How did you get into 'this' music

[orangettecoleman]

not going to give the full from the beginning history, but after listening to the weirdest music I could find for many years I got interested in electronic stuff like Fennesz, Gas, and Philip Jeck, which led me to Touch Records, which led me to Oren Ambarchi. I found this website trying to figure out his setup and perusing the threads introduced me to most of what I now listen to. Also read the first Wire article on "onkyo" a few years ago and listened to downloaded MP3s of Sachiko, Toshi Nakamura, and Otomo Yoshihide for a little while about 6-7 years ago... I didn't really get too into it at the time though because I couldn't afford to buy the CDs and that music sounds like nothing on MP3 through computer speakers, with all the lack of attention that the itunes/MP3/computer listening setup implies. I'm catching up now though...
edit: maybe the main thing was getting the Ambarchi/VoiceCrack/Muller CD for Oren's work, finding that I enjoyed Gunter Muller's work even more, and then ordering the Muller/Akiyama "Points & Slashes" CD from Jon along with a couple other things. I found that it was the perfect marriage between the experimental electronic music that I liked and the sensitivity and pacing of Feldman, who I've been really into for the past few years...

[the_semen_incident]

My ineptitude is what led me to "this".

That is honestly a big part of it, but the pleasure I've always gotten from creating and manipulating sounds is just as important. It comes natural to me, to want to create "those" sounds.

Maybe that last part sounds pretentious or "corny" without me explaining it, but it's really that simple. Ever since I was a kid, I've always gotten a lot of joy out of playing with recording/playback technology and anything else that I could make weird sounds with.

I'm not really intelligent enough to work music theory or cerebral/"arty" concepts into what I do... I just fell into it ("Noise music" in general) because it's all I CAN do, and I get a lot of sick, masturbatory pleasure from it!

[dave quam]

Jon Abbey blackmailed me and I had to buy some of his CDs, and they happened to be good.

For real though, I started checking this board when I was like 17 (goddamn that was along time ago) for any type of music that interested me then (which was a lot, really diving into Can, Sun Ra, Cage, Throbbing Gristle, Smegma, shitty psych records, ect at this point) and a lot of the threads had awesome lists of albums/artists to check out which I loved digging through. I didn't really know what the hell "EAI" or even old Euro Improv was, but I was familiar with AMM (from the Nurse With Wound list) and liked the first record. I heard Otomo and Muller's Time Travel first, just randomly downloaded it because I saw it on here or maybe in The Wire, which I found interesting but it wasn't really so memorable. Jon gave me some recommendations from Erst and I grabbed some discs, and they pretty much clicked right away (and one of them was Do, haha).

[holy ghost]

Short answer:

Age 11: Metallica/Slayer also 60's stuff/Sabbath/Floyd

Age 14: Punk/hardcore/DIY/MRR/Black Flag/some Sonic Youth

Age 16: Napalm Death/Entombed?Heresy/Ripcord/DRI

Age 18: Emperor/Mayhem/Darkthrone black/doom/death etc

Age 20: Soul music/noise/Iron Maiden

From then on: harsh noise/ambient/fruity world music/krautrock/psych/classical/free jazz/regular jazz/Throbbing Gristle/Amon Duul II/Comus/Yes/prog/thrash

I think that's pretty much it, I'm sure there were a few pretty shitty phases in there like for 6 months I was completely hooked on rockabilly (not that it's bad, but a pretty shitty culture) etc......

[J.F.]

Now I pretend not to know what "this" music means, and describe how I got back into "the other" music.

I think Elliott Sharp's Carbon was the first non-free jazz/e.i.m. stuff I liked after my free jazz-only period. From there it was a small step for me to early/mid 80s Frith and the harsher stuff of Arto Lindsay and John Zorn. Soon, early Sonic Youth also helped dragging me back into rock music. Checking out Frith also brought me to some rock-in-opposition-related "avant prog"-stuff.

When I lived in a flatsharing community, I out of curiosity occasionally asked people to lend me CDs, and one girl had PJ Harvey's "Rid of Me", Portishead's second CD, a Cocteau Twins-sampler with earlier stuff, The Breeders' "Last Splash" and Björk's "Post". Each of those included one or two songs I enjoyed right away - for instance I remember very well hearing Portishead's "Cowboys" for the first time - in total awe. So I kept listening to the CDs until I liked them enough to buy them myself. That kind of music made up a completely new department in my collection otherwise mostly consisting of contemporary classical music and free jazz/improv (plus Zappa/Beefheart/70s Prog from my teens). Soon I had my obsessive Björk/PJ Harvey periods, also was somewhat fascinated about the persons, and I more and more felt completely comfortable with their music - not very challenging listening in a way, but I found much of it beautiful and exciting nevertheless. I started to explore (mostly female) singers in the alternative/independent/post-punk/electronica/etc.-field. Others on my way were the Dresden Dolls (I hardly can stand them anymore), and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

After re-discovering NDW, I also checked what post punk stuff happened in other countries, and so started to devote my time to bands like P.I.L. and The Fall - music I just had ignored until then.

Melt-Banana in a way don't fit into this "backwards"-development since they have noise- and speed-elements in their music I already liked in Zorn, DNA etc. several years earlier. But I mention them since going through a long obsessive MxBx-period eventually changed my "esthetic coordinates" in a substancial way. Listening to free jazz/e.i.m. has kept boring me since about 2 years now, and when I practise drums I play violent rock stuff, try blast beats etc.. These days there's nothing I can identify more with than Melties ~'95-'98.

Latest discovery I was mildly obsessed about is M.I.A.

[cheapmachines]

Roughly:

50's/60's comedy LP's (specifically The Goons, Bob Newhart, Round The Horne, Hancock's Half Hour etc.)
Easy Listening (specifically James Last, Edmundo Ros - awful but beautifully recorded...)
...and most importantly - Readers Digest Box Set Compilations of "pop" tunes, which meant I had access to:
Hendrix, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, The Who
From this... Zappa and then the "three B's" ~ Black Sabbath, Big Black and Black Flag + metal in general
Big Black to other underground US rock acts but also Whitehouse
Whitehouse, Maurizio Bianchi, The New Blockaders et al.

Not sure what happened after that, the door was left open