For about 15 years, from the time I was 15 until I hit 30 or so, I was immersed in electronic music. Early electronic bands like Human League (anybody else remember Empire State Human?) and Ultravox, Gary Numan (the first show I ever saw live), Visage, Kraftwerk, DAF, Freur, Vangelis, Jean Michelle Jare, later followed by Depeche Mode, Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails… When I wasn’t listening to it I was making it. I had built an extensive little studio by the end and must of spent close to $35K on music gear all together.
My souped up Mac IIx with it’s original (Rev A) AudioMedia and SampleCell cards look pretty silly now, but they rocked when I bought them… So did the Fostex A8 (later replaced by an Alesis ADAT) and the Roland and Makie mixers I had. Ahh, technical nostalgia…
Kids, a career, house, car, all ate into my time, energy and cash to the point where I could no longer spend the 10 – 12 hours at a stretch that it took to get into the zone to write, and I slowly sold off all my bigger pieces of equipment. It’s been nearly 10 years since I wrote any music.
Well, my birthday was just before Christmas, and I decided to give myself a present. I asked everyone for money instead of gifts this year and bought my self some new toys:
I’ve got to say that Ableton’s Live just rocks. It goes beyond making it easy to work with loops, it makes it trivial. Stuff that used to take me hours of trimming and tweaking and transposing and resampling now are one or two clicks away. It’s too easy… The instant gratification of dropping an existing loop into Live means its harder to make myself go to Reason and build up a sequence from scratch. Oh well, I guess that’s a good problem to have.
But the most stunning thing is the lack of clutter, the Ozone and my PowerBook, that’s it. Amazing.
Now I have to see whether I can get my old DAT player working so I can go through my old demo’s to scratch together some ideas.
Oh, as an aside Kraftwerk is coming to Toronto in April…
All the bands you mentioned are still great and it seems that alot of new bands are reproducing their style. That is my observation yet I came across Dada Pogrom who has managed to turn my ears upside down in the electronic scheme of things. It is really dark and chilly. In any case, google the same and listen:
http://www.dadapogrom.com
That is a very good point Rachel and I did check out Dada Pogrom who is an interesting artist. I find “Eternity” and “Lota Draconis” brilliantly evil. Right now though, I am onto “Batcave” from Vanity Beach. Perhaps you might want to check out their chill. Here is the link for you:
http://www.purevolume.com/vanitybeach
Btw, I saw “War is a Pogrom” on Badwolf TV – very impressive stuff.