You know, I'd say I'm in one of those transformative, butterfly-leaves-chrysalis stages of my life, but the older I get, the more I start to feel like my entire life is just kind of one big long transformative stage, broken up by smaller, less dramatic transformative stages. ("Less dramatic" being a relative term here, of course. Your "less dramatic" probably has waaaaaayyyyyyyyyy the fuck less drama than Christoph's "less dramatic." lol)
In some ways, this makes it interesting to trace your voice as an artist over the years and the ways it shifts and morphs. I totally forgot about this redo of Clean Bandit's "Symphony" I made 7 years ago. That's... 2018. I was a lot more shy about sharing my art back then. It's not bad, but it doesn't really have much of a distinctive voice to it. I'd started to have faith in myself and what I was good at, but it was still held up by knockoff Flume basses and needed something interesting and different.
I started making music in 2013-2014. I'd always been terrible with guitar and all the traditional instruments. I randomly pirated Ableton Live one day and it sent me down a rabbit hole I still haven't come out of. Even living in dingy, isolated apartments when I was super down on my luck, I had something I could instantly tell I was really good at. Of course, it took me another two years before I made anything I was confident enough in to actually show to people. I've scrubbed most of those old songs from the internet, for obvious reasons. lol
By 2016-2018, I was trying to get out of Nebraska, bouncing around Denver, Vegas and LA on Megabus and Amtrak. I got really into house music at this time- the beats spoke in the same universal way as hip-hop, but I liked the energy and bounce of house more. I still fucked around with hip-hop adjacent stuff for a while, but all these big transformations in my life made me outgrow it. It's not that I don't like the music or the culture, it's just that others can do those beats way better than me, and I'd rather focus on what I'm good at- house n techno!
I think another big part of what propelled me was having something that felt so radically different to explore and enjoy. I grew up in a world where you were a "musician" who played "guitar" or "drums or "bass" or "piano." The DJ thing scared and confused these people. They couldn't figure out what the difference was between what I did and a damn jukebox! They couldn't fit me into their narrow perception. So I learned to color outside the lines with my creative networking- I had to, because the hand I was dealt was actively trying to sabotage me.
I made my first mixtape in this time, "noideahowtoparty, Vol. 1." It's a... little bit different from the noideahowtoparty of now. But some of the ideas and sounds, the approach to distortion and empty space, still sounds the same.
It took a lot of time. And a lot of falling on my face. Hindsight's always 20/20, and I'm sure I could go back and do it all again with half the time and half the money- but ruminating's always been an issue for me, and if you're always looking backwards, you'll never have the time to appreciate where you're going.
Once I moved out to Denver in 2019, I started to network a bit more and ended up at a weekly open decks. It was a really cool crowd full of super helpful people who liked me and wanted to help me get my foot in the door. Of course, that got fked up by COVID. As did everything else. Crazy to think that was so long ago, isn't it? I digress.
Locked inside, I had no choice but to go the other way and hone my production skills. I'd started making mix CDs before I had moved, and decided to continue that sound, but in entirely new directions. Where almost all my prior work could be easily classified into some hybrid of house or hip-hop, these traded convention out for flirtations with trance, breaks, UKG, DnB, acid, synthwave and more. And then... there was techno.
Techno was not something I immediately fell in love with. I played the Charlotte de Witte remix of Eats Everything- Space Raiders pretty religiously when I went on runs, but I had pretty aggressively stayed inside the "tech-house" boundary of that universe for most of my time as a raver. The seed was planted when I saw KiNK open for Peggy Gou at Club Vinyl in October 2019, though. That set was magical. No thoughts, just dancing and bliss.
Prior to that, the other thing that had changed me was a CD copy of Plastikman's Sheet One my aunt and uncle had given me on a vacation to Anchorage. I'd gone to go see a bunch of dubstep DJs one night up there, but ended up being so much more fascinated by the sounds I'd heard on the drive there that I dipped out early to go finish the album alone in my room. That 303 was unlike anything I'd ever heard before!
For some reason, techno also clicked so much better with my production and mixing style than anything else I had tried before. I don't think this EP is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but to me I can hear this as the exact point I found my voice as an artist, both sonically and psychologically.
I did a few shows around this time, but I kind of fumbled things and so the live music didn't really take off for me at this point. I had a lot I still needed to learn in my personal life, and it's hard to focus on building an audience and networking properly if you can't put yourself in the necessary headspace. (Live and don't learn, that's my motto.)
That said, processing personal shit is great fuel for music, and so that's how this album came about. Side A is a continuation of Mortis Infernum, lots of minimal house and acid techno with a strong trance influence. (Mostly Trance Wax and Sasha). Side B is chaos, with almost every song being a little sonic universe in and of itself. Hell Hath No Fury almost causes everything to fall over, but then Kallapsrr and Glitershok put it all back together again. I'm really proud of how every song on this album flows together to create one big cohesive whole.
So, yeah. That's (some) of my story up until the first album. There's a lot more, but this post got really long so we're just going to save it for another day. Guess the end really wasn't in sight, huh?
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