i love being right about threads getting closed down - obviously because it was not about music
The exact same thing happens to me. I get kind of overwhelmed by how much good, interesting music there is that I never would have heard if I wasn’t intentionally looking for obscure stuff to sample from. It’s hard not to get sentimental thinking about the musicians whose dreams were embodied in that largely-forgotten music. I think DJ Shadow spoke eloquently about it in Scratch, but it’s been many years since I watched that film.
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maaaaaaan this is Chris Travis/Xavier Wulf like a motherfucker. brought me back to the super-long scoop-line Fear of God tees and jogger denim with the long drawstrings 
edit: also a hell of a throwback, D.R.O. was everywhere back in those days. first heard him on a handful of Felly tracks so i know that beat cost a pretty penny lmao.
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A# to C is a boss move.
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oooooo yeah man. it was a golden era for sure. i think we got lucky with the DRO beat because i think we bought it when he was doing a sale to help pay for a move or car repairs or something so i think we paid like $75. we loved his work with the palmer squares so it was the deal of the century for us
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I discovered electronic music in high school and college. In high school, in the late nineties, I knew a kid who played Orbital and Underworld, and I thought those sounds were so cool. Then, in college, I DJ’d at the radio station, which basically meant browsing through thousands of LPs in a basement and deciding what to play. One day I found an EP by Autechre called “Envane”; on the record sleeve, one of the other DJs had circled one of the tracks (I think it was the last one) and written “PLAY THIS!” next to it. I played it about a zillion times and discovered all of Warp Records from there.
There were four or five records that really changed my life at that time. Keith Fullerton Whitman’s “Playthroughs”; Fennesz’s “Endless Summer”; Tim Hecker’s “Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do It Again”; My Bloody Valentine’s “Loveless”; and Eno’s “Music for Airports.” I just really got pulled into the world of noise, space, texture, and sound design. And then I got really obsessed, more generally, with bands like New Order, Felt, and Slowdive, and also with the Eno-inflected U2 albums, basically the ones running from Unforgettable Fire through Pop.
Anyway, I was always a serious music listener but never actually thought about making music myself. I had some Volcas and liked to mess around in Garage Band, and that was it. And then, a couple of years ago, a switch flipped, and I suddenly thought to myself, “I can do this,” and I found that all the sequencing and synthesizing made sense to me.
Currently I have no ambitions except for learning and having fun. I have two young kids and a lot of deadlines for my work as a writer, so I mostly just put little songs together to listen to while I work—either proper songs with parts, on my OP-1F, or more generative / ambient stuff with my modular. I’m frankly amazed that I can put together music that I enjoy listening to for a whole workday. I’d say that, in ten years’ time, I’d like to have moved from ‘sounds pretty’ to ‘emotionally moving.’
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so sorry to enable you but i’m loving this rap and it is inspiring me to release my cringey rap music
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dude what
are you me?
am i you?
what?
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Good thread. Cool to hear people’s stories …
For the most part, I didn’t pay much attention to electronic music until I was maybe 40. I spent most of the time before that involved with bands, songwriting, and trying to play various kinds of drums with people as well as possible.
However, I was always interested in synthesizers, as this kind of magic box. I couldn’t afford them and had no keyboard skills as a youth, but I would buy magazines and albums where Herbie Hancock or Joe Zawinul (Weather Report) made cool music with great drummers and these analog mystery boxes. Later I liked Eno’s MUSIC FOR AIRPORTS, and still later Goldie’s TIMELESS and Photek’s LOGICAL PROGRESSION anthology. I also see Public Enemy as an important early electronic artist.
For the rest of the twentieth century, I just used very affordable synths and drum machines as a way to write songs, since guitars are a mystery to me, my hands won’t do that. I kept learning about chords and songs and basslines, and took some children’s piano lessons later on, in my 50s. (All the students had to do a group recital, where 12 year old Chinese girls wailed on Chopin and played rings around me. I screwed up my little Bach piece in G, but redeemed myself with a blues, which was vigorously applauded by all the Chinese parents.)
I had zero awareness of any of the other big names in electronic music (BOC, Aphex Twin, Autechre, etc.) until discovering it all at once as I got into synths in recent years. It’s been a pleasure to explore this musical continent.
What are your ambitions as a musician?
Dunno. Right now I work on songs and I work on electronic instrumentals. I think I post about one electronic track a year here. Wish I produced more. I also work on fundamental stuff: using a digital keyboard to play simple arrangements of Monk and Mingus tunes and whatever classical pieces I can stand and handle (Satie’s Gym 1, Bach’s Prelude 1, Chopin Prelude in Em, etc…)
What are your influences, how do they inform your practice?
Combination of what I heard growing up (folk, soul, bits of pop and even light opera); what I heard as a teen, learning drums (rock, funk, jazz, reggae, fancy pop) and what I learned to play or hear in college and after (gamelan, various African/Cuban drumming, salsa, European orchestral/chamber music, singer-songwriters, Brazilian music); and oh yeah, all that electronic stuff later on.
Where do you see your music 10 years from now?
Too far to plan … about anything.
How do you find time for music making (if it’s not already your main occupation)?
I have enough time and I still don’t make enough music. I never had kids, that’s a big part of it. Maybe I should have had kids.
I dunno, let’s just try and talk about music for a bit, yeah?
“Without music, this world wouldn’t be shit.” - Thelonious Monk, source unknown
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do it! while i definitely cringe a bit while listening to my old stuff, my ego is still in play. compared to all the other bad rap ive found on soundcloud, i would consider my tracks to be in the upper echelon of bad soundcloud rap.
for example, this is a track made around the same time from other dorky highschoolers in seattle. our tracks are clearly way better. i dont know these guys but i’d be surprised if we werent at the same spodies (jungle juice kegger type party in public parks) considering my buddies threw most of those parties at that time.
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Y’all keep this up and I’m gonna regretfully post my old rap shit. Haha!
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Yeah, I might post my old high school death metal band tracks!
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I might go for a shit.
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So you can listen to all our glory in your own glory.
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This is a whole other discussion 
I use to play the guitar a lot. And smoke even more.
This track was a complete improvisation, showing where we were at in 2002:
Stream La Face Cachée music | Listen to songs, albums, playlists for free on SoundCloud
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This is awesome! I love it!
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Hell yeah — that jam hit the spot this morning!
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If it helps at all, @kokosnuss is always on my case for submitting tracks to the battles that don’t quite conform to the genre. (Not calling you out, koko, I appreciate the feedback and I know it’s meant constructively!)
But yeah, I always feel my heart sink a little when, inevitably, someone in the thread says “I know who made Track X.”
No matter how hard I try to make a genre track, it always ends up in the King Duppy microgenre.
Or maybe I’m looking at it the wrong way and having a style or sensibility or whatever that I can’t break out of is a good thing. It means my stuff is mine, right? That seems especially important these days when everything can be everything else and nothing is allowed to be itself.
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Imo, if someone can hear your sonic signature regardless of prompt or genre, then you’ve simply outgrown the need for such simple structures and you’ve learned to truly express yourself boundlessly
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It’s funny that you mention that. This video of Eric J came up on my feed and he’s responsible for some Dua Lipa songs along with Tame Impala. As he’s using the plugins you can definitely hear how it’s his sonic signature on those Dua Lipa tracks.
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