By now you know the spiel 
. If not, search for the title of this thread and you‘ll find many explanations and examples. Looking forward to reading all of your entries as always!
In case anyone wants to reflect on the project so far but has missed the following thread:
I hated the 80’s.
Couldnt bear the sound of synths that were everywhere, the gated reverb on snare, the drum machines… Eeek.
This decade and the beginning of the following was a long suffering: I would take the bus to school every morning and every evening, having to bear with 40mn of radio, that would certainly not pass my favorite Yes or Pink Floyd songs.
Then I heard Where Is My Mind. The suffering was over. The Pixies, then Nirvana then the whole wave of indie rock would save me from the boredom of teenage years.
I got myself an electric guitar with the money I could get from little jobs, taking care of kids.
But before I got it, I would just go in the garden with my classical guitar shout all my rage and uncomfort. A therapy.
Doolittle became my favorite album. 35 minutes of absolute bliss, I loved every line of every instrument, the voices, and the sound of Santiago’s guitar became a new goal in itself.
In 1999, Franck Black was touring with the Catholics, and came to play in my school, at the Rock’n’Solex festival organised by some friends of mine. In the afternoon before the concert, the local radio had invited Franck Black to play on the little stage we had in the school, in the mythical Foyer de l’INSA.
I had been asked by my best friend if I could lent my guitar Amp, a large Peavey Delta Blues, to Franck Black, so that he could play a few songs (Wave of Mutilation, Caribou, Hey). I was extatic.
Still have this amp.
With Franck Black’s signature on it ^^
Never forget hearing Doolittle for the first time, it was the first album I heard of theirs at a party in someone’s shed one night and I was hooked on the Pixies from that moment onwards.
That’s such a great story about Frank Black. I loved all of the Pixies 80s and 90s albums and felt that the first 2 Frank Black albums were just as good, also really loved The Cult Of Ray and Dog In The Sand. I really should listen more to his other albums, just never got round to it. So cool that he played your amp and you still have it with his signature.
I got into metal in a very big way from the age of 14. I loved Metallica, Anthrax, Megadeth and Slayer but there was no such idea as the ‘big 4’ at that time, that was a media thing that came later and I was as much into bands such as Testament, Exodus, Nuclear Assault and Death Angel. This was the time that I got my first guitar, started playing in a band and started going to gigs. I was obsessed with this music. For example, I remember one night the newest Testament song Trial By Fire was played on my favorite radio show. I recorded it on tape and rewound the tape over and over again, I was so addicted to it (I was supposed to be doing my homework). That song was all I could think about or talk about the next day at school. The album it was on ‘A New Order’ would have been another good choice for this because it’s definitely one of my favorite metal albums of all time and my favourite of theirs.
Around this time, someone gave me a copy of Dimension Hatröss by Voivod and it blew my mind. At first I couldn’t wrap my head around all of the changes in key and rhythm and the dissonant riffs, but the more I heard it I really loved this music and felt like they were doing something miles ahead of everyone else I was listening to. Even after many times of listening to it, it was quite a challenge to follow it but I loved every minute of it. Part of what made it so good was knowing that out of the chaos of the dissonance and changes in key and rhythm, they would suddenly go into some of the best melodic riffs and vocal lines I had ever heard. Most of my friends were also into thrash metal but not Voivod, so it felt like a very personal thing.
It was only in recent years that I realized that Dimension Hatröss is my favorite metal album of all time. I don’t listen to metal often these days, but I return to this album a lot more than any other metal album.
I also really loved their album ‘Nothingface’ back in the day, which has a great cover of one of my favorite Pink Floyd songs Astronomy Domine. I’ve listened to their other albums in recent years and really enjoyed them.
Nothingface blew my hat off at the time.
I loved thrash metal and still do. I’ve bought most of my beloved favourite albums back one by one and that includes Dimension Hatröss and Nothingface too. Voivod Truly has their own thing and sound that a bunch of bands have tried to imitate but with little success.
I started listening to synthpop through a cassette compilation called It’s Electric, that I found in a discount bin at my local Anttila. It had all the greatest hits of the genre like Tainted Love by Soft Cell, Fade To Grey by Visage and Enola Gay by OMD.
At first it felt weird compared to all the stuff I had listened to previously (metal, alternative rock, hip hop etc.) but then I started to appreciate the extra catchy one finger synth melodies and DIY-mentality. It’s impossibly hard to come up with a new one finger synth riff because all the best ones were already invented in England in 1979-1983.
Soon I started gravitating towards the more ”serious” stuff that felt a bit deeper; Tears For Fears, Talk Talk and especially Japan that I hold in very very high regard even today. I hunted down all the stuff on vinyl I could find and played that stuff on my dj gigs every time.
A friend of mine who owned the club where I played, had this favourite band from the same period that he kept blabbing on about. I always thought that the name of the band was so lame and somewhat ”too british” to interest me.
It must be utter shit, judging by the name. Not interested.
Years later I bought the 7” in a surprise box, heard King Of Rock’n’Roll from Prefab Sprout for the first time and realized that I immensely enjoyed what I was hearing. That was and is perhaps their poppiest moment and an easy entryway into the world of Prefab Sprout. Since then I’ve bought every album I’ve been able to get and at the moment my collection is missing just one album.
Through Prefab Sprout I found a whole new world of music, which usually goes by the name sophisti-pop. The Blue Nile, Double, Aztec Camera, Crowded House, Talk Talk’s later output and many others including Tears For Fears, Mark Hollis’ solo album and so on could be called sophisti-pop. But Paddy McAloon’s Prefab Sprout is perhaps the penultimate sophisti-pop band.
The genre has it’s predecessors in Steely Dan and such ultra sleek soft rockers and luckily there’s also a new generation of sophisti-pop from artists like Westerman and even These New Puritans.
Usually if Prefab Sprout is mentioned anywhere, it’s their second album Steve McQueen which gets all the praise but for me the fifth album Jordan - The Comeback is the true masterpiece. (Although I have to say that when I broke up with my ex over 10 years ago the two songs that helped me immensely were Fleetwood Mac’s Go Your Own Way and Prefab Sprout’s When Love Breaks Down which is from Steve McQueen.)
It’s hard to put the appeal of Prefab Sprout into words. It’s a combination of damn good song writing and pristine production. Paddy McAloon has the tendency to take his time in polishing everything to just the right degree. I guess it’s just a state of mind to find yourself immersed in these tunes. At first seems like just sleek surface with no deeper meaning but when you get it, you truly get it. I love my thrash metal vinyls, my Squarepusher cds and my Aesop Rock -albums but often in my everyday life I just end up listening to Prefab Sprout. There’s something comforting there - like a warm blanket.
Pulp - “Different Class”
Ultimately, I think the strength of this album rests on the lyrics. I am not usually into lyrics, focusing more on melody, timbre, and inflection than the words if I’m even focusing on the singer at all. But Pulp’s lyrics are intelligible, relatable, and transparently about something. And the melodies are very catchy, if relatively simple.
It is an album of pop songs played by non-virtuosos. There’s a bit of a slacker affect, yet the depth of the commentary in the songs reveals the craft behind it all.
This is an album that reminds me that lyrics don’t have to be insipid or unintelligible or opaque.
I don’t know Voivod or this album, but that’s one of the most artful metal album covers I’ve ever seen!
This is something I’m also very interested in picking my albums and writing about them. I find that many of the albums have shaped me precisely because I experienced them with other people that have also helped me become the person I am. Other albums didn’t resonate with my friends for some reason, but feel like a very personal thing as a result. So which ones define me? Probably both, but it’s hard to decide.
I guess this has changed since 
? I felt the same about 80s music for a long time, when I was mostly into rock music. Now I think of it as probably the most interesting decade when it comes to sounds that were born and shaped back then.
Doolittle is definitely an album I have to dig into at some point. I fell in love with everything on the “Wave of Mutilation” best of when the Pixies reunited, but am ashamed I haven’t gone back and listened to their actual albums.
That’s something I’ll come to later on in my list. I will even use that warm blanket term. There might be music that’s more groundbreaking that will change everything, but the laid back music you can just always listen to over the years is just as important and influential!
