Otto Matta

All great psy artists have started by learning a traditional instrument. I recommend a harmonica, bassoon, trombone or castanets. If you skip this part your music will end up like Skazi's.

Some of that was creepy.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what the Thor synth can do.

Alcyone.

I personally often enjoy the psy interpretation of electro. Straight electro is not so interesting to my ears. Examples of good interpretations: X-Dream's recent stuff (I've been listening to We Interface in the car a lot lately), recent Wizzy Noise and of course Genetic.

Dammit, I always forget to turn down the volume in my headphones when I listen to NHJO. It's like a blast of insanity straight into my cerebral koreatex.

I'd love to hear an Etnica electro disc.

First of all, people, it's "genius". Not "genious." Thanks. Pet peeve of mine. Verb, I hear you. I've also been an art student in the past - art undergrad, architecture grad - and I also write music. We're clearly the sensitive, creative types. If we can't or don't create we go crazy. I hear you. I just want to respond by saying that there's a very good, and very complex, reason why we create. And I don't think it's an act entirely insulated from the outside world. I don't believe you when you say you don't care about other people when you make melodies. I don't believe you because the expression of art is, I believe, a form of communication. Sure, you may not be attempting to communicate with everybody, but you are attempting to make contact with those you consider worth contacting. Maybe it's five people. Maybe a hundred. But they're the ones you essentially want as friends or allies. They're your kind, your spiritual nodes, if I may be so flaketastic. Our art, I really believe (and I admit I could merely speaking for myself), is the attempt to reach people like ourselves. Artists are alone in the world because there are so few of us. We and the philosophers are the tip of the iceberg of humanity (Schopenhauer). And it's that lonliness that causes us to reach out to those who just might understand and appreciate us in the way we prefer to be understood and appreciated, and we're just not going to get that sort of contact with 99.99% of people. So I can't help but feel that your complaints - which I can certainly relate to to an extent - are caused by existential lonliness, from getting heckled by the void. Your only option, seems to me, is to toughen up and get better at creating. Climb to the mountain cave, hang out for as long as it takes, and when you're ready, come back down and share what you've learned with the people.

I honestly don't know. I have to assume that D-Dave would let us know when his new stuff is ready.

+1 I think I might even like Moby more.

Dave BotFB said he was stopping Schlab and focusing more on industrial breakbeat stuff or something like that, as I recall. I too would love to hear Ka-Sol's album. It was supposed to be a double-album!

I've got a sizeable collection, and I've listened to most of it many times, but yeah, it's weird to have so much music and seldomly listen to much of it - and still want more. I think what it comes down to for me is that I keep the stuff around because I have so much emotion (and money) invested in each CD that I can't bear to part with any of them. Maybe once or twice a year I'll get in a mood and remove all the CDs I know I'll never listen to (which is sometimes a mistake). If I didn't do this I'd have well over a thousand CDs. And I'd feel so damn guilty having so much music I'd probably never listen to again. I do the same with my books.

Really?

My blood type is A-killargh. My DJ set always conquers several third world nations. But I'm so PLUR I just give them back their autonomy. My DJ set created a tsunami that killed 50,000 hippies. My DJ set spawned a new element called trancium. The Chinese listen to my sets by putting their ears to the ground. My DJ set inspired the Hindus to create a new veda in the Upanishads. An alien race on another planet had almost given up listening for signals of extraterrestrial intelligence until my DJ set arrived in their antennae - at light speed. They're on their way over. To dance and smoke a chara. My DJ set was ultimately blamed for 9/11, so it wasn't an inside job, considering I was in Goa at the time. Philip K. Dick wrote a novel about one of my DJ sets. Later, a Hollywood movie was made about it, to great acclaim. Albert Hofmann and Timothy Leary sampled me.

Heh. I hear you, and I appreciate the advice. It doesn't quite speak to my case though. I wouldn't interpret my being increasingly discriminating as my being unhappy or unfulfilled, because I'm neither. And when my being asks me to let go for a while, I let go. Most of the time, though, my being wants to create, and music has been the vehicle for a little while.

Definitely. I personally would love to have a collaborative partner with whom I could write music for a long time, but, like I personally feel about pretty much any of my own future interpersonal relationships, the potential is slimmer the older I get. So I just go ahead and do my thing, not really waiting for it to happen. It really comes down to, I feel, severe introversion.

Yeah, I was going to say a similar thing. It's hard to get around that control thing. At the same time, though, I've known people who need collaborators to be creative. Most rock'n'roll bands are like that, if you think about it. To me, writing music has always been like painting a painting. When you paint, it's a highly personal experience, and you simply don't have collaborators. You paint the painting, alone, until it's done. You may later do some touch-ups to it, put varnish and frame on it. Put your signature on it! Before the varnish, of course. And then you display it to people, like it's something on the wall. That you made! That you put your heart and soul into! All by yourself! Hehe. If you don't like it you're an asshole! No, not really.

One track that really convinced me early on that I was listening to something really different was California Sunshine's Tokyo Underground. It made me hallucinate sober with eyes closed (in headphones). Edit: And a little later, Colorbox's Train to Chroma City blew my mind.

Hehe. Nicely put.

I just wanted to say how I think this is one of the funniest topics on Psynews, ever. And I like the social subtlety in who likes what and who doesn't.

So sweet. A match in the making.

Okay, that description is pretty much what I had in mind when I mentioned the "slots in the frequency spectrum". Yes, it is subjective, isn't it? Same thing with opinions on compression usage, I find. It all adds up to the ol' "learn the rules so you know how to break them" adage.

You can't really know unless you try. My first instinct is to say no, because there are many companies that specialize in making kick-butt headphones. Price is generally an issue, although the rule, "You get what you pay for", is fuzzy with headphones. Some people pay a lot of money for Bose or Sony headphones, for instance, but their prices are jacked and their quality is relatively low, so it's therefore a ripoff. Opinions that one gets here are highly subjective. I, for one, many years ago used to think Sony headphones were the shit, and spent good money on them. But that was part of the learning process.

With the exception of a couple garage bands in the 80s and 90s, and a collaboration here and there, I've always been solo. Not so much that I don't enjoy the collaborative experience, but I think my love for being alone and personal with music outweighs it. I find it's very much like a relationship, in that it's not easy to find that right partner, but when it happens it's a lot of fun for however long it lasts. So in the same way it seems one has to "play the field." Unless one enjoys bachelor life too much. Hehe.

I see, like harmonics or something? Or like the spectral analysis of an astronomical object? (How's that for geeky?) And depending on where those harmonics are peaking, one can cut or boost them? Or even move them? Damn, whenever I feel I'm finally starting to really get it, I realize that there are just more levels to attain. Where does it stop, I wonder? Hehe. :drama: