this is also from before, and i won't post it there again, but i'll post it here:

this isn't just bowie's best record, it's one of the decade's best records. that little comeback stint in the 90s was his most interesting period, musically. but, will we ever hear it in it's initial and intended form?

(relevant file: schizoid, confused, on sexual confusion in adolescence)

obligatory "influential on the featured track" post.

the last thing i need to point to for this feature is socal punk. my entry point was ultimately nirvana, but the real entry point was the offspring. i probably wouldn't agree much with gurewitz if we were to order his catalog; the offspring and bad religion are really the only two pop punk bands i'd bother with, because they have that higher level of harmonic complexity. and, coming out of the grunge collapse, it was increasingly socal punk that i turned to for my rock kicks. as a guitarist, the guitar style in those offspring and bad religion records up to about 97 had a big effect on me that you can hear for years afterwards in the fast, dissonant chord work - and often in more subtle ways, as well. and, if you've been reading my rambling, this should not surprise you, either.

(relevant tracks: on sexual confusion in adolescence, to spin inside dull aberrations, anything with a guitar, really)

this is a post from about a year ago, and i won't post it there again, but i'll post it here again:

this more or less replaced fixed as my go-to nin record for busing and had a big influence on me in terms of rhythms slowly developing over time. it's something that mostly comes out in the remixes, this sort of evolving, mutating thing...it's very much process music....

(relevant tracks: on sexual awkwardness in adolescence, symphonies 4 & 5, teenage jesus (suicide), others)

obligatory "influential on the featured track" post.

i often describe what i was doing in this period as synth pop, and tend to point to a lot of industrial influences, but there's also a large gaze component coming from bands like curve, garbage, mbv, the cure and (ultimately) the smashing pumpkins. it's just that it's a lot more subtle and kind of buried in the production. it's the flange on the guitar, the gate on the snare. for this particular feature track, though, you can really hear it - i'm just pulling this curve track out of a hat, though. this is a strong disc, but a lot of this music is very stylistically similar and i could point to virtually any of it as influential in the context i'm constructing it in.

(relevant tracks: on sexual awkwardness in adolescence, virtually anything after 1998)

obligatory "influential on the featured track" post.

it's sampled. in a sarcastic song about necrophilia. hey spidey, what are you doing out all night by yourself, anyways?

(relevant track: on sexual awkwardness in adolescence)

obligatory "influential on the featured track" post.

the prodigy kind of hit be my surprise in 1997. i don't know if the kids realize it, but 1997 was the year that techno really broke. there was that huge daft punk record. the chemical brothers. and, the fat of the land.

i was veering in this direction, but i was following more of an underground path, through offshoots of 80s industrial, which i'd been set on by a mild obsession with a couple of nine inch nails remix discs released before 1996, and a beginning exploration of the warp records catalog. research was largely done over the internet, and through conversations with people 5-10 years older than i was. i was aware of the raver kids around me, but i didn't really understand what they were. my intuition was that a rave was really just another kind of high school dance, and my punk instincts put me squarely against it as a consequence of it. looking back, i regret keeping an arm's distance from it - in hindsight, i understand that this was a very wrong perspective and that the truth is that if i was looking for punks in the mid to late 90s then the place i'd be most likely to find them at was actually a rave. i never really came face-to-face with the prodigy until they were roaring at me over muchmusic.

this isn't a record i've come back to much over the years. the fact that i was exploring much more abstract types of electronic music should say a little bit about where my head was always really at in relation to the genre, and what i'm really looking for; even jilted doesn't really hold up well, despite it's importance. but, the fact that something comparable to what i was searching out over usenet was coming at me from mainstream media was exciting to me for a little while, and it coerced me into biting into this disc pretty hard, for a little while. you can hear little bits of it all over the discography.

(relevant tracks: on sexual awkwardness in adolescence, evil is a human construction, subtle nods elsewhere)