March is here and you know what that means: time for part three of our project, where we present the albums that define us, one entry per month.
To those who haven’t heard of the project before:
Let’s quickly remind us of the rules:
Excited for those new entries - and whether albums that have already been written about will return or not!
It’s 1996.
I’m in Rennes as a student, discovering booze and hash, and a lot of my time is dedicated to music already… Both listening and playing.
This album is a mystery to me, then: how can one do such sounds with a guitar, an amplifier, a distorsion pedal and a wah?
How do you get this energy?
How do you even sing these songs?
Jimi’s guitar playing is by far my favorite.
I remember 1998 New Year’s Eve, a friend puts a video cassette of Jimi at Woodstock in the background, and I can’t just stop watching, completely hooked.
I’m fascinated. Mesmerized.
Hendrix was not just a virtuoso: there are so many elements in his music that escape the classic notation, the way I was taught classical music. I can’t play this by reading a partition, nor chords. It seems stupid.
The only way is listening, practicing, and engage totally in playing and improvising.
This is really where I learn the guitar and music in general. Truly expressing myself through music. Letting the body do its part, lowering the brain’s grip on the output, or paying attention to other aspects of what I play. Less in the notes and more in the intention.
A year later I’m in a band creating my own music together with friends.
Whatever the style, I have a wah under my foot and I look for the edge, the breakup points, the weird and the energy way more than an alignment of notes.
When I was growing up there was a department store chain in Finland called Anttila. It had always been there and would always be. Or so it seemed. It had been established in the 50s but sadly Anttila filed for bankruptcy ten years ago in 2016.
That was a great loss to the Finnish society as Anttila was for many people the first place to go to buy a new computer, hair dryer, bath robe or a five pack of socks. Anttila stores also had a section called Top Ten, which was like a record store inside a department store. For a long time it was the best place to buy movies, vinyl, cd, video games etc. I grew up in a small seaside town and luckily we had a record store but the local Anttila was a great supplement for that.
Being a countrywide chain store Anttila had the heft & power to buy large quantities of stuff cheap and they had this habit of buying overstock (basically cutouts from the USA without the cuts made) from big record companies very cheap and selling them in big bins for very little money. A new cd from those stands usually cost 19,95 Fmk which translates roughly to 3,50€. A new cd in the record shop usually cost 100-120 Fmk so you could get 5-6 cds for the price of one in Anttila. That was a huge saving for a kid who had barely any money of his own.
Of course those discount stands never had any big name bands in them. You could get five for the price of one, but you had to take a chance and buy bands you’d never heard of before. But that was half the fun. Basically that is what taught me to pay attention to things like the record label or the producer of the album. If I found something produced by Andy Wallace, Dave Jerden, Sylvia Massy or some other favourites in the midst of those unknown bands, I took a chance because I had liked albums they’d produced previously for well known bands.
Those three euro bins were my Rock’n’roll Highschool. In the time before the internet there were limited resources to find out about new music but the Anttila bins taught me quite a lot about music and introduced me to numerous bands. Not all of them great, but the amount of albums was five times more I could’ve ever afforded elsewhere. I was a music-hungry teen and Anttila served an all you can eat buffet.
I found Monster Magnet, Paw, Superdrag, Jellyfish, Crash Worship, 311, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Mind Over Four, Eric’s Trip and many many more in those discount bins and my teenage taste in music was completely built on that shaky foundation.
It’s an often discussed topic between my friends that as a youngster when you only had money for a couple of new albums every month you really paid attention to those few. Even an album you’d bought for the cover and it turned out to be completely out of your comfort zone, you’d give a second and third spin and tried to learn to like. Music was an investment and you wanted returns.
Usually it also worked. You bought something you thought looked like a metal album and at home it turned out to be some weird instrumental funk-jamband greatness produced by that guy from Pearl Jam. You learned to love it and at the same time expanded your musical horizons.
Sometimes I think about starting a podcast concentrating only on bands and albums that were sold in those Anttila discount bins.
I bought Lincoln LP by They Might Be Giants from one of those Anttila bins just for the weird and interesting cover photo. This time it was vinyl and cost only 9,95 Fmk (around 1,70€). Needless to say, I didn’t quite get it. For someone coming from a metal and alt rock background, the album felt like a folksy comedy act with weird instrumentation and for a long time I had a hard time listening to it.
