If you try to list all the ways that you find out about music, how may are there? I suppose Radio, TV, Peers, Family and Retail establishments might make the list. A big reason that our friends are our friends is that they have a reasonable understanding of what makes us tick. That is why our friends may be the most influential force in our Musical Evolutions.
What do you do when your friends don’t like your style of music as much as you do. My Electronic, New Age, Techno, Dubstep stuff usually falls into this category. People I know seem to like it when I play it for them but they don’t like it enough to pursue it on their own.
Not having peers to help explore a genre of music means that their is nobody to share the burden and expense of the expedition with. This slows things down considerably. I really had nobody to discuss New Age Music with until I found out about online news groups. alt.binaries.NewAge or something like that. Here was a little faceless community that would talk about New Age music and better yet, post samples. This became an amazing resource for several years.
If you not familiar with the format [and I don’t blame you as most ISP’s no longer support news groups] it was basically a forum where people posted things that were similar to emails. Somebody would post something with a subject line like If You Like Jean Michel Jarre, Check Out Craig Padilla. In the body would be a little more information and perhaps a link to Craig Padilla’s website or a sample song or 2.
I spent a good deal of time combing through the posts, listening to samples and making notes. Finally I had a group of people who not only liked New Age music but they knew a lot about it. Every once in a while non new age stuff would make its way in usually because of some request or bizarre linkage. MC Hawking was one of those and I’ll talk about that in a few days.
There are so many artists that I found out about using this cool tool. It was a sad day when I got the email from my ISP indicating that they were no longer going to offer news group services. Fortunately, search engines and web sites have been able to fill in that void for the most part. One thing that the news groups did that amazon doesn’t was represent the really obscure music. There are some that just don’t seem to exist anywhere else. I feel fortunate to have found news groups when I did.
Stephanie Sante – Airstream – I really wanted to play Anasazi for you but I can’t find it anywhere.
Patrick O’Hearn – Chatahoochee Field Day – how cool is this song!? I never would have found this without News Groups.
Giles Reaves – Submerged
Enigma – Principles Of Lust
Roedelius & Alquimia –
Craig Padilla – Beyond Beta
Well this was an extreme disappointment. Almost none of the tracks that I wanted you to hear here are available on YouTube. Well I suppose I should have expected it since the really obscure was what it was all about. Maybe I can try to find some links somewhere else.