Yeah, this is a weird one for me because for example, I remember being at a party dancing to Primal Scream’s ‘Screamadelica’ with friends and always think of that as my ‘gateway’ moment/album for getting into electronic music (because it’s really a rock/electronic crossover album). Not long after this I remember sitting around a boombox in a field with friends and beers, hearing The Prodigy’s ‘Music For The Jilted Generation’ for the first time. This was a moment where I really knew that electronic music was the next very big thing for me. So really these 2 albums do define me, and being with my friends was a vital part of the experience. However, I listened to those 2 albums to death, so it’s kind of hard for me to feel the same excitement about them at this moment in time. Also, I could say that most of the music that defines who I am now is personal because I have quite different taste in music from my friends, whereas we all pretty much loved the same music when we were younger.
So I could have approached this in a different way and presented more albums that were life changing but not necessarily ones I still feel like listening to…but I prefer to think of music that is more reflective of me now, and a lot of that is quite personal rather than experienced with friends. This kind of makes sense to me anyway because I really enjoy making and listening to music alone these days and don’t even go to gigs anymore. Music is often quite a meditative thing for me at this point in my life.
OK. So to date my January, February and March contribution to this challenge have documented my exciting and painful emergence and sort of progress as a musically limited teenage musician.
This is a short detour. And I’ll get the link to the music out of the way first, as I guess in the end this is what this is all about. Also, you need to prioritise listening to this as it will (hopefully) expand your brain in ways that are good (or maybe not).
I’d half mentioned last month my side quest dive into late 80s weird pre-grunge noise experimentation. Which didn’t really impact hugely on the music I created, but it did definitely shift my understanding as a naive young music hungry kid as to the boundaries of what music could and couldn’t be.
A lot of the drive to dive down that rabbit hole came from endless listening to John Peel in the late evening. A necessity for musically adventurous youth from the 1970s to the 2000s. And a strange communal activity of the sort that doesnt happen any more in the artistic space. Kids these days don’t start the day enthusing to a friend “did you hear that track on John Peel last night” like we did. And its a massive, massive loss.
One of the wilder avenues John Peel ventured down in the mid-80s was the output of Shimmy-Disc, the borderline deranged outsider label founded by professional weirdo muso Kramer in 1987 as an outlet for some of the strangest music out there at the time. Over ten or so years, Shimmy Disc released over 100 albums, many of them deeply strange, launched the careers of Kramer’s own band Bongwater, as well as King Missile, early Daniel Johnston vinyl, Ween and even Gwar. And helped open my mind even further as to what music could be.
What made the Shimmy Disc thing work was Kramer’s ability to identify and recruit artists who operated outside any reasonable boundary. If what came out was often nonsensical or disastrous, it also kind of acknowledged that it knew what it was doing when creating those disasters. It was half a joke. But only half.
Some of what Kramer’s eclectic and unhinged approach produced was genuinely astonishing. Including this ridiculous coming together of Screaming jay Hawkins, Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead and Bongwater playing a Roky Erikson cover that defies description…
But the Tinklers were who I loved most. Ludicrous and stupid, even by Shimmy-Disc standards, Charles Brohawn and Chris Mason were an approaching middle aged duo from Baltimore who made music on rubber-band guitars, bits of string, old boxes, spoons, cans full of stones, whatever else came to hand. Whilst moaning semi-out-of-tune lyrics in a manner that suggested half remembered folk tunes dragged out of the defective memories of the cognitively damaged or seriously drugged.
What was astonishing about listening to their initial album, Casserole, my pick for this month, was the way they just wholesale rejected any sort of musical skill as an underpinning of their records. Maybe that’s why it struck a chord. The idea (much explored in my other contributions to this challenge) that you could get away with being genuinely terrible if you did it with absolute commitment. Something I was definitely utterly, totally aligned with. Also making music that it was hard to imagine anyone else liking, and obviously not giving a shit.
The record was 33 tracks long. Mostly super short shots of derangement. And all of them were either strange or disturbing in some way. John Peel played a lot of them on his show. I suspect he was as amazed as I was at this…thing. I bought the album and played it to death, to the annoyance and frustration of almost everyone I came into contact with. When later I got a student radio station show, I was able to spread its strangeness even further. Assuming anyone listened to my shows. But the truth was - for the same reasons the Tinklers did what they did - it didnt really matter.
