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It’s best that I delve into one of the most defining influences on who I am sooner than later, as music is likely to crop up here more often than not. My history with music spans over 20 years, so it’s hard to know where to begin, as well as how much I should elaborate. I don’t want to turn a blog post into a book, so I’ll overview the main points for now and fill in the details with later posts. My First Acoustic Guitar My half-brother came up from Tennessee to visit for a couple weeks in the latter part of 1987, and being in college, he was a rather avid fan of MTV. I ended up watching it with him more than once and I was blown away. There were a lot of acts back then that really lit my ears up (Guns ‘n’ Roses, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi), but there was one video in particular that really caught my attention. That video was for George Michael’s [“Faith”], which gave me the impression that rocking out on an acoustic guitar was the coolest thing ever. I had to have one. Thankfully, my mother is a very generous woman and she got me a learner’s acoustic for Christmas that year. It had 18 frets - 12 of which were functionally playable - and didn’t have the best intonation, but I loved it nonetheless. As it was, I was more enamored with the idea of rocking out on an acoustic than actually doing so, which meant I didn’t end up playing it much at that time. It came back into play about five years later, and I still have it on my guitar rack as a reminder of my beginnings. Piano Lessons My mom worked with a man whose wife taught piano lessons and they lived in our neighborhood, so mom asked me if I’d like to take lessons. It sounded like a good idea, since we had recently acquired my grandma’s old piano and she’d moved into an apartment where it wouldn’t fit. I agreed and took a year’s worth of lessons (give or take) between 1991 and 1992. I don’t have the strongest memory of my progress and skill development at this time, but I do remember that my teacher asked me at the beginning of our sessions together if I’d like to learn more traditional compositions or jazz and blues standards. As you may have guessed, I went for the latter. It’s likely that was a catalyst for my delving into a vast amount of non-mainstream genres over the years, as I’ve always enjoyed music that’s a little more outside the box. That’s certainly what I create, so no surprise there either. My First Electric Guitar I have to thank my good friend Drew for this one, as it was during the summer of 1993 when he introduced me to our local Seattle scene (I had been listening to a lot of new jack swing and east coast rap at the time) and I fell head over heels in love with these groups, especially Nirvana. After listening to their discography incessantly, I physically needed an electric guitar. The problem was that at the age of 13, it was difficult to wrangle up the money for one. That led me to pick up my acoustic guitar again in November of 1993 and I began playing it a lot. It was a few more months before I actually got an electric guitar (February of 1994), but my mom saw that I was actually making an effort to learn this time, so she offered to get one for me as long as I could help out. I found the receipt recently – she paid for the guitar (a nice Stratocaster copy made by Hohner) while I paid for the amplifier and the hard-shell case (which was for a Fernandes guitar that had already been sold). As soon as I got the guitar and amp set up, I started getting blank tapes and recording anything and everything I could come up with into my old boom box with a cheap microphone from Fred Meyer. Not to say these songs were masterpieces – I recall a “song” entitled 911 where I was playing the 9th fret of the 6th string (C sharp) then the 1st fret of the 6th string (F) twice. I repeated that phrase over and over again, steadily going out of time. Good stuff. Not Playing Well with Others I used to do tapes with friends under ridiculous band names (Lungbutter is one that springs to mind) and the music we’d make would be absolutely horrendous. We didn’t know how to play very well at all, but that was beside the point, as we all had a lot of fun expressing ourselves in this way. Many of these ridiculous tapes were made between 8th and 12th grade, but I did have a go at some more serious band situations during that time. The first band I was recruited into was one called Succubus. It didn’t make any difference that our name was highly irrelevant to who we were (five 14-year-old guys), as none of us were especially good players at that time. I think we had a demo track or two before we split up. Bleeding Disease was next, which was one of the guys from Succubus on guitar and me screaming my guts out about hating life. Night and day to now, I’ll tell you. We put seven songs to tape, passed a few around and nothing happened. Next was around the age of 16 (1996) with Thy Kingdom Burn / Dusk / Full of Contempt (among other names). It was Drew behind the kit and me doing death metal vocals and playing guitar. We recorded quite a bit of stuff, had side projects (nothing new there) and some of our songs were actually half-decent pieces of death ‘n’ roll, but nothing really came about from that either. Music Software for a Beginner I started experimenting with putting together tracks on a computer in 1997, which was mostly grabbing samples from the internet and manipulating them in [Goldwave]. The project was called Orchestral Horrors, and I made three “songs” this way, one of which was a sound clip of breaking glass looped and sped up / pitch shifted / etc. That was the best of the three. I eventually branched out into using drum machine programs – [HammerHead Rhythm Station] was and is still a favorite of mine, even though it doesn’t work so great with my current operating system. It did come in handy for putting drum tracks together for a couple of years’ worth of songs, but eventually it became a bit archaic for what I needed to do when I started branching into time signatures outside of 4/4. My First Cassette Now I’ve done tons of solo cassettes before the one I’m about to talk about, but they were all either guitar or bass recorded onto a cassette in a boom box. I had purchased a four-track recorder in early 1998 and a tape deck in mid-1998 to convert my four-track recordings onto an actual playable source. My current solo project at the time was entitled Soul Ablaze (the name likely inspired by the old SNES game [Soul Blazer  ]), and I had seven songs ready to put to tape. I had a fairly basic set up – one track for the HammerHead loops, one track for bass, one track for electric guitar, and one track for vocals/any other instrumental touches I needed.As for the tape itself – it was entitled “Burned” (named after the title track), but I can barely remember the thing. I know there was a black metal-ish song (lots of tremolo picking) to open things up, a couple of 8-minute plus doom songs, a couple of death ‘n’ roll tracks (one of which was from the Full of Contempt days and was the best of the