Friday, August 8, 2025

My Musical History Part 5 -- Fountain AVM, Synthwave, and Industrial Re-born

Hey all! I know Blaugust is going on, but I took inventory of everything going on in my life and came to the conclusion that I'm not participating this year. That said, there were a few posts I wanted to share. It's been four years since I posted about my musical history, and I have more to talk about now!

If you've been keeping up with my blog ever since 2021, you'll already be familiar with most of this information. If not, please enjoy these previous Music History posts I made. (Side note: I edited part 4 a bit, because I felt like some of it really belonged more here in Part 5.)

Music History Part 5 -- Quarantine, Adam Terry, Synthwave, and Industrial Re-born

The world smacked me upside the head, and my music bug was about ready for a rebirth . . . COVID and a quarantined reality solidly hit everyone in 2020. I was staying home and with extra time on my hands. My buddy at work had a group named Bueno Sueno and they had just released a song called Lost in the Shine. I convinced him to send me the stems and flexed my remixing muscles with a mix I called the Tom Purdue Shimmer Mix. 

That remix set off a bug in me, and I started remixing or remaking some deep cut songs that were meaningful to me in one way or another. Before I knew it, I had a whole playlist of remixes and remakes on YouTube:

  • Cetu Javu's Fight Without a Reason (Lifestyle Remix)
  • Morrissey's Now My Heart is Full (Bunny Love Remix)
  • Cabaret Voltaire's Code (Wah Guitar Mix)
  • The Cure's Night Like This (Deeper Still Mix)
  • Decussion Council's (yes, my old high school band) Don't Stop (Everyone Hang On Mix)
  • Tom Purdue's Bit by Bit (2020 Mix)

I wrote about all of them in this blog post from June 2020. As mentioned in that blog post, I formulated a plan to release a lathe print vinyl record with a very small print run . . . 4-5 copies through a company called American Vinyl. When I got the records back, I thought they sounded horrible. I hadn't mixed the songs considering volume levels and how they would actually play on a record player. I threw them in the garbage can in disgust.

My wife, on the other hand, who is much smarter than me, saved them out of the garbage can and instead stashed them in a secret spot that I would only find later when we were moving from Texas back to Utah. (which . . . is a story all unto itself.) Turns out it was mostly the fault of our bad record player at the time. There were a few sub-bass hits on the Don't Stop mix that were just too low and distorted a bit, but that's it. The record sounds great.

Not the white album, it's a Quarantined Mix Record from Tom Purdue!

For real though, the life as a rock star wannabe had become nothing more than a dusty, distant 30-year-old memory up until 2021 when a great guy named Adam Terry contacted me over Instagram holding both my Darkest America and Freeze tapes from back in 1990. "Are you this Purdue?" 

Now THAT's a rare sight you don't see . . . ever!

It's like everything from back then unlocked all over again, and we had a great conversation about the good old days. With Adam's help, the hope of actually releasing some old music of mine on his label, FountainAVM, was now a possibility! He asked to hear more of my stuff and I flooded his Dropbox with hours upon hours of old music I had recorded on tape.



Adam was fantastic! I've never had anyone dump so many hours of their life just dedicated to listening to my music. Honestly, the real help from Adam has been feeling like someone actually cared about me as an artist enough to reach out and help me dust off the old tapes. While there may be a lot of sadness and regret from the past, his simple act of reaching out kind of unplugged so many things that I had bottled up over the years. That alone was appreciated.

From all that, Adam curated two albums of music.  The first was just released last year. As discussed in this post:

"My new "old" album was released today by FOUNTAINavm. This album titled "An Ant Survives A Rainstorm" is a curated collection of music and sound experiments from 1987-1992. 

Back in the late 80's and early 90's, I was writing hundreds of songs on my old Ensoniq EPS, Peavey DPM, and Kurzweil K2000S keyboard synths. A few years ago, I came in contact with Adam Terry from FOUNTAINavm, and he asked if he could listen to my collection of nine, 60-minute-long old audio tapes I had made of unreleased music from my youth.


Adam selected several songs from the collection, and I poured through my old floppy disks to find these tracks and re-record them for this project . . . MOST of them. A couple songs had been lost to time, and we just made do with the old recordings we had. 

Adam curated an interesting selection that's different from my usual sound. I'm happy with the result. I've enjoyed riding around in my car late at night listening to An Ant Survives A Rainstorm and hope you would too.

Thanks to FOUNTAINavm for releasing this music and thanks for listening!"

