Part 3 -- Marriage, Poetry, and the IDM era
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Marriage settled me down quite a bit. I started thinking more outside myself and now I started thinking about "us" and "our future." So music making in general kind of took more of a hobbiest-stance in my life, and I returned to college life with a renewed fervor.
I did have one last small stint with an Industrial music in a band called Drill Smear Theory, but it didn't last longer than a few months. Of course, I still remember the weird upstairs apartment these dudes lived in. I kept my gear at their apartment for those months, and the drummer beat the snot out of my electronic drums. When I left the band, I gave them all the sound disks and made a clean break.
Chris, the leader of the band, later found a replacement keyboard guy. He brought me over to the new guy's house to teach him how to run the songs. The new guy seemed like he had no idea that keyboard could even string songs together like that. I can't remember where they went from there, but I think the drummer went on to play for an industrial act out of New Mexico that was eventually signed in Germany?
I don't know . . . it's been too many years now and I've lost track of all those people. My interests were changing as well.
That's also when I started writing poetry and participating in the Toastmasters speech club. I started performing spoken word at local poetry slams and did surprisingly well. I had so much in-store money coming to me from one of the local bookstores that the owner became a little bit annoyed that I was sitting on all that poetry-slam-won money. (He didn't need to worry, I wasn't going to cash it in all at once . . . in fact, I don't think I cashed most of it in.) A big moment came from winning a university-level poetry slam where I won $100, which was/is pretty decent money for poetry. ;) That even tied my best paying country music gig! (It feels great to be paid for creativity.)
So at this point, poetry was life, and I wrote several chapbooks worth of verse. I even made a pilgrimage with my old guitarist buddy, Sean, to Boulder Colorado and casually met THEE Allen Ginsberg. I ended up writing a poem about him wandering through a party wearing his blue pajamas. These were strange times, friends.
A couple of years later I even made a long road-trip pilgrimage to participate in a poetry event known as Picnuke in Portland, Oregon and made friends with another poet that just happens to be none other than THEE Lord Spode of Team Spode. Yes! If you've read a lot of my blog, you've heard of him! Before video games, there was poetry!
Eventually I figured that this whole time with music and poetry what I was really trying to do was COMMUNICATE with people, and that's when I finally decided on Communication as a degree and finished out school, Summa Cum Laude style, with a Technical Writing minor. I was all set to make money in a real job.
In fact, my first job out of school was being a Technical Editor for a contractor for the Air Force, and I worked there for 14 years there while my wife and I started our family and had three kids. I had become a dad.
I decided to make this blog back in the day as a creative outlet while I played Wizard101 with my kids. And this blog is what led me being hired in the video game industry with KingsIsle Entertainment, but that's a different story for a different time.
Let's rewind a bit. *insert tape rewind sound* All the while and through it all . . . I was still tinkering with music in the background. For some reason I started remaking Christmas songs in a techno style and my co-workers at the time (1996) egged me on into making a full CD of Christmas music.
I was fired up about it too. I had big plans for my Christmas CD especially after getting rear ended in my car and suddenly finding the payout from the car accident was exactly the amount needed to fund creating 500 copies of the CD. I actually sold enough CDs that I broke even . . . the rest of the CDs became easy Christmas gifts for years to come!
Eventually the computer became a thing in my life, and finally I could tinker more with music production as well as play a mean game of Diablo. Wild was my first album where I started using a computer to produce music instead of strictly using the on-board synthesizer. At this point my music was still a blend of on-board sequencer and computer, but Audacity was there to help me make things as strange as I wanted there in 1999. (Wild is also uploaded to Bandcamp for your amusement/enjoyment)
I took a full week off of work and finished the Wild CD up. Back then MP3.com was the place to go for uploading your music and sharing it with the world. I wish I wouldn't have relied so heavily on using that site for releasing my music at the turn of the century. Some cool stuff is gone because of that, but I still have the CDs and the memories. I made some excellent friends on that site and it even led to me joining a podcast that featured local bands on mp3.com.
I was listening to a lot of IDM at the time. Bands like Aphex Twin, u-ziq, and Future Sounds of London solidly had my ear. When you listen to Wild, you can tell that was the case. Although, the gap between my home production and what professional production was capable of at the time was growing ever further apart. It wasn't until I got my hands on software programs like Acid Music and Reason that I could really increase my music production quality.
Eventually, wanting to promote my Wild CD, I formed an alliance back in the early 2000's with like-minded musically inclined people on the young Internet, and we called ourselves the IEMC or Independent Electronic Musician Collective. This was pretty much an email group where we would promote our stuff to other songwriters like ourselves. I met some great people through this group like Eric Piotrowski and Stephen Phillips.
There were plenty of opportunities to collaborate in this group, and I ended up remixing Eric's music and being remixed by Eric himself. Stephen ran a downtempo/chill-wave Internet radio show that I used to visit quite a bit as well.
So many cool artists were in this group in the early 2000's. Unfortunately the group pretty much fell apart right after we produced our first CD as a group. The stress of making that happen seemed to be too much for the group, but you can still hear a few of my tracks from that era on Soundcloud.
Tune in tomorrow where I sum it all up in Part 4 and detail the return of old allies and the life of writing video game parodies on the YouTubes!
Happy Dueling!
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