ihatemusic

Apologies if this has been asked before - I did a search and couldn't see anything.

So yeah, how did you get into this. By this I mean, whatever it is you're into within the realms of whatever we talk about here. I know we're not all on the exact same narrow path, but I imagine there are some interesting stories about what led you to this point. Influential musicians, records, teachers, friends. Chance encounters? Random moments?

I think for me it was hearing Sonic Youth and then seeing an interview with them in The Wire, so buying it and being confused by the writing about stuff I simply couldn't hear (mid 90's, teenager, no internet) but continuing to buy it and read about everything and imagine what it sounded like. Eventually I would be able to locate records of these things I had read about (we're talking stuff like The Dead C, not any EAI stuff, yet - that was still a step too far for me) and slowly assemble a path towards where I am now. Honorable mentions to the likes of Stars of the Lid and LaBradford and Jim O'Rourke who made records that were slightly more easy to get hold of in the wastelands of the midlands in the mid to late 90's

Not particularly interesting, but if I'm asking for your stories, I should share mine.

I'm sure i'll remember more interesting (or not) points as I think, but I don't doubt a lot of you have more interesting stories anyway.

Not sure if you mean 'experimental' music in general or CPM in particular.

For the former, I was in my early teens a fan of early industrial music and post-industrial music.
Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Coil, Nurse With Wound, etc. Most of this I find does not stand
the test of time and I have sold most of the CDs.

Then with my teens I got into, strangely enough, jazz and first wave punk/post-punk at the same time.
For that reason, Miles Davis' _Kind of Blue_ and Gang of Four's _Entertainment_ are inextricably linked
in my mind.

My first exposure to CPM proper was when Jon Abbey on a jazz bulletin board suggested I attend a concert in Berlin in a former factory complex that has been converted into an office complex. In one of those Berlin-typical entanglements of art and finance (thus proving Tilbury's quotation of Sebald that all art is money laundering), artists like the Phosphor collective and the Kammerensemble Neue Musik were invited to improvise and play a composition by Otomo Yoshihide. I was intrigued enough to start attending concerts and buying CDs.

I suppose I mean both, and anything inbetween. More like, how did you end up where you are now, liking what you like, listening to what you listen to. I didn't want to limit the question to only those into something very particular.

I got here mostly from listening to college radio in Atlanta. WREK & WRAS have consistently had great shows focusing on avant-garde musics, as well as slightly off-kilter sounds in their "regular rotation."

working at issue project room in new york and with suzanne fiol (its director, r.i.p) changed my life and ears

i fell.

m

I started digging jazz more from this site. I had no idea of ESP disk.

My development went in (what I can understand as) a linear way only up to a certain point (stylistically from Hardrock to... let's say the first few Acta-LPs [= british improv label]), and then my ears opened up for all kinds of stuff.

It mostly developped slowly, except for when I attended a Gunter Hampel-concert. I went in there as a prog/Zappa-fan, and left as a free jazz fan, so to speak.

There had been a few stylistic "lateral entrants" (contemporary classical music, certain "alternative" female rock/pop artists) which I met randomly, but which opened rooms I still explore.

Impulses came from my older sibblings, friends, older musicians, university, my own drum students, sometimes music mags (for instance I remember falling in love with a picture of never-heard-before Karen O. kneeling on a posh dinner table). Usually followed by lots of reading and research on my own.

When looking at the music-media I accumulated especially in recent years, I wish I wouldn't be interested in so many different genres.

---
When looking at "where I am now", I first have to say I developped into a hopeless Melt-Banana fanatic. I figured that various sensibilities I developped as a listener and drummer over the years find the most pleasant response in about all aspects making up that band.

Mudd was pushed!!

I think it was Niwi.

A family friend was going overseas to undertake a phd in composition (with George Crumb) and dumped a pile of their old tapes on me. I was 15, and a metal/ hardcore listener - favourite bands at this point were Big Black & Napalm Death. 'Torture Garden' by Naked City blew me out of the water. Nancarrow's player piano studies went straight over my head at the time, but I've come right around on them since.

As it doesn't seem to be available anywhere online, here's the text of the Epiphany I submitted to Wire, originally published in November 2000.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

If the great Elgar and Brahms conductor Sir John Barbirolli hadn't died when he did, none of this might have happened. As it was, my first trips to the Thursday evening Hallé Orchestra concerts in Manchester were to see his successor, a young Scottish upstart called James Loughran, whose daring programming (UK premieres of Ligeti, Xenakis, Maki Ishii..) was about as popular with the conservative Mancunians as Ken Livingston's GLC would later be with Thatcher. Why were these nice ordinary people booing this amazing music with such hatred? It made a hell of an impression on this ten-year old lad. So much so that when I started going for music lessons at the Royal Northern College of Music Junior Department after school on Fridays, I made a point of heading straight for the record library in search of New Music.

There, to the bemusement of Colin, the bespectacled record librarian, I discovered amongst other things a fabulous box set entitled Music Before Revolution (the Ensemble Musica Negativa, conducted by Rainer Raihn – I only ever saw one more copy, in the Sibley Library at the Eastman School in Rochester, New York (not for lending): anyone out there got one for sale?), which kicks off with Cage's Credo in US (1942), an act of outright sabotage on a record of Dvorak's New World Symphony featuring prepared piano, percussion, and a very annoying door buzzer. Other memorable finds included the Webern String Trio, Xenakis's Persepolis (now happily reissued after years out of print!), and Stockhausen's Hymnen (more later).. But the one that really took the top of my head off was Ligeti's Requiem, which I insisted on listening to with the full score (I was a cocky kid), which was about as big as I was. Now, I don't know if you've ever tried listening to the Ligeti Requiem on headphones, but I can assure you the effect is truly cataclysmic: when mezzo-soprano Barbro Ericson sings "Tuba Mirum" in the Dies Irae (an amazing leap of nearly two octaves, from a low A flat to an excruciating top G), you really feel the end of the world is nigh.. When it was all over I was shattered, but at the same time grimly resolved "to devote my life to new music" – nothing else had ever affected me so deeply. Thus, utterly convinced of his mission in life, this gangly 14 year-old strutted forth into the corridors of the RNCM to smoke a cigarette (I figured this was the cool thing to do). Imagine my horror when I turned a corner and came upon my father deep in conversation with my violin teacher! I stuffed the cig into my school blazer pocket, muttered some feeble excuse to get the hell out of there, and raced back to the relative safety of the record library (at least there my dad wouldn't know where to find me). As I calmly browsed the shelves, Colin caught my eye: "You do realise you're on fire, don't you?" he said matter-of-factly, and I looked down to see that the butt had burned its way through a packet of paper tissues and transformed the inner lining of my blazer into a molten, tarry mess. Needless to say, the real Dies Irae came later when I had to explain this to my parents..

After the Ligeti awakening, life was never quite the same. While my schoolpals were thrilling to "Holidays in the Sun" and travelling en masse into Manchester on Saturday afternooons to smash up the Arndale Centre, I was desperately trying to track down a copy of Stockhausen's Mantra. My best mate Morph thought I was decidedly strange (whereas slicing all ten fingertips with a razor blade to get out of his Grade VII piano exam was, for him, perfectly normal behaviour), but I was hooked. While Morph's punk band The Nonskills (with their one and only song, "Fuck the Dog") were playing (their one and only gig) at a church hall outside Oldham (which got royally trashed when the drummer frisbee'd his cymbals into the crowd and started a riot), I was at home poring over Jonathan Cott's Conversations with Stockhausen; Hymnen, not Slaughter and the Dogs, was my idea of music for the post-apocalypse. I started experimenting with shortwaves (wouldn't you?) and took my dad's Sharp radio into a nearby park in the evenings to wake up and play along with the birds on a plastic descant recorder (Michael Vetter's version of Stockhausen's Spiral, discovered of course through the good offices of Colin, was a major influence). It was during one of these ecstatic solo improvisations that I must have flicked the wrong switch on the set and landed on.. BBC Radio Two (!): Humphrey Lyttleton's The Best of Jazz, just in time to hear Humph say: "This next track lasts seventeen minutes and I'm making no apology for playing it all." I stopped tooting and listened. Charles Mingus, New York Town Hall 1964: "So Long Eric", featuring the (soon to be) late Eric Dolphy. From Mingus' first notes striding up the bass, I was captivated, and by the time Jaki Byard's block chords started swinging like hell and Clifford Jordan came in, I'd put the recorder away and was lying back in the grass. The magic continued through the amazing bass/drums dialogue between Mingus and Dannie Richmond, and then the groove kicked in again.. but where was Eric? One, two, three choruses went by, and then suddenly.. there he was! In the space of barely three seconds he was all over the horn, the absolutely perfect combination of flawless technique and pure inspiration, each chorus a workout of almost Webernian intervallic precision (try transcribing it and you'll see how astoundingly complex it is) – but at full volume and maximum energy. But the best was yet to come – after a lousy tape edit, the theme crashes back and then goes into a classic Mingus rallentando, the racing triplets finally slowing until they themselves become the groove – and when Eric Dolphy comes sailing back in, it's.. it's quite simply one of the greatest moments in the history of music, full stop.

