Sorry if this is all a bit crabwise, but I’m a bit drunk right now.
I’ve just been to a Sunday matinee gig at the Museum Vaults in Sunderland. Usually these are DIY punk gigs but today it was summat a bit different: Badger, Seizure and Holy Braille (my preferences ran in the reverse order) - mostly electronica with a bit hip-hop in the middle. At any rate, by the headliners, I found meself thinking what it was that didn’t quite sit well with me and concluded it was what I’ve heard termed as “the tyranny of small differences”. I’ve been making electronica for donkey’s years and so I inevitably have particular opinions and tastes about how it should sound, which tends to make me more critical than I would typically be with, say, a punk band, cos I haven’t done much of that.
Anyway, all of this preamble is probably kind of irrelevant. The point is, it got me reflecting on my own stuff and I hit on the sudden realisation that I’ve been doing this shit for 30 years. And I’m still not good at it, so I should probably keep me opinions to meself.
So anyhow, for anyone who has waded through this, here’s a giggle for you: a video I did a few years ago when I realised I’d been making music for a quarter of a century. It’s basically a string of short clips of songs - one per year - I made between 1994 and 2019, starting with OctaMED and moving on through Cubase to starting with Renoise back in 2004. I know it’s mostly crap, but there’s a pleasingly unsanitised or idealised progression to it anyway. It’s one of these thing where I like to see it occasionally cos it makes me feel like I have actually developed a bit, even if in essence my musical ideas are basically the same as they were in my teens.
It might interest you anyway.I feel a weird need to fly the flag for talentless hacks.