Music That Has Shaped Your Musical Conception

elektro80 · Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2003 7:26 am Post subject:

Use the files.electro-music.com site. Fast... and it does not affect your bandwidth here. You do have the ftp acct still??

mosc · Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2003 7:33 am Post subject:

I'll go for it. Also, I've got the code for sub forums. I want to get that up first.

So much to do; so little time. Didn't someone say that once?

seraph · Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2007 2:16 pm Post subject:

I just happened to read this thread again. This forum is packed with great stuff Very Happy

elektro80 · Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2007 2:55 pm Post subject:

Does that mean this thread has been resurrected!! Very Happy

seraph · Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2007 2:59 pm Post subject:

Acoustic Interloper · Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2007 8:35 am Post subject:

Stanley Pain · Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2007 4:21 pm Post subject:

blue hell · Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2007 4:58 pm Post subject:

Stanley Pain · Posted: Fri Jul 27, 2007 12:02 am Post subject:

i think that discovering composers who used noise was, for me, the equivalent of a small town boy going to a big gay club in London and realising that it was "ok to be gay."

my big influences were:
henze - it's ok to be atonal
stockhausen - it's ok to use noise
download - it's ok to use noise in "dance" music

Prodigy and Orbital inspired me... there seemed to be some integrity in their work lacking in some of their popular contemporaries whose names now totally escape me. Liam Howlett was a funky young producer with high production standards and i believe that he was a healthy role model.

Bach was a massive influence on me, but i was playing his stuff from such a young age that i wasn't really conscious of myself thinking "wow this is amazing music". rather it was "this is tricky stuff..." but in hindsight it MUST have had a big effect on me.

if i search deep in my musical soul i would begrudgingly admit that Louis Feuillard, the author of the zen like daily musical exercises for the 'cello had an effect on me and along with scales practise have a lot to answer for. even today having not played 'cello seriously for 10 years, i find my left hand tapping out the patterns of his exercises.

Mozart... Liszt... Reich... for all the obvious reasons. Aphex Twin, Autechre....

but i reckon the most important musical influences were my formal music teachers.

my 'cello teacher, a guy called Paul Cox, refused to enter me for any graded exams on principle. at 13 years old i entered myself for my grade 8 and i look upon my certificate with a sense of pride and adult understanding. my name appears on it twice. my 'cello teacher wanted no part of music being judged arbitrarily. (for the record i got 143/150... distinction Razz

)

a guy called Paul De Keyser (Fanny Waterman's son) gave me the occasional lesson. he was crazy but gave me the most important lesson a performer could have and taught me how to play and appreciate bach.
"play everything loud. play every note exactly the correct length. do not play any note louder or quieter than the one preceding it". he would shout as soon as i broke that rule. "Bach is a genius, you are not. if bach hadn't wanted that note to be heard he would not have written it on the page." i don't know if you've played the Bach unaccompanied, but it's nigh on impossible to follow these rules. if able you should try reeeally hard to do so, and it requires a monumental feat of concentration that takes you to a zen like realm. and the audiences love the result. those couple of sentences taught me how to play bach.

nick bannan taught me couterpoint "rules" at a very young age. i think it's a very brave thing for a teacher to do. ignore the age of a student and just go with the flow.

i was lucky enough to have a musical education that a) started early b) followed no curriculum save what interested the teacher at any given moment and c) was provided by excellent musicians passionate about their own field.

bannan also taught me about the evolution of music, church music in particular. he taught me what an arrangement was. i didn't really understand for about 2 years afterwards though...

Gaspy Conana · Joined: Jul 30, 2007 Posts: 3 Location: Florida

When I was first getting into the creative aspects of music prog rock and jazz fusion were my main motivators. I was more concerned with the technical compositions and such. Odd time sigs, dissonance, that type of thing. Bands like Magma, Genesis, Gong, King Crimson, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Sun Ra, etc.

Free Jazz and Avant music are currently a big inspiration. So many new possibilities. Ash Ra Tempel and Albert Ayler come to mind.

When it comes to electronic music, Klaus Schulze was a big one. Nobody has come close to achieving what he has in my opinion.

Wayne Higgins · Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2007 11:06 am Post subject:

When it comes to this subject, I have to take a trip down memory lane.

1: Steppenwolf "Magic Carpet Ride". I can still remember being in a car with my older sister in 1967 when the guy on the radio said here's something new.... That middle trippy part was IT! No more Yummy Yummy Yummy for me.

2: Iron Butterfly "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida". A song that takes a whole album side. Wow. I was in the 6th grade when I first heard it. I still listen to it. On my Myspace page there's a picture of me and Ron Bushy. I consider Metamorphosis a better album, but Vida is the one that turned my head.

3: Deep Purple "Child in Time" and Issac Hayes "The Look Of Love." I mention these two together because one night in Columbia, SC, this 7th grader was fiddling with the radio dial and picked up WCOS-FM, "Music for the people". Early 70's FM. I never listened to top 40 again. Ever.

4: Eugene Fodor's performance of Tchaikosky's violin was the first classical album I ever bought. Columbia Red Seal. I still can't find it on CD, and I have yet to hear anyone match his performance of the piece. He recieve so much acclaim and critisism. Too bad he went down the wrong road for part of his life, but don't we all?

5: Kraftwerk "Autobahn". The end of the 70's. I may put a bit too much importance on this album, but it brought electronic music to the spotlight. Electronic music wasn't new to me, Wendy Carlos "Switched on Bach" was the primary draw for me to dabble in synthesizers. But "Autobahn" was so much more, hmmm, whimsical. Ensemble-Oriented, that's it.

6: Mike Oldfield "Tubular Bells" One guy (mostly), a tape deck, and an imagination. I'm really glad this one sold as well as it did.

7: Tangerine Dream "Rubycon" I still wonder, how did THREE guys do this. I could see one, but not three. A wonderful collective work.

8: Return to Forever live on some TV concert show. Totally blown away. I discovered jazz.

9: Ramones "Rocket To Russia". You can laugh at this one. I played in punk bands for a while. Hell, I got an album on vinyl. But the thing about this album was that after all that arguing in college about who's the best, who's the greatest, this album loudly proclaimed "Who gives a crap. Let's just have fun and enjoy the music."

10: Fripp and Eno "No Pussyfootin'" and seeing Robert Fripp at a record store in Austin, TX during the Frippertronics tour. The album was, and still is, a top favorite and top influence. Seeing him actually do it was something I had to do. It's taken me a long time, and I'm still working on it. The way I look at is "yeah, he's just another Fripp loop copy." But there's alot fewer of me around than Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton clones. Kind of like the statements that Triumvirat was just another ELP. In my opinion, another ELP is a bit harder to pull off than another Thin Lizzy. I was a long time 70's progressive rock fan, but Fripp took it, and guitar playing, to a different level.

11: Gothic Playground. An unbelievable number of things happened musically to me in this time. I went from the guy who wished he was in a band, to that guy in the band. All local, but still a big step. It was a hell of a band. We were together for two years. We did an album which didn't sell, and played alot of crazy gigs.

12: Phillip Glass "Einstien on the Beach." There are YEARS between 10 and 12. I was at a friends house and mentioned that I had heard a tape that day called "The Desert Music" by Steve Reich. He said that is a good one, but he proceeded to play Einstien. I had never heard of minimalism, and still wonder if that's what I'm doing when I play. I have since listened to quite a bit. A confusing moment for me was reading a Melliflua review and seeing the name Terry Reily. I didn't know who he was, but I had to check him out. Still puzzled.

13: Brian Eno "Thursday Afternoon" This was not the first time I had ever heard Eno, but it was the first 60 min ambient piece I had heard. I didn't know what to expect. After about the first 20 minutes, I stopped expecting anything. I consider that to have been my first glance into what I am doing now.

