I started a newsletter on substack. Here’s an excerpt from the fifth post. Read in full (and subscribe for free) here.
I had a moment when I was preparing my playlist for my first in-person DJ gig in almost 3 years last weekend. Putting together noise techno with icy dark disco tracks, I realized that the past was echoing through the present. Not in a nostalgic way, but in the sense that a seed planted long ago was finally blooming. Across gaps in time, physical distances, and disruptions, it lay dormant and semi-neglected, but I see it now slowly coming to life with attention and care.
For factual, not nostalgic reasons, I will briefly explain: the first New York Noise compilation came out the year I graduated from high school, with an earlier No New York reissue in the air at the time as well. I gravitated toward the recordings by Mars and DNA: shadowy sounds and subterranean voices echoing through time, bookended by minimal dance tracks by the likes of Konk and ESG, alongside Glenn Branca’s conceptual guitar music. The idea of music as raw, communal, sometimes half-formed and chaotic, plunged into obscurity and re-emerging after being buried long ago was ingrained in my mind from these early listening days.
When I entered the Vancouver club scene as the singer of a new “electroclash” band (we were really post-punk with y2k outfits, but the NYC reference was key), I found myself being invited to DJ at events, where I did what I’d done at the house parties that me and my roommates were always throwing: played my favorite tracks from my collection of weird records. Some of these were danceable (Erase Errata, T. Rex), some were not (Black Dice, early Glass Candy), and most were rather noisy. Although I don’t revisit the past much in my listening habits, I’m struck by how this early spirit of dissonant dance repeats itself in new forms through my music collection today.
This nascent DJ career went on hiatus while I was in art school, during which I became an experimental musician in the classical, if not academic, sense. I cut my teeth playing noise shows in the art school parking garage and subscribed to an ethos of “ignorance”: that is, an experiential, felt sense of music informed by instinct, an open-ended exploration of various creative mediums, and perhaps more than a touch of youthful hubris. This mood was prevalent in the scene I was part of, where we competed in crafting the most dissonant and bizarre performances using little more than cheap gear and improvisation.
My musical journey began disruptively and has survived many discontinuities. I remember a few years during the following decade where I didn’t really listen to music at all–due perhaps, in retrospect, to a touch of anhedonia brought on by the stress of surviving in New York at the time. Music became an abstraction to me, a concept rather than a practice, and I took on a disassociated performance persona that expressed my general sense of disconnection as a sort of ambient gestural poetics.
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