However the album slowly grew on me and I noticed that the lead track Ana Ng was playing in my head constantly. Amazing songwriting which I’ve come to fully appreciate only later. Many of the melodies on the album approach something akin to classical music crossed with great classic power pop. Nowadays hearing Ana Ng or They’ll Need A Crane brings tears to my eyes, and the rest of the album is great too. I’ve slowly tried to acquire other albums by TMBG too and somehow now, 38 years later I’ve grown to really really love their stuff. Sure it’s quirky and a prime example of what you call an “acquired taste”, but this band really kicks ass in a nerdy accordion playing kind of way.
TMBG have a new album coming out this spring and I’ve listened to the new stuff which is great, but for me Lincoln can never be surpassed. They’ve put out 23 albums since the late 80s. I own three of them. Living in small town Finland tends to mean that you can’t buy any records from smaller, less well known bands unless you order them yourself. Especially as there’s no Anttila and the discount bins with exotic bands no more.
I guess this post was more about Anttila and it’s three euro bins than about Lincoln as an album, but that feeling of going to Anttila to see if they’ve received a new batch in their discount bins was very very much the lifesblood of my musical upbringing. If your town still has a department store with a music/movie section, embrace it!
(The beautiful thing is that almost every town in Finland with at least 30000-40000 people used to have it’s own Anttila and usually different stores had different selection in their discount bins so Anttila was a mandatory visit wherever in Finland you travelled.)
Hats off for Anttila (and TMBG)!
It’s quite difficult to pick an album that represents what came next for me musically. I have a friend who’s always been a trailblazer with all things music and fashion. Towards the end of the eighties, maybe early nineties, he handed me a stack of records and I can wholeheartedly say that this has shaped my musical tastes unlike anything else ever since. I can’t say I was into electronic music very much back then. I noticed the news coming from the UK about “rave” and “acid house”, but they didn’t mean much to me. But something else had been brewing since the late 80s that caught me completely by surprise. People like Eddie Piller, Gilles Peterson and James Lavelle (and as I wouldn’t find out until decades later) were playing and releasing a super eclectic mix of electronica, jazz, dub, soul, funk, latin, hip hop, folk and whatever else they saw fit to make dance floors explode. Bands emerged that represented the amalgamation of the old and the new, acts like Galliano, The James Taylor Quartet, Incognito (who by that time had already existed for probably more than a decade), and the Young Disciples. Styles crossed over in completely unexpected ways, for me most notably the David Morales Remix of Ronnie Laws’ multi covered club anthem “Always There” with Jocelyn Brown’s vocals giving me goose bumps to this very day. Anyway, I could pick at least a dozen albums representing that time in my life and admittedly, my choice is somewhat arbitrary. The record that I’m talking about is the compilation “Totally Wired 7”, released on Eddie Piller*s Acid Jazz label, because it sent me off in so many different directions: from Alice Clark’s Soul belter “Don’t you care?”, to the jazz infused rap of The Grand Oral Disceminator’s “That’s how it is” (behind which was Maxi Jazz) with The Quiet Boys’ ragga infused jazz house track “Sim Ting”, the stylistic variety is incredible. Ultimately, this eclecticism made me move beyond teenage tribalism and albums like this one made me fall in love with the notion of “just good music” and the search for always more of it, sometimes in the most unexpected of places. To say that this discovery was pivotal for me would be gross understatement.
Not sure how I can link to a YT playlist properly here:
I grew up listening to Rhythm and Blues music. I didn’t start listening to rock music until I was in high school (music appreciation class). Van Halen was one the first rock groups I began listening to. On Diver Down, Van Halen does a nice cover of Dancing in the Street, a Motown hit from 1964 by Martha and the Vandellas.
Björk - Homogenic
I was already a casual fan of Björk when this came out, but Homogenic was her first album I bought upon release. The songs are great, the production is fantastic, the performances are excellent. It was a big part of my soundtrack at that stage of life.
Fast forward a few years and I bought the live DVD with the string octet and Mark Bell. Loved every second of it. Watching Mark playing live probably planted the seed that has grown into my electronic instrument obsession.
blood sugar sex magic - chilli peppers
i am revising for final exams at school and its really intense because i have been in and out of love with various girls, smoked a tonne and a half of weed playing in a band with my best friends and was currently surviving what thought would be unsurvivable pressure to do well in these fucking exmas - anyway blood sugar sex magic was on rpeat on my stereo an di had the cd sleeve and lyrics on my desk instead of working i would play the songs over and read the lyrics and pretend to myslef i had done a days study at my desk ( i hated that fucking desk)
I don’t know who said it but I always loved something I heard about Hendrix saying that if aliens came and heard him play, they would think it’s a form of language.
One of those quotes that works better the less you think about it (because you could say the same about nearly anything) but anyways, I liked it.
I love how expressive he is even while mostly existing around a 12 bar blues paradigm. Band of Gypsy’s is probably my favorite, especially machine gun.
