i came to the realization when i was young that things in music never quite went the way i wanted them to. i'm not talking about the progression and evolution of genre, or the electronic companies that produced the mediums on which what they pass as art is purchased on edging their way into the market with mass produced formats. there was just something of passion in my desire to hear it that took music from me.
i grew up in a musical family. my mother taught piano, played the organ for the church, and taught elemetary school music classes. her mother's house was a place i always liked to go. she owned a very large, two full manual organ. very nice sound, and quite clear and shocking. she also had a grand piano for the recitals she hosted, and an upright model for teaching. my grandmother was very good at what she did. she taught piano and organ, and played the harp. that was one of two very important things in my musical life. i would curl up on a blanket at the foot of her massive harp, and she lullabied me to sleep. i remember that vividly. the songs she played for me were simple songs. i was young, and always wanted to hear the alphabet song, or jesus loves me. regardless, it was a vivid collection of memory for me.
the second very important factor was that she owned recording equipment. my brother and i would go to her house, and use her two deck tape recorder to record ourselves. he played the guitar alot at that time, and i just wanted to be around it. the things we did to enhance the music always interested me. we would get the chordless phone, and put the reciever end of it on the strings above the pickup, then go to another phone in the house and speak into it, or we would call automated time and temperature numbers. that was the first time i had heard a guitar talk. from then on, my attention was gotten towards sound engineering.
i played several instruments over the years. among them were the flute, piano, organ, and guitar. i had formal lessons on the piano for a short time by my grandmother, and formal instruction for several years on the flute. none of them really interested me, though. my mind always wandered back to the things we would do to my brother's guitar, and the recording equipment in the back room of my grandmother's house. then, one day, everything changed. my mother got rid of the upright piano we kept at our house, and replaced it with a keyboard. it was a move she made to better accomodate her new husband, which brought something into the house that became a major factor, a computer.
my brother and i started recording things with microsoft sound recorder. using that and a tape player, we started making things in multiple layers. it was a painstaking and tedious process. he did alot of the playing, and i just messed with sound recorder. splicing was in for me, in a big way.
it finally hit me when i was 18. the obsession had stayed away for most of my life. music was always there, but when i got to be old enough, i lost focus on everything else to make the sounds that were in my head a reality of compressed air currents. sound produced images of fourier analysis in my head, and i couldn't get enough of playing with them. i already had a skewed view on reality brought on by persistant antisocial behavior. i had strange tastes to begin with, and it all collided to make wonderful sounds.
i always claimed to be a part of the "experimental music" movement. the term interested me greatly. it made a link in my brain between music and science. two of the things i and very fond of. after a while, however, i saw how it was just another scene, just like all the rock stars, and the country music experience. there were alot of kids in the town i was in that just did it to get some ass. it made me sick. all these people claiming the title of musician, just because they can loopback static to static. chris newman and i did a little stint in the experimenetal music field for a short time after that, then that's when i decided that i was no longer experimenting. i had found my results. this music is what i've been searching for. theory had become law.