“Saplings”, their next album on Shimmy Disc was moderately more normal but still enjoyable. But more silly than wild it even had (for all its primitive instrumentation and production) had a bit of a concept to it. Mostly sort of ecological. “The Dodo Bird & The Calvaria Tree” was all about the death of ecosystems; “Dinosaurs Are Getting Better” was kind of fun take on evolution and development. “Trees Like To Rot In The Forest” was probably the highpoint. But though it was weird by most standards, it wasnt nearly as off-the-scale as Casserole.
The Tinklers released one more album on Shimmy-Disc a year later - “Crash” - but by then I was bored of it all and onto the next musical thing. And when Shimmy-Disc itself fell apart a few years later with legal fights over contracts, and an acrimonious split with Ann Magnuson, left Bongwater disbanded and Kramer broke I don’t think I even noticed. Because all of the real action from them was in the first 2-3 years of madness. The label seems to have been rebooted recently, with a few Daniel Johnson re-issues, but it’s not the same as its heyday.
And the truth is, in a world of infinite music, YouTube everything, John Peel long gone, and intense, ridiculous musical secrets no longer existing, the impact on me (or anyone) of something like Casserole coming out now would be non-existent. There is terrible music everywhere. But in the 80s it was great and it was different and it was shocking and it opened all sorts of possibilities. Terrible, weird, transgressive don’t-give-a-shit music on actual vinyl and being played on the radio as well. That was special. And Casserole was the acme and apex of that. Better or worse times? I don’t know. Old folk need to be careful of nostalgia. Especially for stuff like this…
i was waiting for someone to mention Doolittle! such a cold album, 10/10. my earliest interaction with it was on Girl Talk’s Night Ripper, where Where Is My Mind got mashed up with Nas’ Hate Me Now. i think i mentioned it earlier in the year but Girl Talk’s albums introduced me to a lotta music lol.
I’d like to drop Rhythm & Sound’s - See Mi Yah. And I kinda wanna drop this as a double album, even though it isn’t. It has an instrumental counterpart to it, Versions, which is perfect blended in with the other tracks imo.
This one is one of those albums like, the ‘CD that never leaves the car’ kind’ve album. The bass hook, so deep and clean. Hidden trumpets. Infinite repeat.
This quote from InSheepsClothing summing up the record itself:
Dub techno masters Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald present the fourth LP on their “Burial Mix” series featuring a collection of one-rhythm tracks with Jamaican legends Sugar Minott and Willi Williams along with Berlin-based Paul St. Hilaire, Ras Perez, Koki, Ras Donovan, Rod Of Iron, and others. As expected with Rhythm & Sound productions, the hypnotic dub groove here is perfectly mixed, spaced out, and completely addictive even after multiple listens. Try it with a sub…
But for me - it’s an afternoon album. Sundown, relaxing, not being at work, maybe a couple beers, sunnies on, toasting out the afternoon.
It’s an album for the open road, detached, moving to the next, no behind, only a forwards. Windows down.
Freedom.
And the Versions:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nI8hVbn1kOnBZrdWfLLoP7HEk7u7GHXMA&si=juLOWkPDsshVp8Ol
I never realized it was that short!
Definitely my favorite pixies album even though Surfer Rosa has equally good songs. I just feel the songs flow better together in Doolittle.
Also as a guitar player, Frank has some juice. Like you’d call Joey “The guitar player” in the group but franks parts are way harder to nail with that unique touch he has.
Frank Blacks acoustic demos for pixies are great.
It’s about that time. BoC was inevitable for my list, and Geo was a clear choice as my first introduction to BoC (and still my favorite album of theirs.)
I actually started listening to them much later, around 2017. I know the exact year because I was fleeing a hurricane and listened to Geo in full for the first time on a plane ride to Texas.
Funny story, I started the album when we boarded. It took a while and during the exact moment you start hearing “A beautiful plaaaace,” we started moving. But I was unfamiliar with the song (and lore) and I thought I was hearing “Get of the plaaane.” - I chalked it up as a fun coincidence and buckled up a little tighter.
Also, I was in the early arc of synth nerdom, so I was aware of the band and their general sound even though I hadn’t done any deep dives. I watched the movie Baby Driver around this time period (I love Edgar Wright!) and that scene with Ready Let’s Go was the push to finally sit down and listen to them. I knew it was Boards just form the sound and committed to starting with whatever album that was on.
TH is probably my second favorite album. I love how cold and dreary it is, with Geo being a bit more “Sinister.” - Gryoscope is actually my favorite song by them. Maybe followed by Jacquard Causeway.
