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Chris Christodoulou is an innovative prog rock/electronic composer. He has written music for games that perfectly match and elevate their assigned places within games, while also being standout enjoyable sonic experiences outside of a game, in casual listening. His compositional style, treating electronic and digital instruments as though they are a part of an orchestra, has inspired and informed how I want to write music. I now seek an alternate structure and set of musical components to typical electronic/pop music constraints, as I feel Chris's way of writing leads listeners on a more deep and enjoyable sonic journey.

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In terms of sound design and emotional depth through instrumentation alone (no vocals), Disasterpeace (AKA Rich Vreeland) is a great influence. His emphasis on and great use of silence makes his loud/emotional sound hit even harder, for a variety of desired emotional impacts. His background in Chiptune makes his current sound design hit a delicate and nostalgic note for me, in a way I would love to learn to replicate/take inspiration from.

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As a prominent composer of baroque music in the early 1700s, J.S. Bach feels like a rather faraway and odd influence for a prog rock/electronic composer to have, but Chris states that he lies often at the heart of his work "...in terms of extensive use of contrapuntal melodies and particularly dense instrumentation."(Borkowski, 2022). Multiple of Chris's compositions take pieces of Bach's work and build upon them, often adding an electronic twist in his own signature style, such as "Prelude in D flat major". In one article, he even begins a statement with "Thank Bach, no!" (Jarman, 2016), replacing the typical "God" with the name of his idol.

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Daft Punk's distinctive pop/electronic style has been a major impact on both Chris Christodoulou's growth as a musician and multiple of his projects for the Risk of Rain game series. He lists Daft Punk's Discovery album as "one of the most important electronic albums ever made and my personal #1 album of the 00s." (Borkowski, 2022) The duo's prolific use of catchy looped synthesiser melodies can be seen in many of Chris's works, laying a solid undertone, over the top of which he then often improvises prog-rock inspired solos.

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Chris comments on how, while others may refer to his works as "songs", he instead views them as individual narratives (Borkowski, 2022). "My compositions are, more often than not, structured like a film", he states in an interview with Mariusz Borkowski (2022). While he has primarily written for games, his drive to tell a story with each composition remains unchanged. Even with his primary drive in some projects being "...for the very realistic goal of being able to consume food on regular intervals" (Jarman, 2016), that desire is still undimmed, and is of great inspiration to me.

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Though Rich Vreeland started his music writing journey simply on guitar, when he stumbled upon the Chiptune community and began playing with the tools and sound design that they employed, he had this to say: "I basically went from laboring over a track for months to being able to get my ideas down quickly." (Pop Disciple, 2019), thus a blend of musical style heavily influenced by Chiptune was born. This is clear not only in the technology he used in order to produce his ideas, but also his sound design, often letting the spotlight fall on older/simpler synth sounds than modern electronic music might use.

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Rich Vreeland began learning music on guitar, inspired by Prog Rock icons such as Tool and Rage Against The Machine (Jarman, 2016), though he found guitar alone a difficult method of writing (Pop Disciple, 2019) and eventually moved to electronic methods of assembling his ideas. Still, in an interview he says his music remained "Very much inspired by prog rock — a lot of athletic and crazy music with lots of changes and runs." (Pop Disciple, 2019).

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Game development, a deeply collaborative effort and process has influenced Rich Vreeland's work heavily, with titles such as Solar Ash Kingdom being a prime example he has discussed (Kellman et al., 2020). His comments on making music in the early stages of such large, collaborative projects, despite massive unknowns and constant changes, have inspired me to attempt the same. Through trial and error, Vreeland discovered that instead of coming up with musical demos for things that are likely to change, experimenting with concepts based on what does exist and communicating closely throughout the development process yielded far better results (Kellman et al., 2020).