EPThttp://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=329075
Edit: Please try to read part 1 first. While I try to offer context in part 2, much of what I have to say here refers back to part 1.
In 1993, I was graduating from college, my first girlfriend (mentioned in my last post) had dumped me, and I had started a new job out in the middle of nowhere working on testing nuclear missiles and launching spy satellites at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, CA. Plenty of nihilism to go around.
My interest in industrial music was getting more... rarefied, intellectualized? I'd gotten the idea of making a career in motion picture production, and I found myself drawn toward music that was more cinematic, maybe, than what I'd listened to before.
This was a song by Front Line Assembly, originally released in 1992, which was at the start of that trend. Front Line Assembly was a project mainly run by Canadian musician Bill Leeb, who had previously been a member of Skinny Puppy under the pseudonym "Wilhelm Schroeder."
Fun note: My first car was crashed twice (once by me) and both times that album ("Tactical Neural Implant") was playing. I have since forbidden copies to be carried in my vehicles.
Front 242 had drifted off in the direction of less poppy, more complex songs as well. I'd listen to this while driving out among the space launch facilities (closed to the public, so I was quite alone.) Sorry there's no video.
At the same time, though, some friends from school had encouraged me to try out some of the first artists to work on what's more recently been called "ambient" or "trance" music. The first of this that I ever heard had been a couple years earlier in 1989, by a fellow student at Harvey Mudd who had insisted that I sit down and listen to this. What he played for me was The Orb's "Little Fluffly Clouds":
Around 1993-4, I started to get into William Orbit. William Orbit was a session musician for IRS Records who had been described by Miles Copeland III (founder of IRS and brother of The Police's Stewart Copeland) as "IRS Records' secret weapon."
Around this time, I got my hands on the (then new) boxed set from The Police that had ALL their songs, and I immersed myself in it from beginning to end. Before that point I hadn't really seen the connection between them and ska, but now it was obvious to me, and I loved it. This song is a particularly good example of that. Try comparing it to something like English Beat or one of their real ska predecessors to get the connection.
In mid-1995, I found myself listening to Soundgarden. My former, Depeche-Mode-listening girlfriend and I had briefly flirted with the music of Nirvana, when they were brand new, and Soundgarden caught my attention right as I was making a trip, in the spring of 1995, at age 24, to see another former crush from 9 years earlier who lived in Seattle. Coincidentally, they were playing Seattle while I was there, and the city had basically shut down for them.
I spent the next several years listening largely to what was on the radio, since it was starting to get interesting to me again. In 1995, I left Vandenberg to work at a TV manufacturer (Mitsubishi Consumer Electronics) and I found myself listening to a lot of music like Garbage:
and No Doubt:
No Doubt, of course, also had that ska connection going on. I see that as a thread through pop music from 1980s to the present that most people don't really acknowledge, and it's still going on to this day.
In 1996, I got my big break and started working at Disney Animation. The first few months I was there, I found myself more interested in industrial music again. Of course, the genre had by now involved to be more of an electronic twist on metal than it used to be. One song from this period that caught my attention in particular was "Guilty" from Gravity Kills:
For the next few years I mostly listened, as I'd said, to what was on the radio, but around 1999 I found myself drawn into music by Propellerheads (much of which wound up on my visual effects and animation demo reel over that time.) One great piece from that timeframe was called Spybreak! and was featured in The Matrix:
Here's the sequence from The Matrix that uses the song:
Around that time, I left Disney and moved to the SF Bay to work at PDI, the company which (shortly thereafter) released Shrek. I'll cover the timeframe from there to the present in part 3, where you'll hear about:
1) Why Gorillaz was so fascinating at the time.
2) Why someone who loved industrial music could also come to love the music of Sarah McLachlan.
3) The hip-hop that you didn't hear about in parts 1 and 2 and where that led.
4) How having a healthy income and the introduction of the brand new iTunes Music Store in 2003 conspired to make my musical life a lot more complex.
