What got you into avant-garde and experimental music? (ticket, listening to music)

innerspaceboy · 04-10-2019, 09:52 AM

In 1996 I was 15 years old. Prior to one particular summer day, my entire musical scope of knowledge was limited to the rotation from an oldies FM station in my city. But one fateful day, a girlfriend spun me Underworld's Dubnobasswithmyheadman. It was the first music I ever heard which wasn’t top-40 radio rock, and I was forever changed. The progressive house cuts from that record inspired me to take a proactive role in exploring music critically and analytically, seeking out longform and experimental musics. That album set me on a path leading to a lifelong exploration of 20th-century music, a love for the ambient genre, and for the fringes of electroacoustic experimentation.

Actively exploring the history of electronic music, I began reading and discovered noise via Russolo's manifesto, Nyman's text on experimental music, Partch's Genesis of a Music, Prendergast's The Ambient Century, the culturally contextual music criticism of Simon Reynolds, and scores of other books chronicling theory and philosophy of experimental sound.

Some of my earliest record collecting was an array of albums from the Moog craze, which naturally led me to musique concrète and tape music composers like Tom Dissevelt, Dick Raaymakers, Manhattan Research, and synth pioneers like Subotnick and Schulze. Eno's Airports served as my initiation into ambient, (as it did for so many listeners), which later led me to drone, microhouse, and lowercase musics. Kosmische musik was being rediscovered by a new generation of listeners at the time, and a number of classic Brain releases were reissued in the Germany, the US, and UK.

Music blogs like holy****ing****40000 and ambientmusicguide were incredibly helpful resources, as were RYM-generated lists and user reviews. I joined a number of online vinyl communities and discovered countless essential experimental titles through those groups.The blogging community supplied me with complete discographic archives of several experimental record labels like DG avantgarde and Prospective 21e Siècle.

Through my blogging I've been fortunate enough to have independent artists send me limited run releases which has exposed me to a lot of great under-the-radar tunes.

The Bop Shop in Rochester was an equally valuable resource, hooking me up with imported first-pressings of all the classics, and some deeper cuts as well.

I still need to pick up a copy of David Stubbs’ Mars by 1980 for my next read. I'm also aware that my focus has always been on veterans of the avant-garde and that I'm missing an entire world of lesser-known and independent releases. I'm going to have to explore a few key threads here on MB to get the scoop.

This is a valuable community.