While discussing old music with Adam, we also started discussing new music (well new music to me), and he turned me on to the Minimalist Wave Tapes project, so I started listening to it plus some old formative, meaningful music to me from the 70's - 90's like Kraftwerk, Boards of Canada, Yaz, Thompson Twins, and the Psychedelic Furs. After baptizing myself in all this music and having recently remade Bit by Bit for my Quarantined Mixes, I realized I could make a synthwave album of my own.

The end result was Red Pinto Hatchback, released in 2021. I actually made two posts about this one. One about the making of the cover art, and one about the album release itself. As I stated in that post:

". . . So many formative "musical" hours were spent driving around in my old Red Pinto Hatchback in the late 80's, listening to music, that it felt very apropos to immortalize it as my spacecraft in comic book form.


A futuristic blast from my musical past

I paid for the distribution of this album through Distrokid, so you can find it on all kinds of sites now, including YouTube, iTunes, Apple Music, Amazon, Tik Tok, and more. That's right, you can make a Tik Toks using my music. CRAZY!

. . . The reactions I've been getting from friends and family have been pretty fun to watch. One of the first people to contact me was my old musical ally, Sean. He played guitar on both of my Industrial albums and I played drums on a few of his tracks.  I hadn't really heard much from him for years and he hit me up in DMs to let me know how fun it was to hear my music again and that it brought back a lot of great memories.

Even my sister-in-law was doing the good work and being proud of me, sharing the music around to her friends, and I have to say . . . promoting music is the hardest part of the process, and probably the part I tiptoe around the most. I know people get tired of hearing artists hype up their latest works because I also get tired of it when I see it myself. Making the music is challenging and fun but promoting it and not being annoying at the same time is a delicate balance that I'm trying to swing."

After a couple years, my music interests had successfully reignited, and I was trying my hand at collaborating and failing at it a bit, save for one special collaboration. Talks with Adam about making Beat Tapes on old school audio tape gave me a great idea for making a collection of songs. As stated in my post about about Rotted Leisure Rooms:

"Over the past year and a half I started amassing a small collection of grooves that needed a wider audience than myself. I had three songs that came out of creative suggestions from my oldest child. Two more that spawned from discussions with old friends. Another that came from chatting with an old underground musical idol of mine from when I was in high school. And a handful of others that were just collecting digital dust. Out of all this comes my latest release titled "Rotted Leisure Rooms."  

Rotted Leisure Rooms is available online for you to listen to and download, but I also went old school and made a handful of audio tapes on beautiful, dungeon-brown-colored cassette. Truly, if you have a Walkman, I'd love to get my music in there for you to enjoy on your new walk down old memory lane.

No school like the old school

I have to talk a bit about the title track to Rotted Leisure Rooms. It's a gritty industrial piece that features the synth work of David Kane. Back in 1988 I was watching 120 minutes on MTV when a song called Baby Doe Rules by David Kane's Decay of the Western Civilization came on, and I recorded it on VHS tape. I asked every record shop I could find in Utah if they had it so I could listen to more, and no one knew what I was talking about. 

Eventually I transferred the song off of VHS tape to audio tape so I could listen to it in my car. It was a rare track that no one knew. I think they played Baby Doe Rules only a handful of times late at night on MTV, but there was something about the raw sampled, industrial goodness of this track that in a way gave me permission to do the same. It was truly an inspirational track for me.

Just a year and a half ago, I found David Kane's website while remembering how influential this song was to me, and I reached out to tell him how much I enjoyed it. We traded several e-mails back and forth and somehow I convinced him to collaborate with me on this track. I've enjoyed our chats and getting to know him better. Truly the best thing to come out of me making this music has already happened, and that was getting to collab with David."

So . . . that catches us up to August 2025 and there's been a lot holding me back once again: Losing my job, moving back to Utah, learning a new career, and being diagnosed with Stage 4 Lung Cancer. I have lots of ideas for music, but haven't pursued them. I'm stuck once again.

I'll snap out of it soon though. Adam Terry has been chatting me up again about releasing another collection of music -- he's just been busy running a local record shop in Salt Lake and pouring his whole life into it.  If you're in Salt Lake, go checkout Fountain Records. It's a great shop. Support local folks like Adam and his wife, who are both simply awesome. It's a cool scene in there for sure.


Here's to the future!

Thanks for reading along with my musical history. There's still a lot of blanks here and things I missed, but I'd need to pen an actual autobiography instead of 5 blog posts to really get it all down. 

Happy Dueling!

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