14: Nalini. She was my sitar teacher for 8 months. Indian, classically trained, a student of Ravi's first student. Amazing musician. After playing music for years, this was the first time I ever had lessons. Indian music was not an easy thing to grasp, until I learned, as with "Thursday Afternoon" to stop reaching out to grasp. Foriegn culture, art, music. A whole new world. Amazing.

15: Nat King Cole "The Very Thought of You". For some odd reason, this became a favorite album. Everything about it. Absolutely wonderful.

I'll finish with the song that still runs chills up my spine.
16: Music of the Rain Forest Pygmies compiled by Colin Trumbull. The track "Mbuti: Clementine" by the Batwa Pygmoids will make you wonder about the history of the world. If you've never heard it, you owe it to yourself. We are all one.

Lunch hour's over, time to get back to it.

Antimon · Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 6:02 am Post subject:

This thread deserves more posts. Here's mine.

1) My cousin's record collection. By later calculations, I must have been about 6 or 7 years old when I visited the family of my mother's brother, hearing the son play Jean Michel Jarre, Popcorn and Pink Floyd and others. For me, there is always a kind of connection backwards in time when I listen to this music.

2) ELO - "Time". This was the first LP I bought for myself (I must have been 9). I did it because I saw the video for Twilight on a Norwegian/Swedish/Danish gameshow called "Hit" that asked questions with music videos as backdrop. I think it was the first time music videos were regularly shown on TV in this corner of the world.

3) Alan Parsons Project - "Ammonia Avenue". The second group that I bought an album by. I think APP have shaped my view of music more than anyone else, in that I now frown on labeling of music, and when a reviewer complains about an album being "unfocussed" I will say it's "eclectic" and consider it a great thing. This album has confusing and sinister cover artwork, Eric Woolfson's haunting, otherworldly voice, and beautiful songs.

4) School. In my mid-teens, school was divided into a heavy metal vs. synth battle that has forever left me alienated from the kind of metal that was played at that time, as well as a particular kind of synth music that had a renaissance a few years back (e.g. "Body Music"). It was so obvious that it wasn't about the music, it was music + hair + clothes.

5) The Commodore 64. The C64 happened to have, besides SID - one of the greatest synth chips - a handful of brilliant composers (Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Ben Dalgliesh etc) who made some weird, experimental stuff to games such as Sanxion (a wonderful version of Prokofiev's "Dance of the Capulets" from "Romeo and Juliet"), Parallax (a 15-minute psychedelic jam-like blast), Mutants, Master of the Lamps etc etc. Don't judge these by the chip tunes you hear nowadays (although often nice, they are different beasts), search out the real stuff.

6) Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells. Besides being a great record, this opened up my eyes to multitrack recording, and made me want a 4-track bad enough to spend all the money I had at the moment to buy it. Although I don't hope to make another Tubular Bells, there is a sense of power that you get from having a little box in front of you that allows you to lay down any amount of layers to make music - even if limited by the quality of tape and mixer. Of course, Mike Oldfield did Tubular Bells on 4-track as well, with endless ping-pong recordings.

7) The NMG2 noodle section here. This is a completely different take on music - something that I have thought a lot about since reading about Eno's Koan-based floppy disk that you could buy. Hearing what people make the machine do, and the feeling of putting together stuff myself and then seeing it come alive - it's magic.

There are loads more stuff and musicians that I look upon as role models and guides, but the 7 above have probably done the most to make me look at music the way I do today.

/Stefan

Keysandslots · Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 7:40 am Post subject:

What I find amazing (and interesting) about this thread is the appearance of common records through the various posts. Just when I'm thinking I'm some sort of unsophisticated lowly acoustic piano player because I can't quite "get" electronic, trance-type music, along comes a bunch of people who have the same albums I do.

I recall listening to my younger sister's Monkees records and thinking the songs were kinda trash pop. One record had an instrument called a "Moog Synthesizer" on it and we were trying to figure out what the thing was and what sound it was making. That was 1967 and I was 9 years old (7 years later I had an 88 Stage Rhodes, 9 years later I was playing the Minimoog at Humber College). When my sister grew out of those records, we trashed them. I'm still kicking myself for that.

