at all in any aspect of electronic music over the last 20 years who doesn't know who they are and doesn't find them an influence in some way. Their influence is almost impossible to measure. They're so unique, they're kind of an aside – I can't think of anyone else who exists so completely in their own sphere. For as long as I remember they've been part of my musical landscape. This tune is a slightly weird choice because it's not very representative of that general release. It's so simple and so beautiful – just a really amazing tune. You can pick and choose pretty much any Autechre track and it's very difficult to place it in terms of time or genre. It's so of its own world that it's difficult to try and quantitatively judge it. You can't say what a good or bad Autechre tune is; it's just totally of its own world.

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When my uncle gave me Music For Airports as a kid, it was possibly the most influential moment in my life. There are probably things I've taken more influence from compositionally, but just as a transitional moment in my life from thinking music had to be a certain way to hearing that and realising that it could be any way, hearing this was massive. He gave me Apollo a couple of years later and while I never had the same relationship with it that I did with Music For Airports, it is still some heavyweight space music from an artist whose influence can't be measured. His legacy is on a ridiculous scale no one can ever really hope to match; the amount of influence and the amount of involvement across music is incredible. That idea that musically you can literally do what you want to do... Brian Eno was the first person who really showed me that.

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When I first heard this I remember being shocked. It readjusted me emotionally in the same way a profound drug experience can when you're young – from then on, all emotional responses are compared to or informed by this new thing. It is so simple but so incredibly powerful. I have spent many hours, possibly even days, listening to this and thinking about space and our place in it. It wasn't until many years of listening to this that I bothered to look up what the words meant and then I was destroyed all over again. Even though the lyrics have this incredible meaning, however, for me it is still the ultimate meditation on our tiny place in the massiveness of space.

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No list about space could not include him. A lot will be written about Bowie over the next few months and I doubt I can add anything meaningful to it. 'Ashes to Ashes' is my favourite track, but it's not really the music, he was just fucking cool and completely sci-fi to the end.

I had this weird feeling of patriotism after he died. I've always hated patriotism in England and the association with right-wing politics and all that sort of stuff, apart from when I thought about Bowie... I got this massive sense of patriotism! I don't even consider him a British artist exactly as he feels more international than that.

He somehow managed to avoid ever really fucking it up, which is a miracle when you work for your whole life on something. Even the jungle collaboration he did – even that doesn't sound dated, or like a dent in his career. When an artist jumps on a new bandwagon and tries to get involved with the newest thing – that's often seen as something really negative. It's like, "Oh, so this washed-up rockstar wants to find out what the kids are listening to", but he's the opposite of that. He's someone who just endlessly nurtured new ideas.

'Ashes To Ashes' is one of the least sci-fi tracks by him so it doesn't even quite fit on this list, but as someone who's dedicated their life to going so far beyond humanity, he has to be included in some way.