I returned home that night and wrote the following lines from William Blake in my diary:

He who Kisses the Joy as it Flies
Lives in Eternity's Sunrise"

I think it's Rainer Riehn, actually. Anybody got a copy of that box?

Dan Warburton wrote:While my schoolpals were thrilling to "Holidays in the Sun" and travelling en masse into Manchester on Saturday afternooons to smash up the Arndale Centre

The IRA blowing the Arndale Centre up caused millions of pounds worth of improvements.

I picked up AECO's Urban Bushman at a store in 82 when I was living in a cheap basement apt. in a converted sorority. I liked the cover and was curious. After that, I got into a conversation with the philosophy prof who lived in the converted garage apt out back and he told me if I liked AECO, I should come by some night and listen to Sun Ra, which I did. Spent many Friday nights hanging in his room listening to Sun Ra, Frank Zappa, Lydia Lunch, Fred Frith, Material, Meredith Monk, etc. Then I discovered Miles Davis and that was pretty much it for me. I became a jazz DJ at the school radio station and started to explore the genre very seriously through the record collection in my university library as well as the Carnegie library downtown. By the mid-eighties, I was pretty caught up in experimental music and that continued until the latter 90s. After I discovered internet listserves in around 99, I was exposed via Jon Abbey primarily to EAI. Jon was always posting extensive end-of-the-year favorites in those days, and I learned a shitload from those lists as well as those posted by Brian Olewnick. I learned a lot about music from those guys. Now, I learn a lot from you guys/gals by mostly lurking on this site as I don't have the energy and time to keep up with it all as much as I used to. Some of the folk here are walking encyclopedias of information. the internet really changed everything as far as learning about music (and many other things).

well the band that got me into this kind of stuff was The Legendary Pink Dots, despite Ka-Spel's Radiohead love.

Initially, an old girlfriend had me buy skinny puppy's "last rights" which just sounded like noise to me at the time, but which I'd go back to every so often, eventually finding the music therein... now, of course, it just sounds like 16th note drum patterns and backwards, slowed down tape samples, but the personal transition from not being able to understand it, to growing to love it, is what put me on the track of things that I didn't initially get... though, once your ears are open a degree, it's hard to close them, so of course the trajectory of 'difficulty' in what I was seeking out and listening to grew more and more steep with each new widening, to continue with my metaphor...

Another one that took me a while to get, much later on, was angst hase pfeffer nase's "beatings with gimpy flighted wings entrapped by post fence of garish land" which took a while, but hasn't been far from my ears for a few years running now...

Along similar lines, the 'folktales' 3" with Bhob, Jon, and Achim being played all together on different cd players approximated a revelation that was closely shadowed later that same year (2003?) by the Hampshire Tavern (Amherst, MA) performance of the BSC... these, along with certain performances around the same time by Noetinger/Marchetti, Nmperign, Lescaleet, Lopez, steltzer/talbot, Corsano/Rylan/Talbot, and a host of others (pretty much all seen at the Flywheel, Easthampton, MA) put me in the very specific lines we mostly discuss here on this board...

Now, out in SF, the noise scene has become a much bigger influence, as much as I try to not let it be.. but that's more in terms of my performances, not so much related to this thread, or not yet anyways!

Formative memories from the psychedelic rock years pre-1970:

• The musique concrete interludes on the Mothers' We're Only In It For The Money
  Prepared piano and general electronic mayhem on the Dead's Anthem of the Sun
  Revolution #9

These led me to Cage and Stockhausen; I remember being completely blown away by Hymnen.

Then there was the local record store, which had all kinds of weird LPs, including the Zorn game albums on Parachute. An interest in Zorn was a great flowering, since a) he played all different kinds of music, and b) the zorn mailing list was an ear-opening experience all by itself and was my first introduction to many of the people in this forum.

well, i'd played banjo for years, so it just seemed like th natural next step.

