Some background on how I got into this type of music...
For various reasons, I put music on the back-burner for much of the 2000s. Outside of my already existing collection--the kind you play over, and over, and over again--it got increasingly difficult for me to find music on the radio that appealed to me. In order to keep things fresh, one of the ways I found "new music" was to seek out as many live versions of the stuff I
already liked. With each live performance, I could always find something different and unique in it. The other way I went about things was to buy albums I didn’t already have from my favorite artists and/or their side projects. This worked for a while, until, of course, it didn’t. I hadn’t allocated much time to seeking out new music outside of the aforementioned, or to watch TV, either. Time for music? Didn’t have it. TV? Didn’t care.
Now, I love my gritty grunge music (that’s dad rock to some of you) and my Alice In Chains, but I have liked electronic music ever since the 8- and 16-bit days. I did have some exposure to other types of electronic music as well. The extent of my trance exposure was
Robert Miles’s “Children” (referred to as dream trance). My techno/electronica exposure came in the form of the
Wipeout video-game soundtrack and groups such as The Prodigy, The Crystal Method
(“BusyChild”), or alternative-sounding crossovers like Sneaker Pimps's "6 Underground." When it comes to house music, I liked Todd Terry's remix of Everything But The Girl's "Missing," although I wouldn’t have known at the time that it was considered house music. My ‘90s dance and Eurodance exposure were acts such as
Haddaway, La Bouche,
Snap!,
The Real McCoy, and a few others. Outside of that, I never found a lot of popular dance music to be particularly appealing.
Fast-forwarding to the latter part of the 2000s and into the 2010s, I would come to find out that a different kind of electronic-based music had emerged in popular culture. The specific date escapes me, but one day in 2012 or so, I turned on the television and proceeded to flip through the channels, going beyond my pre-sets and into the nexus that is the digital sub-channels: the 5-1s, 5-2s and 5-3s. That’s when I discovered an awesome music channel called
TheCoolTV. It was refreshing to finally have a music channel again. Like any other type of music outlet, not everything in TheCoolTV's rotation was great, but I was definitely digging the ambient vibe of what I was hearing. A few examples include
Nero’s “Me And You”(2011),
La Roux’s “Bulletproof” (2009),
John Butler Trio’s “Revolution” (2011), an alternative rock/roots-rock song, as well as a bunch of other selections that I don’t recall. At this point, I was still at the stage where this stuff was wafting in the background; music wasn’t a central focus.
Unfortunately, not soon after my discovery of TheCoolTV, the channel went off the air with no warning, and no replacement. It's always frustrating when you find something you really like, and then poof, it’s gone. Disappointing, but the seed was already planted.
With TheCoolTV gone from over-the-air television, I didn't know where to look for new music. Local radio hadn't been interesting in years. Given that, I didn't have a good reference point for what was happening in the modern music scene, let alone with electronica. All I knew at this point was that I wanted to seek out that ambient sound I found on TheCoolTV.
A few months later, I was at a get-together and one of guys started playing Skrillex’s remix of Benny Benassi's “Cinema." This was done via his iPhone which was then hooked up to a large speaker system.
Okay, “Cinema” not being so ambient here, but it had a good melody and enough crunchy bass to make me say, “What iiiiiiis this?” And sure, I had now heard “Cinema,” but I still didn’t know what a
filthy drop was, or anything about dubstep for that matter.
That same guy was also a proponent of Pandora. I knew about Pandora back during its early days and had used it briefly here and there, but when you’re using a dial-up connection--and that's all that we could get--services such as Pandora don’t do you any favors. After much maligning on my part, I decided to give Pandora a try and signed up for the service.
My first manual entry and subsequent thumbed-up track on Pandora occurred on 8/7/2013. It is something from John O’Callaghan, and it was a track I had found while watching a random YouTube video:
John O'Callaghan (ft. Sarah Howells) –“ Find Yourself” [Original Mix]
I would prefer the remix by Cosmic Gate if it didn't spend the first three minutes meandering on about nothing.
The first artist I ever inserted as a station seed is a producer named 501:
501 - “Feel For You”
501 quote via Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/501dubz/pos...53124317452953
Quote:
|
501: major part of the allure of hearing amazing new music is not knowing how it was accomplished - you dont hear the technique, just the music...technically you can learn to mimic a certain feeling or someone's sound (just like a reverb puts a naked sound into a space) but humans = not robots. producing music, to me, is closer to art than engineering.
|
Five other songs received a thumbs up on 8/7/2013 and 8/8/2013, respectively:
Calvertron (ft. Melleefresh) - “8Bit Dreamz”
"8Bit Dreamz" is a crunchy banger with a silky smooth lead-in to the drop.
Two remixes from Skrillex:
Nero - “Promises” [Skrillex and Nero Remix]
Benny Benassi (ft. Gary Go) - “Cinema” [Skrillex Remix]
Arty & Mat Zo – “Rebound” [Original Mix]
"Rebound" is a rolling, thunderous track that carries the right amount of bass throughout without losing its ambient sound. It has two major parts, and it is a track that is perfect for long drives.
Emma Hewitt – “Foolish Boy” [Ivan Gough & Luke Chable Remix]
An entry from popular trance artist Emma Hewitt, remixed by Ivan Gough and Luke Chable.
Emma Hewitt quote:
Quote:
|
Emma: I didn’t have any formal training as a singer. I did learn classical piano for a few years and did all my exams. I do believe it is important for musicians to learn about the theory side of music, just to at least get a basic knowledge of keys and which notes work in which scales etc. But on the other hand it is a fine line, as I also think that sometimes lessons will beat the creativity out of someone and teach them not to improvise.
|
Read more:
Emma Hewitt interview.
- aux-in