This week sees the DVD release of two films from the singular talent of Gregg Araki: 1993's Totally Fucked Up and Kaboom, his most recent. It's always tempting to look for patterns and themes in a director's work, but in Araki's case, there's little that connects them all. The disenfranchised gay teens of Totally Fucked Up don't share much common ground with the silly stoners of his later comedy Smiley Face; and it's hard to reconcile the serious, subtle Mysterious Skin with the knockabout thrills of Splendor and Kaboom.

But for all the hallucinatory imagery, ambisexual cavorting, drug taking, violence and other shocking facets of Araki's work, there's one element that runs through them all: the music. When he says that "Kaboom is my most autobiographical and personal film", he's not talking about the religious cults, secret agents and murder, but scenes such as the one where Thomas Dekker's character goes to a gig, a massive grin plastered across his face, or gives a look of pure glee when a close friend gives him a signed Explosions In The Sky CD for his birthday.

Araki's taste is quite unlike that of most directors. Though he was born and raised in California, the music that defines his career is British. Particularly moody British indie music from the mid-80s to early 90s, in fact. Araki is, unashamedly, a shoegazer.

"In those formative teenage years, that music really struck a chord with me," says Araki, an unlikely torchbearer for a period and style of music that didn't really seem to make much of an impact in the country that spawned it. "College radio, alternative music back then was all straightforward rock bands like Soul Asylum; the British bands were more atmospheric and experimental – music that you respond to on a purely emotional level. I've always been a huge music collector and I've always liked bands that do their own thing. It's a spirit I share in my film-making. I like bands that follow their drummer."

Before grunge, before Britpop, before landfill indie and the more careerist approach we see today, alternative rock was an altogether noisier and experimental place. The key influences of the time were the essentially disparate artists Jesus And Mary Chain, Cocteau Twins and Sonic Youth. My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr further added to the heady mixture of bands who felt guitars should be louder than the vocals; that the texture of sound and dynamics were equally if not more important than tunes; bands who felt that, other than the psychedelic drones of Tomorrow Never Knows and Rain, the Beatles had little to offer. Such dedication to wrenching new sounds out of their guitars kept the musicians staring down at the rafts of effects pedals at their feet: hence the name shoegaze.

Intended as an insult, the term quickly stuck. Bands such as Lush, Ride, Curve, Chapterhouse and Slowdive were all over the music press for a year or so, then quickly forgotten. "Ah, the notoriously fickle British music press," says Araki. "By the time we got a lot of the records here, the bands were already finished, gone."

In the UK, shoegazing was over by 1991, lost in the grunge goldrush. In the US, it had barely started.

"Not just America," adds Araki. "All over Europe – and the rest of the world, really – there are pockets of bands still doing this sort of music." While here in the UK we have nomadic club nights such as Sonic Cathedral and AC30 keeping the faith, in the US the influence of shoegazing is clearer to see, its DNA audible in the music of current bands such as Warpaint, the aforementioned Explosions In The Sky, Tamaryn and Cults, and their echoing guitars resonate all over hipster-haven festivals like Coachella. With these bands, and many other new fans of the music, more often than not you'll find it was the soundtrack albums to Araki's films that provided a crash course: Shoegazing 101.

'Often I've had to beg, make a little artist-to-artist plea, write letters telling them how much their music means to me and how it will be used'

Gregg Araki. Photograph: Matt Carr/Getty

"That's the biggest pleasure and privilege for me," he says. "A big part of being a music fan is passing on records, introducing your friends to new bands."

With Totally Fucked Up, what seemed like a cost-effective way to get a movie soundtrack together (Ride, Pale Saints, His Name Is Alive, This Mortal Coil) became something more time consuming, more an actual labour of love. "As most of the bands – even the labels – are long gone, hunting down the rights can be very complex. I've been on the phone to agents who are saying, 'We don't own the rights to that,' and I've been telling them, 'Yes, you do, I'm holding the record right in front of me!'"

Which meant that often the best place to go was the source of the music, and, for Araki, getting in touch with the musicians has been a joy. "Looking back, as a fan, it's unbelievable that I've been able to have a relationship with so many of the bands I love. Often I've had to beg, make a little artist-to-artist plea, writing letters telling them how much their music means to me and how it will be used. I remember we had to have a little private screening of Totally Fucked Up for Trent Reznor so he could give us the OK on some of his music."

Araki doesn't just use existing songs as shorthand for time and place; the music is often too obscure to be easily recognised by anyone other than devotees. "That's just down to me using the songs I like – they tend to be B-sides or remixes. If something was a big radio hit and heard everywhere, I'll tend not to go for it." In Araki's films the music is an inherent component, like a stick of rock with "SHOEGAZE" written all the way through it. It's there in titles of his films (Nowhere was named after the Ride album, The Living End is a Jesus And Mary Chain song); Kaboom features a website, justforaday.com, named after Slowdive's debut album; and the weird cult in the film reference a handbook called An Ideal For Living: the title of Joy Division's debut EP.

'I write with music playing all the time, it's integral to the atmosphere and spirit of my movies'

British shoegaze favourites, Lush. Photograph: Bob Berg/Getty

Does Araki gets a kick out of including these details? "Oh sure, but it's more than that. I write with music playing all the time, it's integral to the atmosphere and spirit of my movies. Often I'll put the track in the script so it's there all the way through the process. Music can cut through a lot. If you're on the same page as someone with certain bands then you'll probably have plenty else you can relate to. It's not foolproof, but if I met someone who only liked Britney Spears then I doubt we'd have much of a relationship."

Araki has also managed to keep shoegazing going by commissioning new music and remixes from his favourite bands. Splendor features Lush remixed by My Bloody Valentine; Mysterious Skin goes even further by having original music from Eno collaborator Harold Budd and Cocteau Twins guitarist Robin Guthrie on the soundtrack. "I'm so proud of that score and those remixes," he enthuses. "They wouldn't exist if it weren't for my movies. Although I wouldn't have had them in my films had their music not meant so much to me in the first place."

As investment in new bands and sounds is at an all-time low, many are now looking to the past for bands that the history books have skipped over. Shoegazing certainly fits that bill – even in the recent Creation Records documentary, Upside Down, the quietly prolific Slowdive barely get a mention among the more attention-grabbing antics of their labelmates Primal Scream and Oasis.

Of course, at a time when you can just release a playlist on Spotify, or stream it through Facebook (which Araki has done for Kaboom), Araki's excellent soundtrack albums already seem to be a thing of the past. "There's no money for such things at the present, no incentive for record companies to repackage their music," he sighs. "The sad thing is, today a band like Slowdive wouldn't be able to have a career. They hardly dealt in huge figures, but they sold enough to get a career out of it."

In Araki's soundtracks, a wave of music that was created for, and by, shy, bedsit-dwelling youngsters in rainy Britain who could barely see the world through their fringes has found a new home in sunny California. Their introspective, sedate tunes fit Araki's often frantic and visceral movies with surprising perfection. It's not just simple nostalgia or retro-fetishism that keeps people listening – maybe you never really know what you've got until it's gone. As Araki says, only half-joking – and this is from a man who has pushed the boundaries of cinema to fit his own needs, regardless of what others may think – "My only regret in life is that I never saw Slowdive live."

Totally Fucked Up and Kaboom are out on DVD now