My Musical Evolution – Page 6 – Mapping Influences Over Time

My Musical Evolution – Part 363 21st Century The Return Of The Return Of Spinal Tap

I have been a fan of Spinal Tap ever since I found out that you can’t dust for vomit. The first time I heard of Spinal Tap, it was on TV at The Roach Motel. I tuned in early in the film not knowing what I was watching. They were talking about how their previous drummers had perished. One was a bizarre gardening accident. Another choked on vomit but they weren’t sure whose vomit it was. You can’t dust for vomit.

The next day I discovered that my friend Terry had seen the same show under the same circumstances. We discussed it at length, admiring both the comedic execution as well as the musical prowess. The songs were funny but they were damn good too. It wasn’t long before I was able to commit the next airing of This Is Spinal Tap to video tape. We watched it frequently and soon after, the soundtrack album was in my possession. As I looked a that black album cover, I couldn’t help but ask myself, How much more black could it be and the answer was none. None more black.

Over the years, I have acquired just about everything that there is on Compact Disc or DVD that has to do with Spinal Tap. The guys really are talented musicians and songwriters.

Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight – That’s my friend Jeff with the beard and pliers trying to help Nigel down

Heavy Duty

Gimme Some money

Flower People

Hell Hole

Clam Caravan – This is one of my favorites

Stonehenge

Bitch School

Celtic Blues

Big Bottom

Live At The Royal Albert Hall

My Musical Evolution – Part 362 21st Century Hack

This really belongs in the 90’s but I spaced it so what can you do? Information Society’s second album took another step away from conventional pop music and embraced even more movie dialog samples and electronic and digital sound manipulations. The result really appeals to me on multiple levels.

First, they music is good. Next, I admire and appreciate the intricacies of the all the mixing and development. There are a couple tracks here that like Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, are crafted around lyrics that are 100% sampled from who knows what.

A fun side game with Information Society [self confessed TV addicts] is trying to identify the source of all those snippets of dialog. Lot’s of Star Trek and other sci-fi stuff. They seem to like the same source materials that I do.

In a way, I think this beat driven, digital sampling buffet was an early indication of my eventual interest in Techno and Dubstep music. I can feel the essence of Disco in the beat as well.

Is it serious critical mastery of music? Maybe not but it has the most important thing. It moves me and I enjoy it. Sometimes a Big Mac is just what you want.

Seek 2000

How Long

Think

A Knife And A Fork

Now That I Have You

Hard Currency

Mirrorshades

Hack 1

My Musical Evolution – Part 361 21st Century More Worth Mentioning

I told my children at a very early age to be free to like the music that they like and not to be pressured into liking or not liking something because of their peers. Music is a both a collective and solitary thing. It is cool to like something that a lot of your friends like but it is also important to allow yourself to enjoy whatever music reaches you regardless of what the neighbors think.

I’ve already shared a couple of CD’s that I originally bought because of the reaction my baby children had to them. Even better was when they were old enough to really begin their own Musical Evolutions. I mean there is an outside chance that I might have heard Britney Spears’ first album somehow and picked it up. Same with The Spice Girls but as it turned out, those were early albums that my daughter owned. My son had his favorites too like Linkin Park, Slipknot and Rob Zombie.

I can’t express how cool it is to see your kids get into and enjoy music especially when you enjoy it too. It is remarkable how their Musical Evolutions are similar in texture to my own. Is that due to my influence on them or did I just get lucky. Just last night my son sent me a link to a son that he has been listening to and it really is good. My daughter always has mix CD’s of great stuff. Most of hers is singer, dancer popular stuff but she also strays away from the beaten path to find little know artists that have good sound.

Britney Spears – Baby One More Time

Britney Spears – (You Drive Me) Crazy

Spice Girls – Wannabe

Spice Girls – Say You’ll Be There

Spice Girls – If U Can’t Dance

Linkin Park – Faint

Linkin Park – Numb

Rob Zombie – Demon Speeding

Rob Zombie – Superbeast

Chumbawamba – Tubthumping

Chumbawamba – Amnesia

My Musical Evolution – Part 360 21st Century Pure Moods

My love for New Age music pointed me towards Pure Moods. Although I wouldn’t really consider this stuff New Age, it shares a lot of the qualities that I find attractive. I think Pure Moods might even be the album that opened me up to more Easy Listening music.

