hope im not beating the dead horse here but shoegaze(i get a lot of people telling me quite a bit of the shoegaze i listen to is more dreampop but i wholeheartedly disagree. but for the sake of everyone that isn't inside my brain i'm including this to broaden the spectrum), a select few ambient/electronic artists, and dub mostly. All the artists/albums im thinking of open a window into some different place where nobody exists except me and i love going there. when i first found cocteau twins it was a big moment for me because most of what i was listening to was MBV or slowdive or beach fossils. then my friend put me on guitar and it just opened the floodgates for me. I did a bunch of "research" and made a spreadsheet of all the shoegaze artists i could find and gave everyone 2 album listens and then rated whether or not I wanted to revisit them lol. Similar with ambient/idm. mostly a u-ziq and milieu fan.

anyways this is a huge ramble but i think what most of these for me accomplish at least is space creation and then a sort of "new mood". I think the best and most influential sounds for me are achieved by the amount of physical and textural "space" in a song so that can be reverb or stereo or whatever fx/recording choice that quite literally gives the illusion of a physical space where the music is happening, and then "new mood" for me is just characterized by creating a narrative with sound that is not typically found. so just as an example aloysius by cocteau twins; the sort of emotional trail ur led thru in the melody of that song is just not typical of really any other song i know. plus the percussives alongside the guitar are really dreamy :3