BCT - Bachelor of Creative Technologies at AUT in Auckland is a multi-disciplinary 3-year degree. Students are asked to keep a blog of their journey, I'm a student, and this is my blog. No doubt I'll be explaining our projects as we go and my personal insights to them. Hopefully it will be mildly interesting.

27 October 2012

Influences

I haven't mentioned what's going on in my head when making my sonic soundscapes. So lets talk about some music I like and how that affects what I am doing for my Emerging Practices composition.
Well I have a range of different likes within music, some probably representative of my age and background, though lets set the record straight here. When I say that I mean stuff that that anyone would like, y'know, like the 60s and 70s greats, Doors, Jimi Hendrix blah blah... Not um... I dunno what do people my age with no taste like? Limp Biscuit probably. Yeah nah.
But that's not influencing me much here really. Nor is funky party music, nor is the deep warm sound of analog recordings of the 70s (Split Enz Mental Notes had some of that). Nor is... I dunno....
I've always liked what I used to call as a kid "soundy" music. So the 80s was good for that with all the synths etc.
A favourite artist of mine was/is The The, here is an example of a later album of his (sort of one guy):

But in the late 90s and early 2000s, we had progressive house and trance, one of my favourite albums that I still listen to on occasion, had cranked up in the Studio (through headphones) was the Northern Exposure 2 album:
 

I used to frequent gigs put on by a couple of friends Tom and "Snitch", Analog which was "tech house". Like a lot of dance music genres, that name has been evolved to a bunch of slightly different genres so it's hard to pinpoint what I mean when I say tech house. Whatever Snitch plays when he isn't playing Breaks. A little bit later there were was Breaks, and the Breakers Delight nights, but that is a bit different. I first heard Breaks at a trance gig and was wide eyed about it all (though that might not have been just the music actually).
Recently a friend of mine who I kind of met through that whole scene put on one of her favourite musical outfits one night while I was over and we listened to it in the background the entire night. It was Coil. I knew about Coil and my friends like of them for the whole 10 or so years I've known her but I'd never actually heard complete examples of their work until recently - specifically that one night, she had an unreleased, alts and demos album on. A track in particular that stuck in my head was called Elves.
 

Now when I put my mix up you can marvel at how it sounds nothing like nothing like any of the examples here and say to yourself "wtf?".
But perhaps this gives some idea as to where I'm coming from. Even if the crap I produce sounds nothing like it. My composition has been spat out in a short time and within a certain brief and I'm quite happy to stick to it given that I can't afford more time -  as much as I'd like to mess with it more. the brief says it's not meant to be musical though we can produce what we like. I'll stick to the not meant to be musical part because less can go wrong.
Last words, 2 of these examples have religious sounding tones to them (in the beginning anyway) - though they don't really so much if you actually listen to them... I just want to point out I'm very much not religious at all.

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