Negativland: Escape From Noise.
I think I first heard Escape From Noise when my debate partner at the time brought it into the apartment. Probably 1990. My roommate and I had this crazy open door policy and often had ten or so people hanging out. It was great. (At least it was back then. I’m pretty wired into my introversion these days. I doubt I could handle that many people at one time anymore.)
I know we had a gaggle of people hanging about the living room. Our stereo was one of those one piece systems that was trying to pretend to be a number of individual components and was typical for those times. We would have been doing what college aged deadheads at the time would have been doing. You know, sitting around on several couches talking and stuff. The audio from the album fell comfortably into the background. And I don’t mean that in a bad way.
The album came to mind a week ago when I was trying to figure out if I should keep or abandon a piece that I had spent a lot of time on but wasn’t really resonating with me. I was going through phases of “This is all crap” and started hacking it apart. Then I abandoned the piece entirely and started a brand new piece. Then I went back and resurrected part of the original effort from its grave and relocated it to the new piece. By all appearances it had become a bit of a Frankenstein Monster. So then I went ahead and dug up the corpse of its buddy and in the end had cobbled together 24 minutes of audio that were somewhat relatively thematic and more cohesive than I expected. I then shooed out the door by placing it onto my website. So alls well that ends well. We hope.
But during this entire time I was having frequent occasions where I was self aware of the absurdity of what I was doing with my time during these extraordinarily weighty times for society at large. The question “Why exactly are you doing this mister? Don’t you have better things to do?” came to mind. And the snide answer to that was always simple: “These are absurd times. And You are critiquing that with absurd art. This must be done!”
The question that followed the first was harder to answer. "What album should I highlight for April?” You know, the important stuff.
Because the answer to the first was answered a bit dismissively, as in “How dare thee question mine intent swine!”; and because I needed to commit to some album and found myself strangely unable to commit; I did indeed question the intent with a third question: “Which album is to blame for my absurd behavior?"
That was a better question. Or at least it felt better. The accusatory nature of it permitted me to shift from “blame myself” to “blame others”.
Unfortunately that generated an endless list. Though a good question, the answer has no firm anchor point. I’m a gregarious audio consumer. I like a lot of different things. Everything probably influences me.
What I can say is that I know that upon first hearing Escape From Noise I found myself highly intrigued by their use of vocal samples and random sounds to convey a message.
It was “Yellow Black and Rectangular” that actually caught my attention. We can blame that song uniquely. Certainly it was influencing how I was using vocals for the piece that I had been working through the past couple of weeks because it came to mind when I was getting overly wordy. I thought “Yellow Black Rectangular” was clever in that it was direct and to the point said a lot with only a little. I also genberally enjoyed that they took positions on issues that pertained to civil freedoms and did so in manners that were intriguing and unconventional. I enjoyed the parody, satire and subversiveness found across the album.
Negativland benefitted me by providing me an example of how one may use audio in a manner that was entirely different than commonly expected. Prior to hearing "Escape From Noise” I had mostly been exposed to the what was generally found on the F.M. and A.M. radio formats at the time. I was constrained to their preferences and tastes. These were the years when college radio begat the early years of Alternative radio and during those early years in a college environment I was able to expand my breadth from my rural roots. Negativland’s “Escape From Noise” was one of those pieces.
This album did help shape and expand my desire to explore more avant work. It demanded that I put aside preconceived notions and expectations of structure. That was topical at the time because I was taking a lot liberal arts courses to expand my knowledge. On the one hand these courses heavily encouraged the challenging of ideas. On the other hand they were often ironic. “One must adhere to MLA standards, Ahem!”
This album led me to other Negativland albums and that helped lead me to predecessors or adjacent artists such as Residents, Pere Ubu, Can, Captain Beefheart, etc, etc… In a weird round about way it is how I come across J Dila, Madvillainy and ultimately MF DOOM. The list is endless at this point, but you get the gist.
What I glean from all of that is that though there is not a singular influence, this album is somewhere at the origin point. I heard The Beatle’s Revolution 9 before I heard this, so I know it is not the origin. But it is early enough.
