My name is Gordon.
I guess this all started about 6 years ago, when I was in one of those heavy rock bands that every kid starts as soon as they buy an Ibanez. We had big ambitions, but they were a lot higher than our skill, or our understanding of how music actually works. I always wanted to be a rock star, and I was just as moody as all the greats.
I spent a year putting up with a band that I kept convincing myself was perfect, but always had the underlying impression that I wasn't satisfied. I guess any fifteen year old's impression of perfection is pretty close to the exact opposite.
I remember downloading my first sequencing software. It was called Hammerhead or something like that. I don't even know why I decided to get it, but it made music that I felt was more important than anything with power chords, even though the samples sounded like they came for free with my cereal.
I remember coming across two incredible albums at about the same time: "Kid A" and "ágætis byrjun". They were magical, and still are. There was something about them that made everything else irrelevant in my life. I started spending evenings studying these albums in a trance like state, trying to understand what it was about them that bestowed the emotions I felt while listening. Even to this day I listen with a notepad.
I never considered myself that good of a detective. I didn't think I could ever find any more music that was as special as this, so I began trying to figure it out on my own so I could create more for myself. The experiment started out very much as that: an experiment. But no beakers or foaming green liquid, but if I had those at my disposal I probably would have tried to make music with them. I composed more so as a sound collage, more so than anything comprehendable as a real song.
The idea was to take away all aspects of the music I was currently making with a band, because at the time the heavy detuned guitars of my band had no place in the world of the music I started listening to. I tried anything and there was little to any continuity to anything I recorded. The earliest recordings were only ever heard by close friends who just didn't get it. I took a long time figuring out what made me happy and what I wanted from music, but with every song I attached my experiences and my life, and began the autobiography.
Most of the music I've made no one will ever hear, it's merely for me to reflect upon where I've been. I guess in a way I am co-writing my own soundtrack, because the music I really love, including my own, has the deepest sense of time and place to me. Always being a thinking man, I cherish the music in my life as much as the people, because the best times always have the best theme songs.
As I experience more of my life, I have more to reflect upon, and more to create. As I learn more about myself I will learn how to better recreate the perfect music I dream up in an intangiable form. Perhaps it will work, perhaps not. Either way, I'm alive and I'm living each moment with a song in my head. One I might have heard before, but usually not.
-Gordon
