Robert Miles

Italy, 1984–2017

Roberto Concina, born in Switzerland to Italian parents and raised in Friuli. He wrote 'Children' (1995) to give clubbers something to come down to at the end of a night, and built it on a piano figure written after seeing photographs of child war victims his father had brought back from the former Yugoslavia. It sold over five million copies and invented dream trance more or less on its own. He spent the rest of his life moving away from it, into ambient and dub with Robert Fripp, Bill Laswell and his own radio station. He died in 2017, aged 47.

MusicRoots documents 6 artists who influenced Robert Miles and 0 artists Robert Miles influenced in turn. Every connection cites a published source.

Who influenced Robert Miles?

• Kraftwerk — The machine underneath. What separated 'Children' from the piano house around it was that the pulse never wavered while the melody did all the moving.
• Brian Eno — The half of him that had no interest in the dancefloor at all. After Dreamland he spent twenty years going towards ambient, and Eno is where that impulse points.
• Robert Fripp — One of the six he named, and one he went on to work with rather than only listen to.
• Bill Laswell — The dub and ambient direction Miles took after Dreamland runs straight through Laswell, who later played on his records.
• The Future Sound of London — The nearest thing to a contemporary on his list — proof that a dance record could be atmospheric and still land on the chart.
• Karlheinz Stockhausen — The studio as an instrument rather than a means of recording a performance — the same root Jarre and Kraftwerk grew from, reaching a chart record in 1995.