gemini://notes.hugh.run/2022/2022-08-29.gmi

When I was an angsty suburban teenager in the 90s it may not surprise you to learn that I was obsessed with the Smashing Pumpkins. Whilst Billy Corgan was blessed with neither a pleasant singing voice nor an easygoing temperament, the Pumpkins spoke to me in the way grunge rock bands spoke to many white suburban teenagers at the time.

There was a particular song I loved above all others: "Drown". It was released not on any Pumpkins album but rather as the closing track on the soundrack to the film "Singles". I have no recollection of ever watching this film, but a CD of the soundrack appeared in the family home at some point, and I would often skip to the last track and play it on repeat.

I hadn't thought about this for quite a while, until I recently realised that the impending expansion of my living space will allow me to do the perfect "mid life crisis music creation" - though since my musical tastes radically changed a few years after my obsession with "Drown" and the Pumpkins, I will be purchasing a drum machine and synthesiser rather than a guitar.

The thing that occured to me today is that this original version of "Drown" is, well, a pretty weird track - even by Smashing Pumpkins standards. Structurally, it's a bit of a patchwork. But the thing that I really loved was that fully 50% of the 8 minutes 26 seconds it lasts consists of a lonwinded outro of guitar feedback noodling. It is, frankly, "noise", but there's a shape to it.

I kind of drifted away from the Pumpkins as I moved into my twenties, but I guess my Dad's interest in folk singers and the politics of my household rubbed off on me because for a while I got really into Ani Difranco. Again, there was a particular song that ...I didn't *like* exactly. Rather, I was transfixed by it for reasons I couldn't quite articulate. I still find it an incredibly powerful song, though it does need a content warning (sexual abuse).

This is a very different kind of track to Drown. In this case, it was the pre-recorded loop droning in the background that I found mesmerising - in particular in combination with the torrent flowing out of Ani as she lists the awful things men have done to her from childhood.

As I was listening to Ani Difranco I was also starting to get into the rave scene and in particular trance music. Paul van Dyk once famously declared "There is no 'e' in van Dyk" but everyone assumed he was lying, and certainly parties, drugs, and dance music went together for me at the time. But though I grew out of the first two, I still love electronic music.

Like any genre of music, there's really crap Trance. But the good stuff can be uplifting, exciting, and very hard to hear without wanting to bop along. Electronic music has of course changed over the last two decades. The stuff I'm enjoying more lately appears to be known as "electro house", though I must admit I'm struggling to keep up with all the genres and sub-genres. Generally I really don't like "House" music, but then again my musical tastes have never been linear and always been very specific.

Something I've particularly gotten into lately is ...arguably barely music. On Bandcamp it's tagged with things like "ambient" and "downtempo", but it's not "white noise". If the idea of Trance is to put you in a hyperactive energetic and uninhibited state, then Ambient Electronica or whatever you want to call it, is a totally different kind of "trance". I find it extraordinarily good for helping both with focus and - in what may seem like a contradiction - also for putting me in a state where I can let my mind drift. I've never been into meditation but it feels like what I imagine a good guided meditation might be aiming for. It's not so much a tool to hyper-focus but rather to clear the mind. It's something like soaking in a warm tub, but just for the brain.

I like listening to State Azure and similar sounds, but it's unlikely I'll try to make music like that. Let's face it, I'll have to do what a lot of white guys who are into Electro House do and spectacularly fail to make anything like Deadmau5 despite trying, before I can move on to something else. Maybe I can create Electro-DownTempo-Trance or something.