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Personal Music History

Early Years

Before 2011, I had a very limited idea of what music was out there. I grew up essentially piggybacking off of my parents' taste: Billy Joel, Elton John, The Beatles, Coldplay, and U2, to name a few. Most of the music that I knew of at that point were songs that I had heard on the radio. The only physical release I owned was a CD-R copy of Green Day's American Idiot that I had been given as a gift from an uncle. For the most part, though, the songs that I had in my digital space was stuff directly taken from my parents' iTunes libraries. It was all I had, and I didn't really know any better.

I started playing trombone when I was in fifth grade and didn't stop until very early into my freshman year of college, so I knew about marches and suites and jazz and all that. But I never really explored any of it. It was music I was playing, not music I particularly wanted to listen to (although I am beginning to come around to the idea).


The Spark

In December 2011, I heard Pink Floyd's "Brain Damage / Eclipse" on the local classic rock station. I knew of Pink Floyd, but my only real prior exposure to them was hearing "Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2" on the radio. I remember thinking how good it was. It was utterly unlike anything I'd heard before.

I dug up a copy of The Dark Side of the Moon and The Division Bell and listened to them non-stop. The same uncle who had given me the CD-R copy of American Idiot had also given me a copy of Animals, and I sped through that, too. For Christmas that year, I received a CD copy of The Wall. For the next year, I listened to practically nothing else but these four Pink Floyd albums. I was fortunate enough to see Roger Waters perform The Wall in 2012. The obsession had begun now in earnest, and it wouldn't let up until years later, after many bootleg downloads from almost certainly untrustworthy sites and hours staying awake in the dark, just listening.

In 2014, I also had the chance to see Imagine Dragons perform on their Into the Night tour, which was a blast. I don't listen to them much anymore, but it was a great show.


College Begins

Pink Floyd was still very much my obsession going into college, but I was branching out. I listened, for the first time, to two of what are now my favorite albums in my first semester: King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King and The Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed. Also around this time, a friend asked me to check out Nirvana, and I listened to Nevermind, In Utero, and my personal favorite: MTV Unplugged in New York.

In early 2015, I listened to Radiohead's OK Computer for the first time. I don't remember how I stumbled upon it, or Court or Days of Future Passed, for that matter, but those three albums and Nirvana were the start of my increasing exposure to the broader world of music, sort of continuing the trend of classic rock and alt rock that I had grown up with.

And then, in the summer, I went in a completely different direction.

90s Christian Electronic / Industrial.

One of my good writer friends from Skype, SS&E, had started publishing a longform, music-based story, with author's notes that included his taste in music. This was the one posted for the first chapter:



I was instantly hooked, and bought both of their albums a couple days later, and I also discovered that one of the members, Jon Sonnenberg, had a blog for his solo project, Travelogue (you can visit his blog here).

Having grown up with pretty much only rock and whatever pop the radio was playing, I was hearing something completely new to me.

And I loved it.

In 2016, SS&E linked me to two more groups in the same vein as House of Wires. The first was Cloud2Ground, which later became the band Shiny Toy Guns. I listened to both their E-Majn and The Gate <Beautiful> albums quite a bit that year. He also introduced me to Deitiphobia, and specifically their 1999 album Lo:Fi vs. Sci:Fi, which is mainly EBM with elements of electro-industrial.

There was something about that Deitiphobia album that appealed to me, and as fate would have it, Jon Sonnenberg had been part of an older project called Pivot Clowj. In 2016, he digitally reissued their second album on Bandcamp: It’s Not As If It Were the End of the World… That Was Yesterday. It scratched that itch I had, but when I read the release notes, there was a mention of a track cut from the reissue because it was a cover. Curious, I looked up the cover on YouTube and found out who the original artist was. This was the original track:



Portion Control really nailed the sound I had been looking for, and I ended up purchasing digital copies of their albums ..Step Forward and I Staggered Mentally, their EP Hit the Pulse, and a slew of singles: "Go-Talk," "Rough Justice," and "The Great Divide."

