Friday 4 March 2016

My Teenage Setlist

Construction of Musical Playlist of background music.

To which ends I return to my early teenage setlist, with the help of youtube to replace tape as I no longer have a walkman. The following is from approx age 13-16 (1990-1993 and misses out a lot of other equally as important albums).

David Bowie - Diamond Dogs & Ziggy Stardust
Caravan - In The Land Of Grey And Pink
AC/DC - Who Made Who
Black Sabbath
Rage Against The Machine - Rage Against The Machine
Metallica - (up to and including) The Black Album
Stone Temple Pilots - Core
Pearl Jam - Ten & Verses
Faith No More - Angel Dust
Carter USM - 1992 The Love Album
Janes Addiction
Siouxsie and the Banshee’s - esp. Superstition
The Cure

This is the shit which got me through puberty. Not the darkest hour because there was still Hope in the world at that stage when Life was mostly ahead of me. In retrospect it was seriously getting into BauHaus which ebbed it all away... or was it that their vibe was the scant grain of dusty bedrock beneath my feet in an otherwise fall to the void, teaching me to skip as a step toward learning to fly on velvet wings?

Or was that the parental Generation with their dedication to Enforced Control Regime and willful ignorance of empathy? It took until my mid-30s to wrestle free completely.  My advice to my younger self would be; "Don’t let anybody control you - escape as soon as possible, means Now. The state will support you until you get a job, so you do not have to be slave to abusers.”

Which is my advice to everybody of every age in the UK especially people in puberty; because I remember too well what it is like. The distractions are different in the 21st C but the emotions are the same as they always were, right the way back through history. We now have the luxury of teenage cultural years to indoctrinate instead of sending kids to the workplace, that’s both a blessing and a curse; it should be better, it could be worse. 

I have been studying classical piano since age 7. My dad raised me on blues, prog-rock and stress-based alcoholic beatings; I rebelled into early metal and goth. On and for the records I have always hated Punk despite consistently being labelled as one by people who have no idea at all what their blind prejudice and strawman bullying is doing to the world.

At 16 I got my first electric guitar and a Korg G3 with which I could create the fruitiest organic techno sounds simply by using effects and tapping the strings, it became whole other machine. Ten years later after having travelled Germany to experience the techno scene first-hand I got access to a Korg ES-1 and MC-505, was part of a street crew working our cable-tangled demon of The Midi Monster Machine. The band had to split for legal reasons and I continued my experiments with LFO, spiritism, ESP and auric / perceptual re-configuration until I achieved the result I had been after.

By 2000ad Drum and Bass had taken over the world and it is there that I found my feet on the dancefloor and my heart in Wing-Chung. Psychedelic trancedelia music, dark-psy ~

Today in 2016 my musical tastes have diversified widely. Mostly; world music, the melange of east and west as Arabic musicians discover western machines and acoustic instrumentalists are finally recorded during their live improvisations, made available on youtube.

The experimental electronic dj scene of SecondLife Virtual Reality (Morlita Quan and Alexi Ayres being two names off the top of my head who have repeatedly blown me out of the water).


And so this done, I return to planning my literary masterworks.




No comments:

Post a Comment