I do know a lot of my fixation on how I decide to use vocal samples is influenced by this album as well as well as the adjacent and departed Jon Leidecker’s Over The Edge radio program. And that is good enough for me to justify highlighting this album for the month of April 2026.
Hey what do you know, I finally “Just answered the question”. I can now say “I did it that one time”.
I remember Peel playing “The Future Is Not As Good As It Used to Be”.
If indeed that’s what it’s actually called.
And here it is…isn’t the internet remarkable 
With the actual John Peel outro!
Sorry, posted this in march post first.
The first album that pops up in my mind when i think of albums that define me, it is Bon Iver - Bon Iver
I had heard “Bon Ivers - For Emma Forever ago” and thought it was OK, i was a bit put off by the unpolished nature of it and the frail falsetto singing (which i now adore) but the songs where unmistakably good, like really good.
So fast forward to the end of 2011 beginning of 2012. Me and my then girlfriend (now wife) go and visit her sister who lived with her husband in New Zealand at the time. We go road tripping all across the north island staying at incredible hostels in Rotorua, Raglan etc. driving on roads as pictured, buying avocado´s at the road side for lunch, bathing in hot streams off the side of the road etc.
Just having an incredible time.
While driving my brother in law puts on the Bon iver - Bon iver album for the first time (he had never heard it either) and the first two songs on the album are great. BUT, the real goosebumps moment comes in at song 3 “Holocene”. prior to this song we were talking and having fun, but a bit in to this song everyone got real quiet and just looked out the window, taking in the scenery and letting the music do the talking. by the end of the song my whole body was rattled with goosebumps and i had tears welling up, not that i had gotten sad, but more that i had experienced something incredible, spiritual even. I imagine that this is what christians mean when they say that they felt the presence of god. When the last note rung out we all let out a sigh in unison and started laughing, we all felt it.
Its probably one my most precious music memories ever and i have seen Bon Iver live (which was a religious experience) even and this moment tops even that incredible experience.
When music catches you off guard, it is as if you become part of the universe, you float. I cant really describe it in any other way.
A bit pretentious maybe, but it was a very dear moment to me.
Not at all, I get exactly what you mean! I wrote about this exact feeling at length in my March post about Sigur Rós. I’m glad you shared this because I’m also cautious to talk about this but thought there would surely be people in this forum that have experienced the same. I also thought about likening this experience to what religious people might feel like god is showing them something. Holocene is also a perfect song for that situation you’re describing, the lyrics also always impact me hardest when I’m driving a car. I’ve noticed that musicians often talk about that presence of god experience even if they’re not religious.
I’m in the same camp as you btw, also saw the quality of Vernon’s debut but didn’t care too much, but was completely captured by the self titled album. It’s just a world of its own, like you live in that cover painting for 40 minutes. I think it’s not an accident that it’s almost exactly 40 minutes, establishing it among the “album” albums like “Dark Side of the Moon”. And like that one, it’s hard to imagine how an actual human being even made that music. It just feels like it must have always been there and only needed to be discovered.
It’s probably my favorite incarnation of “Bon Iver”. I love that they evolved after that and reinvented themselves several times, but the self titled album sat right in that corner of being experimental and sound focused but still clearly rooted in folk. I also preferred that live band to the more modern take, the reworks of these songs during the synth heavy “22: a million” tour didn’t translate the magic for me personally. Haven’t seen them since and surprisingly fell in love with “Sable Fable”, so maybe I should see them again.
The show I went to for the self titled tour also is a personal anecdote for me and my partner, since we met each other eight years later but were sure our ways must have crossed before. Then she digs out an old laptop one day and went through photos. When we discovered there’s an album with photos from that concert, we were sure we would find evidence in there. And sure enought, there’s a photo of her with friends with me and my friends standing in the background.
That´s awesome, i love how small the world feels sometimes and other times it feels endless
i think about that a lot, even if my own music isn’t as transformative as the self entitled album, i sometimes listen back to some of my earlier stuff and wonder if it was even me who recorded that, cause i have no clue how i did it and sometimes even when i recorded it.
in regards to Bon Iver, i completely love every album they have made, they are vastly different from each other and that is something i usually don’t appreciate, but i think Vernon has a way of tying it all back to what the core of Bon Iver is. Even on their latest “happier” album, its still feels very Bon Iver, even though the tone has shifted from the “angsty” to be more “at peace”.