And yet, while I was exploring this musical niche, I was going back and revisiting an artist I enjoyed once upon a time in more depth: Led Zeppelin. I was first introduced to them years ago through the Mothership compilation, but now I was exploring their actual discography: finally getting into non-Pink Floyd albums proper. It was a good feeling.

In the summer of 2016, another writer friend of mine, April, got me hooked on this track by a group called Orange that only ever produced one single, "Judy Over the Rainbow." But there was a promo video produced:



It's an incredible track and criminally obscure. It was around this time that I began to transcribe lyrics; April had been trying to piece together what was being sung here, and I eventually ended up finding the main guy, Rick Corcoran, on Facebook and asking him directly (and he responded!). After that, I started focusing my efforts on Deitiphobia's Lo:Fi vs. Sci:Fi, but the vocals were so distorted that it was almost impossible to discern anything.

Towards the end of the year, I made an account at last.fm to keep track of everything I listened to and to identify patterns in how I listened to music. It essentially boiled down to either listening straight through albums or listening to the same track twenty times in a row.

"Judy" stuck with me for a while, and in 2018 we discovered that Rick had rerecorded the track under a new project, The Orgone Box. But there's something else that happened first.


College Continues

Between 2017 and 2018, I listened to eighty-nine new albums, more albums than I had listened to before 2017 combined. Thanks to SS&E and April, I'd had a sort of musical awakening. I felt comfortable enough to check out music and artists outside my normal purview. I was, and still largely am, a creature of habit, so while this may not seem all that important, I grew a lot as a person because of it.

2017 was filled with lots of listens to Deitiphobia, Led Zeppelin, and, yes, Pink Floyd still. At April's urging, I listened to more Yes albums besides Close to the Edge. I went to see Tears for Fears in concert that summer, so I ended up listening to Songs from the Big Chair and The Seeds of Love quite a bit. My family got me to listen to Twenty One Pilots, and though I'm not as big a fan of them now as I was then, I'm glad that I listened through their discography. In November, I bought tickets with my roommates to see Saint Motel perform a short drive away from my school. I also finally explored Jon Sonnenberg's solo work as Travelogue, and found some really nice minimal wave / minimal synth waiting for me (very different from either Pivot Clowj or House of Wires).

But there were two bands that really stood out in 2017, far above the rest.

The first is that classic, all-American rock group from Venice Beach: The Doors. I grew up listening to a compilation of their hits and had listened to a couple of their albums back in 2015, but I made the full dive into their discography this time, essentially going chronologically from The Doors to L.A. Woman. Jim Morrison, to this day, remains my favorite singer. I spent weeks tracking down live albums, both official and not, just to keep hearing their music.

The second band is one I had listened to previously, back in 2015: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.

One of my friends from high school introduced me to them by way of their second album Eyes Like the Sky, a spaghetti western audiobook with backing music from the band, and their sixth album Quarters!, which is a sort of psych / jazz rock combo wherein each of the four tracks is exactly 10:10 (hence the title). I enjoyed both, but beyond the first track from Quarters!, "The River," I hadn't really bothered to explore the rest of their discography.

In 2017, though, they released five full-length albums of new music, each exploring a different genre.

It was ludicrous. I remember thinking that there was no way in hell that any of the albums were going to be good. They had churned them out so quickly!



Well.

In the month and a half between the release of their twelfth album, Polygondwanaland, and the end of the year, I listened to that album fifty-one times.

In 2018, I listened to the same album an additional eighty-nine times.

I'd found a band that resonated with me, that I fell in love with like I had with Pink Floyd back in 2011. I was completely floored. 2018 was the year of King Gizzard, so much so that I even joined the Discord server for the official Subreddit, where I met a lot of great friends who were more than willing to recommend me new music.

And then I really started branching out.

Once again, April had introduced me to more music that I now love. Ready?


In January, I bought tickets to see Walk the Moon play at the same venue where Saint Motel had just a couple months prior. By July, my then-girlfriend had also introduced me to Mr. Bungle's excellent California, which I played pretty heavily while walking to and from campus. I was also able to see Twenty One Pilots live in October, and they put on a great show.

