Ska Lagos Jew Sun Ra

I have a very VERY bizarre growth in music. I honestly had little to no interest in music until a few years ago:

Early Childhood - Teenage late Teenage years : Videogame music found in Squaresoft RPGs, Classic rock my dad used to listen to really loudly(Deep Purple, Sabbath, 70s type stuff. He's a guitarist so eh...). Metallica which my brother was really into, and that's about it.

Late Teenage Years - Early adult years: Bizarre flirtations with grunge(Had a massive obsession with Alice In Chains. You'd never think it of me now). I really got big into System of a Down, White Stripes, and some commercial rock that was big at the time. Albeit, not into most of the stuff my peers were into. My brother was always blaring NIN, and Tool which I never got into even to this day.

Discovering Avant Garde/ Early Adult years - two or three years before now: I barely knew of Patton. Strangely enough, it was from being introduced to a handful of scene kid bands from a guy who I knew for a very short period of my life, and I got a taste of bands like Dog Fashion Disco, and Tub Ring. Of course, I was so ignorant to any form of experimental music I thought these bands were extremely unique, and doing something really trail-blazing. That is, until after reading about thirty million times of them being called Bungle ripoffs I got into Bungle. Which, you think would have been a revelation to me, but it wasn't.

The real revelation came when I was searching for anything that was labeled as 'Avant-Garde'(not knowing what it was at the time). I found something called 'Naked City'. From there, I downloaded the discography, and listened to the album Naked City which had a massive effect on me not listening to any jazz, grindcore, relatively little surf, etc. However, that wasn't the big thing. When listening to the next album 'La Grand Guignol'(Which essentially is Torture Garden with a 30 minute track at the beginning, and a few less songs), and it blew my mind.

The songs were all 30 seconds long, and at a speed that I have never heard before. Shifting genre to genre with such ease, and no adherence to trying to be rocky, or cool. This was a group of nerds, led by an oddball awkward Jewish guy doing some of the most mind bending metal I've heard at the time, and not caring to even take it that seriously. Guignol/Torture Garden still to this day has a massive place in my heart, consistently one of my favorite albums of all time. Where commercial music always disinterested me for being so formulaic, and samey, this is **** that really stood out.

Then - now: An explosion of interest in music of all varieties. A few years before that I'd be the close minded ****head who said "Oh yeah, Death metal guys, they just burp.", or have relatively no interest in Jazz not knowing what it is. I kind of liked classical, but I didn't really know it. Since then, through massive reverse engineering from influences to influences, I have discovered everything from Miles Davis to Gyorgie Ligeti to the other group that really reshapped my life Magma. Not only that, I started listening to more genres that I normally would have thought are "so bad they're teh funny" like death metal, black metal, grindcore. Doors opened to Behemoth, Locust, etc. I refound my love for videogame music, and finally felt comfortable admitting it as comparable to it's mainstream counter-parts, and now, I still like AIC but they make me feel dirty.

Now, I spend a large LARGE portion of my day trying to educate, and build an encyclopedic knowledge of the music I felt was sort of stolen from me by mainstream filters. Japanoise, Avant-Jazz, No wave, Rock In Opposition, Zuehl, Art Rock, Prog Rock, Jazz Fusion, etc. Music I knew I would have adored as a child if I would have just had exposure to it.

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Al Pacino = God