A list for me:

First record - The 5th Dimension - Aquarius (I still love "Let the Sunshine In")
Second record - Beatles - Abbey Road

Stuff that influenced me (in no particular order):

Gino Vannelli - Storm at Sunup
Chick Corea - Romantic Warrior
Vince Guaraldi - A Charlie Brown Christmas
Yes - Yessongs
Loggins And Messina - Sittin' In
Doobie Bros - Minute by Minute and The Captain and Me
Steely Dan - Can't Buy a Thrill, nearly everything else
Larry Fast - everything
Tower of Power - various (seeing them live in Mississauga this fall)
Jan Hammer - The First Seven Days
Herbie Hancock - Headhunters
Billy Preston - some of the early tunes
Edgar Winter - some of the early tunes (Frankenstein, Free Ride, etc.)
Weather Report - everything
Allman Bros - Brothers and Sisters
Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon (of course)
George Duke - various
Jeff Beck - Wired
The Yellowjackets - various
Earth Wind and Fire - various
Donna Summer - yup, I know but Giorgio Moroder had some cool synth stuff
Uriah Heep - Demons and Wizards, Magician's Birthday
and all sorts of others.

I think we all had favourite bands when we were teens, picked up every record without hearing it first. I'd be interested in what other's favourites were. Mine was Yes. For awhile there I bought every Yes album (and then CD), especially if Wakeman was on it.

I'd also be curious to know who your main influence was. I think for me, it was Vince Guaraldi. If I listen to myself (search for my last name, Piscione, in the iTunes store), I hear bits of Guaraldi, although maybe that's wishful thinking.

Randy

seraph · Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 8:13 am Post subject:

jkn · Joined: Mar 14, 2004 Posts: 469 Location: La Porte, IN, USA

I agree - I think age has a lot to do with it. I started really paying attention and listening to music in the 80's... but I was born in 1970 - so most of my early influences were 80's era until I started branching out more deeply into other genres. The reason I wanted to get into synths so bad was after hearing Depeche Mode and Howard Jones... and it didn't take long to dive into Cabaret Voltaire and a host of synthpop, industrial, ebm, etc... stuff during that time. I also got into jazz during that same sort of timeframe and started discovering the 70's stuff on cheap used vinyl... Smile

So anyway... who were the big influences?

The Beatles - this is the earliest band I remember loving. Way before I started getting into buying my own albums I loved my dubbed off the radio cassettes of the Beatles (never mind that not only had they broken up, but I think Wings was done as well...) Smile

Depeche Mode - as mentioned above - they were one of the main reasons I started getting into synths (started piano when I was 5, btw).

Cabaret Voltaire - another 80's thing - though I dove back into their 70's catalog and their last album in about '93 or so is maybe my favorite.

Herbie Hancock - his piano work during the 60's is amazing - and Headhunters is a fantastic album. Mwandishi era as well.

Background music in film/tv... I love the way a certain bit of music or sound can influence emotion so much on screen. I don't necessarily follow who wrote what (though I do look at the credits when it's exceptional) - nor do I really collect soundtrack albums.

whoops - out of time. I'll ramble on about ambient, motown, funk, and minimal techno influences later.

bachus · Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 9:04 am Post subject:

Bach
Prokofiev
Hollywood--particularly cartoon scores.

Low Note · Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 2:51 pm Post subject:

My first musical obsession was listening to mainstream 90s ska and punk.

I quickly dived into Reggae and the Clash. These two sources of inspiration are pretty much the starting point for everything for me. I can relate nearly everything I listen to to these two in some way -even if its just the passion and fire that those two had.

In terms of classical music, my first obsession was Shostakovich, but now I spend a lot more time listening to the European and West Coast 20th Century writers. Mostly pre-1945 unless its electronic in some way.