This album has a good dose of electronic elements combined with native American and other world music aspects. The disco version of The X-Files Theme is also a winner. Now that I mention it, I’m not so sure that The X-Files Theme wasn’t the root of this purchase. Of course now that I’ve listened to this album so many times and discovered the other gems here, The X-Files Theme seems almost insignificant. In fact, I forgot that it was included here until I started playing the album.

Like other soundtracks and compilation albums, Pure Moods provided a good opportunity to explore other music by the artists included here. My Deep Forest Cd is a direct result of Pure Moods as is some of the other Jean Michel Jarre stuff I own.

I’m sure that I’ve mentioned it numerous times before but I’m really curious about attraction. What makes us like the stuff we like? Why do I love up tempo electronic instrumental music so much? What areas of my brain are activated by it. So many people tell me that New Age music puts them to sleep. It is just the opposite for me. I feel awake, focused and energized. Great stuff for work or long road trips.

Enigma – Return To Innocence

Deep Forest – Sweet Lullaby

Jean Michel Jarre – Oxygene 4

DJ Dado & R. Gallo Salsotto – The X-Files Theme

Enigma – Sadeness Part 1

Adiemus – Adiemus

Jan Hammer -Crockett’s Theme

Sacred Spirits – Yeha-Noha

Mark Isham – My Wife With Champagne Shoulders

Candy Dulfer & Dave Stewart – Lily Was Here

My Musical Evolution – Part 359 21st Century Wake Up Neo

Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?

In the 21st Century, I bought a lot of movie soundtracks. I have always been fond of soundtracks but I preferred the symphonic scores that were typically attached to movies like Star Wars or Star Trek. In the 21st Century, I was buying a more soundtracks that featured contemporary music.

Films often had good mixes of music and were good introductory points for artist that I had yet to experience. Sometimes there would be a theme. Sometimes it would just be a good collection of songs.

I liked the movie The Matrix. It was an interesting concept and was rather ground breaking visually at the time. The music was beat driven club stuff. This was inline with my move toward techno and dubstep. This album also featured a dash of metal. I’m fairly certain that Spybreak! was the song that prompted my purchase of this album. Again if I had downloaded that one song I’d have missed out on so many other cool tracks here.

Propellerheads – Spybreak! (Short One)

Rob D – Clubbed To Death

Meat Beat Manifesto – Prime Audio Soup

Lunatic Calm – Leave You Far Behind

Rob Zombie – Dragula

Rage Against The Machine – Wake Up

My Musical Evolution – Part 358 21st Century Under A Violet Moon

It was the summer of 2000 that I first heard of Blackmore’s Night and Under A Violet Moon. Scott and I were driving up to meet Aric for a summer fishing trip on Strawberry Lake. The last few miles back into the wilderness of the lake is a twisting dirt road. As we turned off the pavement and off the grid, a large full moon was rising through the trees. Scott put Under a Violet Moon into his CD player and we approached the lake to some hauntingly amazing music.

Yes, the Blackmore part of Blackmore’s Night is Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple and Rainbow fame. It seems that Ritchie Blackmore had this desire to write and perform Medieval Gypsy music. When I say haunting, I mean it. not haunting in a paranormal activity way but in a more beautifully addictive way.

There are a couple of things I’d like to share with you about this album. The first is how it came to me. You know about Scott sharing it with me on the road to the lake. Scott got it from Eric. Not Aric but Eric, another Eric we know. Eric was in his local record store one day. He was probably looking for Greek music. He lives that stuff now but he used to be a big Ritchie Blackmore fan. Anyway, Blackmore’s Night just happened to be playing on the speakers overhead in the store. Eric was intrigued and asked who it was. The clerk told him it was Blackmore’s Night. He bought it and took it home. It really is good stuff. It was some time later that he was at home reading the liner notes that he discovered that it was indeed Ritchie Blackmore which made it just that much cooler to him.