Roughly in chronological order:

- middle school music theory teacher asking us to define music, and giving us Varese's "organized sound" definition / telling us about Cage's 4'33"

- indie rock music leading to various crossovers into more electronic or avant-garde work (Gastr Del Sol / O'Rourke, Sonic Youth, "Intelligent Dance Music", Kranky records, etc.)

- exposure to some 20th century composition at college. La Monte Young and the minimalists, Varese, Xenakis, and Cage.

- being redirected to this forum after I asked about Cecil Taylor on hipinion

- finding Harry Partch's "Genesis of a Music" for $5 at a book outlet in Utica, NY.

- attending No Fun Fest and being exposed to noise music (the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th ones, I believe)

- ErstLive001, lots of searching, familiarizing myself with the artists, etc. It clicked for good after I purchased Cosmos and listened to it for the first time on acid while I stared at the ceiling fan.

- Playing music, going to shows, operating a small venue out of my house in New Haven, CT, etc. Some eye-opening shows: Derek Bailey's Company at Tonic (my very first free improv show - not great musically, but I hold it dear to my heart anyway), Lasse Marhaug / Pita at No Fun Fest, Alvin Lucier installation at the old Diapason location, and Keith Rowe / Julien Ottavi performing various graphic scores at IPR (and getting to stand behind them and watch as they interpreted the scores!)

how did you end up where you are now, liking what you like, listening to what you listen to.

This will sound much more flippant than it's meant to be, but in order for you to know that about me, you'd have had to have followed me around closely, everywhere, all the time, for the last 35 years. But I suspect you know this.

A brief chronological overview of the main musical revelations in the Min Boyce trajectory, excluding obvious mainstream chart music that all pre-teens were listening to at the time:

- Reading, fascinated, every single detail of the 'Mute Documentary Evidence' printed insert that was included with my sister's Erasure LPs. Florid, Biba Kopf-penned descriptions of Throbbing Gristle, Non, Fad Gadget, Can, Einstürzende Neubauten, DAF, all without being able to hear any of it. It was all so strange and mysterious and taboo.

- 1989-90 era Warp Records (LFO, Sweet Exorcist, Nightmares on Wax), Detroit Techno, R&S Records (Joey Beltram, Outlander, Mentasm etc), early UK rave & jungle.

- Napalm Death / Slayer / Public Enemy / NWA borrowed from school mates.

- Mr Clayton (my electronics teacher)'s John Zorn collection - Spy vs Spy, Spillane, The Big Gundown. I wasn't ready for Spy vs Spy as a 14 year old, but it flipped a switch in my brain and alerted me the existence of far-out music for adults.

- John Peel

- My Bloody Valentine's Loveless

- Main / Robert Hampson (in a wonderful foreshadowing of the effects of the internet, I first got excited about Main based on a review of Dry Stone Feed that appeared on Teletext)

- Arriving at university and befriending a jazz saxophonist. Hearing Out To Lunch, Interstellar Space, Bitches Brew etc.

- Thomas Köner's Permafrost (from a review in short-lived UK indie mag Lime Lizard) which lead to Virgin's Isolationism compilation, which in turn led to:

- Keiji Haino / AMM / God / Matthew Bower

- Hearing Oval on BBC Radio 3, which lead to Mille Plateaux Records, which lead to offshoot Ritornell (Dean Roberts, Stilluppsteypa, Asmus Tietchens, Ambarchi/Fennesz/Pimmon/Rehberg/Rowe etc)

- Coming across The Wire in a Tesco magazine rack, early 1996

- Music & Video Exchange in Notting Hill

- The Sonic Boom exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 2000, featuring Philip Jeck, Ryoji Ikeda, Pan Sonic, Max Eastley, Christina Kubisch etc

- Otomo's Japanorama tour in 2001. First exposure to Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura, Taku Sugimoto, Otomo himself etc.

- Finding a bunch of cheap 2nd hand Erstwhiles in Zulu Records, Vancouver

- Soulseek

- IHM

and so on blah blah blah, at each stage driven by insatiable curiosity, reading loads, taking something and trying to find a) more examples of this, what else have they released, who else have they worked with etc, and specifically in my formative years, trying to find other people doing purer, harder, more minimal, more extreme takes on a subject.
And all the time also listening to lots of other kinds of music. I haven't, for instance, documented my lifelong passion for 60s easy listening/mood music, but that's not particularly relevant here.