In October, on recommendation from April, I made an account at Rate Your Music / Sonemic so I could, y'know... rate my music. It also proved helpful to see what albums I'd previously listened to so that I could find albums by the same artist or similar releases by contemporaries. This is also where I began to more heavily explore genres, though at this point in time, I was mainly interested in releases that the userbase of RYM had collectively deemed "good."

By early 2019, I had begun purchasing some CDs of interest through Discogs (namely releases from The Orgone Box, Deitiphobia, and Travelogue) and had started using Spotify again (after a false start in 2015).


Moving On

After I finished college, I began working full-time in July 2019. Gone were the days where I was listening to music for 80% of my day, walking back from class with my earbuds blasting all sorts of stuff. I was an Adult now, a Professional. Of course, that didn't stop me from seeing Dave Matthews Band in concert (they were good, but I didn't know very much of the material they played).

Despite this setback, however, I listened to ninety-four new albums last year, either through more recommendations by that perennial favorite April, from the Gizz server on Discord, or simply by trawling through charts on RYM.

Let's start with April:


From the Gizz server:


And finally, my own curiosity and recommendations from RYM:


But as 2019 progressed, I found myself listening to Pink Floyd and King Gizzard less and less. There were new artists in the rotation now, material that I hadn't spent hours upon hours listening to and that I wanted to explore more, particularly Out of the Blue, The Cars, Psonic Psunspot, and Argus. Both bands remain my two most listened-to artists, far and away, but I really was moving on, whether I liked it or not, and I had to learn to be okay with that.

2020 was not the year I had expected, in more ways than one, but I was still listening to new music in quarantine. I began contributing to the RYM Ultimate Box Set project and actually published one focusing on 90s Christian Electronic music, which you can read here. Here's a list of my favorite albums I listened to for the first time in 2020:


2021 was a wild year. I continued to branch out musically and used the highest rated albums on RYM as a rough suggestion list. As with anything, some worked for me, some didn't, but I don't regret listening to any of it. Towards the end of the year, I simultaneously changed jobs and discovered my love for '90s jungle / drum and bass. There aren't really any famous albums in that scene, save for a handful of compilations, so I'll go ahead and list some of my favorite tracks for you to check out, if interested.


As for more traditional albums, here are some of my favorites I listened to in 2021:


I listened to a lot more music in 2022. Living by yourself allows a lot more free time than I would have thought possible. I spent a lot more time exploring genres that I used to listen to more a few years ago (progressive rock, psychedelic rock, and alternative rock) in order to better familiarize myself with the breadths of said genres. I also got into new wave and experimental music, two genres I had danced around for a long time but had never really explored beyond the major tracks.

In July, I completed a month-long endeavor to publish the first draft of a new list on RYM: An Incomplete History of Christian Industrial. I had realized how analog this scene really was: a large amount of the music that came out of this little niche is simply not available online in any capacity. I was fortunate enough to connect with the founder of one of the labels in this scene (who shall go unnamed, for privacy reasons) and purchased a few rarities from him that I'd been searching for. The amount of feedback on the list was somewhat surprising, considering how few people are even aware of the artists involved (at least on RYM), but it was encouraging. I also published a smaller companion list to highlight the "key" releases: you can read that one here.

Some favorite albums I listened to in 2022:


2023 is shaping up to be a hell of a year. As the title of that list implies, An Incomplete History of Christian Industrial is incomplete. I've acquired a large amount of music that I need to sort through, listen to, and research before updating the list, so I've been working on "v.2.0" when I have some free time. I have far-flung plans of doing a similar "megalist" for Christian EDM, but I'm much less familiar with that scene (plus it's much bigger, and still fairly active), so no promises there. I've been getting into industrial music more broadly this year, too, and I hope to continue that trend. I'm also hoping to publish more content on this Neocities site this year, to really flesh out some of the pages / projects I have in the works.

Last updated: 31 January 2023

Please feel free to recommend me music, either through Rate Your Music / Sonemic or through last.fm. I'm always looking for new things to listen to!

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