In my life that year I discovered that I really enjoyed fishing and became somewhat fanatical about it. I wanted to go fishing all the time. Scott was renting a place on Lake James and I would drive up there almost every weekend. I’d listen to Under A Violet Moon in the car whenever I went fishing that summer or so it seemed. That linked this album with the joys of going outside and fishing.

Even now in the chill of December, as I listen to Under A Violet Moon, I feel the warmth of summer and the excited anticipation of getting out on the water. It has been 12 years since that summer but familiar smell of Berkeley Power Baits and tackle boxes come to mind with these songs. It is a cool feeling.

Under A Violet Moon

Castles And Dreams – My Favorite song on this album

Morning Star

Avalon

Wind In The Willows

Gone With The Wind

Spanish Nights (I Remember It Well)

Fool’s Gold

Now And Then

Self Portrait

Here is a link to buy this because you really should

My Musical Evolution – Part 357 Quick Recap And On To The 21st Century

As I quickly look back on The 90’s, I’m reminded that it too was a decade of big changes. Not musically so much but more lifestyle in nature. As 1989 turned to 1990, I didn’t have a Windows based computer or associated Windows Media Player. I didn’t have any children. I also didn’t have an internet connection. We also didn’t have cable TV at the beginning of that decade.

Musically, I was still enthralled with New Age music however I did experiment with some Rap stuff. I spent considerable effort accumulating Compact Disc versions of albums and music from the previous era’s of my life. My musical influences were mostly the video jukebox channel and eventually my children. Along the way there were also those surprise influences like the tech support call that yielded Loreena McKennitt and a Guinness Screen Saver that used a song that it would take me 16 years to get around to finding out what it was. My classical phase died down and my interest in The Doors was reignited by Oliver Stone’s movie. I probably should have done another post about the Doors. I guess that just underscores the problem that I’ve been having and discussing. These last 25 years have seen the focus of music in my life take a back seat to many other competing interests. It also makes me feel rushed. I spent 10 months covering the first 23 years of my life and left only two months to cover the remaining 24. While it might make sense in My Musical Evolution, it worries me that my attempt to meet the deadline might lead to some unintentional omissions. I mean how could I have forgotten that second Doors Phase in the early 1990’s?

What is today? December 9th. That gives me 23 days including today to cover the last 13 years.

Guinness Screen Saver

My Musical Evolution – Part 356 The 90’s Goodbye Cassettes, Hello CD-R

The last big technological advancement of the 90’s was the addition of a Compact Disc Burner to my computer. These old technology posts really make me laugh to myself. They all seem so common today but back in 1999 it was new and a big deal. That image reminded me that blank CD’s used to be sold individually or in packs of 5 or 10. Now I buy spindles of 100 for pennies each. How times change.

Now part of me missed the cassette making process. It really was an art form. It was also a time consuming process. Now my multimedia mixing system allowed me to make a 110 minute tape in real time which was a big improvement over the stop and start method before the mixing board.

My CD burner in conjunction with Windows Media Player sped the process up but it took a great deal of the art out of it. With my mixing board, multiple input devices and cassettes, I could layer a bunch of things together and crossfade tracks so that there was never dead air space unless I wanted it that way. With the CD burner, it was just tracks butted up against each other. The big advantage was that it only took 5 minutes to create a 70 minute CD as opposed to 112 minutes to make a 110 minute cassette.

The other cool thing about burning CD’s was the random shuffle aspect. I made anAuto-Playlistthat would select at random songs from my library, limit the duration to 70 minutes [those early CD’s would only hold 70 minutes]. So I could burn a dozen CD’s for a road trip and have no idea what was on them.

In October of 1999, I reluctantly accepted an invitation to join my friends Scott and Aric on a long weekend of fishing on a little lake up near Cadillac, Michigan. I wasn’t a fisherman or remotely interested in fishing but I figured it would be good to hang out with those guys again. After The Roach Days, we really didn’t see each other very much. Aric and I each got married and who knows what Scott was up to. If you remember back to The Roach Days posts, Aric, Scott and I musically came from different backgrounds, we shared The Metal Years together and after, we branched out into different musical directions. Aric got into Stevie Ray Vaughan and some country stuff like The Dixie Chicks. Scott went into the crusty old Delta blues. He was listening to Buddy Guy, B.B. King and Albert Collins type stuff. As you know, I went toward the New Age and electronic stuff which would eventually lead me to Techno and Dubstep.

I burned a coupleNew Agesampler CDs and brought them fishing. It was the start of a trend that continues today. We meet a couple times a year to fish and hang out. Part of that process is to sample each others musical evolutions. Of course, personal media players have taken over from the CD era but we’ll go out on the boat for a few hours, fish and listen to music and discuss. It was a sunny and calm afternoon. The sky was deep blue and the trees surrounding the lake were brilliant with fall color. I played Disc 1 of my New Age mixes. It seemed to go along perfectly with the pace of the day. The soothing electronic pulses and guitars carried our minds away as we glided silently over the glass like surface of the lake. I ended up giving the CD’s to Aric because he really seemed to enjoy them. It was an amazing day and the first of many music filled fishing weekends.

My Musical Evolution – Part 355 The 90’s Windows Media Player

At the end of the 1990’s came another technological change that had a pretty big impact on how I manage my music. It was Windows Media Play 6.4. If you have been following along, you know that I have always treated my Compact Discs like Master Recordings. I didn’t expose them to scratchy CD wallets or leave them languishing in the heat of the car. If I wanted to take them on the road, I transferred a copy to cassette and placed the master on the shelf of my reasonably climate controlled basement.

The exception was bringing them to the office where I would play my favorite Compact Discs on my computer while I worked. In 1999, the new version of Windows Media Player was released and somehow I accidentally discovered that I could copy my CD’s to my hard drive and play them music without having the CD present. I know it seems ridiculous now after almost 15 years but remember this was years before iTunes and the digital media craze swept the nation.

I brought CD’s in every day and ripped them to my hard drive. soon I had most of my music readily available. It really changed how I listened to music. The word Shuffle took on a new meaning as I would listen to an artist or genre or custom playlist. All these things we take for granted today were brand new to me in the 1990’s and it was cool.

Over the next decade, hard drives got bigger, faster and cheaper. Digital music bit rates got higher. I’ve re-ripped all my CD’s a few times as compression technology improves. At that is how it began. Today I’m sitting inches away from almost 50,000 songs that take up nearly 300GB of hard drive space. Windows Media Player would evolve over the next decade too. Those changes would add to the may I listen to and manage my music. So I’d have to say that this was a pretty significant milestone.

My Musical Evolution – Part 354 The 90’s Metal Relapse

How can a guy who loves Jazz Café, Loreena McKennitt, and New Age Music also be into a German metal band like Rammstein? I guess you take the boy out of The Metal Years but you can’t take The Metal Years out of the boy. Although it had been years since I was wild about Metal music, I couldn’t help but like Rammstein’s sound. It was that same industrialized German metal that I liked with Accept only this time it was more polished. I guess this time the machinery was less steam driven and more hydraulic. It had that chunka chunka aspect but they were able to weave in an electronic aspect that was missing before. The addition of keyboards gave them a wider ability whiel their execution kept it very heavy sounding.

Du Hast had made its way to the radio. It is a cool song but there are so many better ones on this album. I owe this purchase to Chicken pox. Yeah it is true. My son had chicken pox and he was miserable. I was home with him. He was probably 7 or 8 at the time. We somehow got it in our head that Rammsteini might make him feel better. So we went to the store and he waited in the car while I ran in and picked up Sehnsucht.

I don’t remember if Rammstein eased the suffering of chicken pox at all but we still continue to enjoy the music all these years later. I’ll have to ask my son if he has listened to Sehnsucht lately.

Sehnsucht

Engel

Tier

Du Hast

Eifersucht