Well, this is my first journal post. I'm not really a online social networker, but I dig the concept of this site. Music is a hugely important thing to me and it's great to be able to meet people who think the same.
My catalyst for this entry was someone calling my musical tastes "interesting". I would hope it is, and it's exactly how I like it. It got me thinking (which is always a good thing) about why I listen to what I do, and how the thread of music has followed my thread of life.
I started out listening to artists like
Tool,
Pantera,
Soundgarden,
Pearl Jam,
Kyuss, Sepultura, etc. It was all long hair, black shirts and khaki cargo pants in those days.
It must have been 1993 as the first album I can remember being interested in was Tool's "Undertow", a friend brought in the CD with the cow licking it's own arse behind the insert, that's pretty much what I remember of it.
The life thread at this time was about being a rebellious teenager and it was only natural that I listen to "alternative" and heavy metal.
This was my bread and butter until my late teens, I had a naive dislike, hate even, of anything electronic -- it was all "techno" to me.
I remember being totally obsessed with Tool after
Aenima came out. My life thread at this time was "lone ranger". I had this folder with all their lyrics printed out and I knew all of them off by heart (laughing out loud about this).
Towards the end of this time I had started surfing, diving and generally spending all my time around the ocean... being "bad" was out of the question in case the universe decided to drop a karma bomb on my head when the surf was big and the only thing to rebel against was working -- so I could surf full-time. It was all board shorts and "el natural" in those days. My thread in life was was totally about the ocean, nature and not messing up anyone elses vibe.
So the thread weaved away from the dark and into the light, I still couldn't come around to "techno" but my tastes were more upbeat. We used to drive long distances to go surfing or fishing and the long hours in the car reminded me of when I was young. My Dad had a friend with a farm in Condobolin about 8 hours drive away. He's from NZ and bands like
Dire Straits, ZZ Top and Led Zeppelin were the flavour in the snooker clubs, dart halls and pubs. So on these long drives, no shit, he would put ONE tape in the deck and let it repeat for the whole trip (you know the auto-flip thing). My brothers and I still joke about this now, it used to drive us crazy.
When I started driving long distances for my own reasons I thought I would give Dire Straits and
Led Zeppelin a go. Their music is awesome for driving, the best IMO. So while my life thread means I drive long distances the music thread follows.
The most important change for me was my conversion to electronic music after I met an awesome chick, Vanessa, and after a while we took this surf trip to Samoa. There were a few internationals and a few locals all pissed on Vailima in, I guess what would be called, the bar. This electronica came on the stereo and everyone thought it was pretty amazing. Through the weakness of drunkedness, a chick (heh) and just generally having a good time an electronic seed had been sown in my life.
We tracked the album down, by an awesome Australian artist
Endorphin. Though Vanessa loved it, I couldn't get the feeling back, all I could hear was the doof-doof, and "I don't listen to techno".
My best friend at the time was a techno freak, he hated my music as much as I hated his. We were polar opposites on most counts, but such is the thread of life our personalities meshed remarkably. He was running a DJ business and had some good studio headphones so I played Endorphin's album through these and suddenly the door to electronic music opened for me, the doof-doof stopped being noise and made sense, it's main purpose wasn't meant to rattle the doors off some idiots commodore. I listened for hours and then bought my own pair of decent headphones a couple of weeks later. I got a couple more Endorphin albums which I loved (took a while to admit) but was still deterred from a lot of electronic, I couldn't work out what it was about Endorphin that attracted me so much, I was soon to find out though.
I guess I was about 22 at this point. While browsing through a second-hand bookstore (which I love) I picked up a book by Carlos Castaneda, this guy is a bit of a phenomenon and while the validity of his writings are disputed, his stories are amazing nonetheless. The basic gist is that reality is only your perception, there is a heavy ethnobotanical influence (in layman's terms -- plants that make you trip). A couple of books later and my world was rocked, I had to take action and for me, that is always in the form of exploration.
When I was a teenager, like most teens, I had dabbled in drugs, the flavour in my day was LSD. I think more than a quarter of the people at our after-formal party were tripping. It was good and safe back then, certainly nothing bad ever happened to anyone I knew. I knew from these experiences what an amazing place the mind was. Though when my life thread weaved the "all natural" path, synthesised chemicals (and for the most part, alcohol) were a no go zone for me.
Don't worry, this next bit will make sense in the context of the music story soon! To cut a long (and good) story short, I got a hold of some mushroom spores and grew my own magic mushrooms.
My life thread at this point weaved "psychonaut". To grow something from a print on paper to a substance that interacts so perfectly with the human mind is beyond mysterious. It was one of the best and definitely the most profound time in my life. I learnt so much and had a great deal of fun. I became known as a bit of a shaman amongst my friends and would stage these mindblowing trip fests. I've gotta stress that I was responsible, I took a long hiatus between trips without alcohol or anything else that would impede my judgement. I did a lot of research and only got people involved who I thought would get something positive out of it. It was never about "getting high" for no reason, it was more like "you're a bit of a thinker, i've got an experience you might enjoy". There is so much more to this part of the story!
So, getting back to the music thing, I was browsing a site looking for some music one day when the name
Infected Mushroom come up, I straight up thought, "I'm into mushrooms and that's a fucking cool name". After listening and loving it, the reason why I couldn't get into a lot of electronic music became obvious, it didn't have a psychedelic component, it was ordinary. So my journey into electronica became simple, and it led onto the most amazing music I have ever heard through artists such as Simon Posford doing
Shpongle,
Younger Brother,
Celtic Cross and
Hallucinogen (who I think, along with his collaborators is the best musician on the planet).
Some time after this I started going to live gigs of small artists, rather than just seeing huge concerts of international artists that I like, seeing someone like Xavier Rudd play live is astounding (maybe that's a bad example considering his popularity now).
Now, my life thread is "amateur naturalist" and I'm traveling around Australia, spending a lot of time in the bush so my tastes have became more down tempo,
Xavier Rudd,
Harry Manx and other stuff that suits the laid back nature of the outdoors.
Somewhere about 5 years ago I learned to play didgeridoo and this has also had an influence on my musical tastes. The last year I have been playing intensely and some of my newest artists have come from this interest.
I've weaved other important webs like "extreme sports" (my avatar is my sorry arse and my very expensive parachute getting a whipping down a 300 metre cliff in the Blue Mountains) but interestingly, I have been influenced but only indirectly through the people I've met.
It was kind of funny to write this, certainly to remember and pinpoint what actually led me to particular music and how it led to something else.
I'm left thinking that music is more important to me than even I knew.
Jonathan
Celtic Cross