Oh yeah!
I think BSSM was my doorstep to funk ^^
Autechre are my favorite artists. Their discography is so rich. I feel like it will could take a lifetime to fully know their NTS Sessions alone. It’s hard to choose a favorite so I’m selecting Exai for this because it was the one that I immersed myself in for the longest period when I bought it on CD on release in 2013. It helped me to get through a hard time in my life. Oversteps also helped me through that time. When I listen to Autechre I often find myself thinking that this is the pinnacle of electronic music. I love every album they have released and love their early and later work equally. I can go back to any of their albums and always find something else in it.
Since reading this post yesterday, I haven’t been able to get Ana Ng out of my head. I didn’t listen to the song — it just popped in.
“Ana NG and i ARE gettin’old and we still haven’t BASKED in the GLOW of eaCHOther’s maJEStic presence”
Radiohead. OK Computer.
It’s 1997. In the last 8 years I have
I am now working a shit-tier job and living in a clapped-out rusty brown starfish of a house-share in the arse-end of Brum with people I don’t know - at least one of who thinks that actual swords are for waving around indoors whenever you’re upset.
My life is an utter catastrophe.
The one thing keeping me relatively sane is that I have met some people who go clubbing and have also discovered pills and found someone who will sell me weed.
I still remember being chuffed out of my tiny mind, looking out of the back of clapped out red Fiesta at the sodium lamps passing by on the ring road, while Dave drove us at Kessell Run speeds to the garage for skins, listening to Let Down and The Tourist and feeling like they somehow encapsulated all the misery and unhappiness I was feeling at that time.
Ah. Happy days.
I absolutely love TMBG! I’ve been a fan since a friend first played me Flood back around 1991 (and still gets an annual listen). One of my favorite drum machine bands. Their whole dial-a-song thing was genius too. The one time i got to see them live they were fantastic.
Thanks for that! I’ve mentioned listening to De-Loused at “Müller Markt” in my February post - if that text wasn’t already really long, I would have included a little detour about how important it was that this store (which otherwise sold perfume, household stuff, toys, some food) carried a robust CD section called “Hard’n Heavy” (yeah, I know). That was crucial to me being able to buy all of my CDs in smaller cities.
I remember my dad telling me he had to drive all the way to Munich just to buy “Dark Side of the Moon”. Which evolved into the best selling album ever made. If you couldn’t even buy that in my region a few decades earlier, I don’t know if I could have discovered the kinds of music I like if I had grown up in the 80s or 90s. I guess only if I had cool friends with bootleg tapes. So I’m really thankful I grew up in the 2000s and had the internet to get to know about music off the beaten path and a store that allowed me to buy it even in a rural region.
I love that this discount bin introduced you to various alternative music and how you learned what to look out for! I also had no idea that living in a smaller country like Finland meant there weren’t that many CDs imported, especially in more rural regions. You forget about the implications of physical media and how it creates scarcity as we are now used to having everything available at the press of a button.
That’s a lot of ifs in one sentence.
I’ve read this a few times already, and what I gather from it isn’t exactly what is written 
Yeah I thought so when writing it but couldn’t fix it so early in the morning. I edited the post so I hope it’s more clear now.
Ah, OK.
I assumed we were the same generation as mine, for some reason. My mind was bending your sentence to reflect my own teenage years…
And yes, indeed, I confirm: it took some dedication to discover artists, and internet + mp3 were a dream come true.
Wu-Tang Clan - Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
This my favorite album of all time. My dessert island album. I bought it 4 times on CD because I kept wearing the discs out and bought multiple vinyl releases even though i don’t have a turntable to play them.
I was around 9 years old when a kid from my old
Neighborhood (my parents and his parents were still friends). Played this for me on his Grundig boombox while we were skating outside his house.
By that time, I was already familiar with the west coast gangster rap style, but had never heard something from the east coast.
It was so raw, so unmusical yet musical, and the warrior energy perfectly matched my early onset of puberty and the frustration, anger and urge to rebel that came with it.
I had nothing i common with the background of the members, and yet i felt deeply connected to them. From then on, i blindly and religiously bought and consumed everything that had to do with Wu-Tang.
Until this day it’s one of the albums i listen to the most and i was almost in tears when i heard the clan open their final tour with (“Bring the Ruckus”) in my home town.
After yesterday, i finally decided on my first tattoo….
Oh! I thought Wu-Tang was from NYC.
Edit: checked, yes they are. Must have misunderstood what was said. Again.
They wrote about Snoop Dogg last, so I think it means: I already knew West Coast, but now I got to hear East Coast.