bunch), an instrumental piece, and a military dirge to close it out. I’ll have to listen to it again and see if there’s anything salvageable for a future [Days Gone By] release. Absolutely Electrifying Time for a little story to break up the pace, but it keeps with the timeline. I was jamming with a friend and co-worker of mine at the time at my place a few months after graduating from high school – I want to say it was October or November of 1998. He was playing guitar and I was playing bass, and we decided to trade instruments that were both plugged into live amplifiers. As soon as we swapped, he got a jolt that sent him backwards a bit and I became paralyzed with an instrument in each hand. As I’m yelling at him to turn off one of the amplifiers (“TURN ONE OFF!” were my exact words), I was dumbfounded at my predicament. I couldn’t move, but I wasn’t in any pain and still had the wherewithal to know that cutting the power on one of the amplifiers would return my motor functions to me. The best part was after my friend had cut one of the amplifiers, the energy I was attracting from the bass guitar allowed the headstock to attach itself to the right side of my face for about five seconds. There was a nice resonating BONK sound from the collision. Actually, the best part was the wave of euphoria that washed over me once the power dropped out and I could move again. I’d liken it to the feeling of coming down from an amazing high – which is funny, considering I was firmly planted to the ground. My First CD I’ll never forget [A New Beginning], as it was the album that accompanied the emotions I had in the wake of having my first (and only) love crushed. It’s also unforgettable in that I recorded it during the month of September 2001, and no one needs a reminder as to what happened then. I was ready to put something together, as I had twelve songs that I’d been working on over the past year and a half, and I was bound and determined to get them recorded. I had been working with a four-track recorder for a few years previous, but I wanted to harness the power of using my computer as a recording tool. In retrospect, it was a little ambitious for me to attempt to record an album at that point, as the good home recording technology at the time was still rather expensive and I hadn’t figured out how to properly produce a guitar without it sounding like I was using white noise as a distortion pedal. The drums that I had picked up a couple years previous to the album were also tricky to record. On top of that, I mistakenly deleted all of the separate instrument tracks, so all that’s left of the original recordings are the mixed together wave files. Despite all of the issues, I still stand behind the compositions. However, if I were to re-record them, they’d need some serious tightening up. In fact, I did re-record one of them for “Days Gone By, Volume One” last year (Thoughts of Her), but even that could use a little more tightening up. Projects Galore There was a time in the early 2000’s where my project bloat was ridiculous. I had upwards of 10 projects, none of which sounded all that dissimilar from each other. Now I might be the pot and the kettle right now, as I’ve still got six active solo projects and two collaborations going, but they at least all have a method to their madness. I’ll talk about my current projects more in a future blog post. As for having tons of different projects at the time, I’m having a hard time remembering why I did. The early 2000’s are on the fuzzy side for me, as it seems like I had more on my plate back then than I do now. I believe what would happen is that I would get an idea for a project, but rarely sit down and figure out how I would execute it. I’m a lot better about that these days, but I still come up with new projects fairly often (one or two every few months). At this point, my active projects are diverse enough that these new ideas can be converted into a conceptualized album rather than a whole new project (thankfully). That said, I came up with a new project idea a few days ago which should absorb one of my current underutilized projects and one of my ancillary projects that I've been waffling on putting out a final album for. I won’t really know until I start working with it (which should happen this weekend or the next one), though I could detail the specifics behind putting this project (or any project) together in a blog post, as I’ve done it enough times to know my way around it. Playing with Others More Successfully I decided to get back to group recording a few years after Full of Contempt disbanded. I got back together with Drew (and brought my good friend Steve into the fold once) and we started up Oort Cloud, which was an avant-garde musical experiment wherein we would improvise whatever wackiness was in our heads at the time with whichever instruments (and non-instruments) we decided to use. We had a catchphrase for our collaboration – “We call ourselves Oort Cloud because we’re out there!” We ended up recording seven sessions altogether, spanning from August 2002 to July 2004. Six of these sessions can be found over at the Concatenation Records website under [Oort Cloud - The First Four Sessions] and [Oort Cloud - The Last Two Sessions], and the seventh one would never have seen daylight without some serious remixing, as it was Drew and I playing two keyboards together at the same time, not with each other. I took it upon myself to remix this session with the five year mark coming up, and the end result was put out under my [Amaranthine Skies] project in July 2009 and entitled [It Came from Beyond the Oort Cloud]. You may have noticed it over in the sidebar on your way down here, but if not, you can check it out through the link. I’m happy with how it turned out, especially since it came out as a solid deep space ambient album. It also serves as closure to a part of my past, as Drew doesn’t play music any more and this album was the best last musical hurrah I could give him. Dwelling of Duels I was checking traffic for my [Natthimmel] project page one afternoon, and I noticed one of the places I was getting a fair amount of my traffic from was a place called [The Shizz]. I knew it was the home of the [Minibosses Message Board] from my time in the NES scene (which I’ll talk about more in my “For the Love of Gaming” post), and as I had done video game covers under my [Natthimmel] project, it’s not too surprising that people there had found my output. I decided to lurk for a little bit and I saw that it was a solid community, so I decided to join up. Not only was the forum home to the [Minibosses], it was also home to the [Dwelling of Duels] competition, which is a monthly competition for musicians into video game music to cover their favorite songs from any video game they want or from a pre-selected theme. The only prerequisite is that the material should be focused on the performance of at least one live instrument. I decided to enter the month that I had discovered The Shizz (April 2005), and found the criticism to be rather harsh. However, most of it was constructive, so I sucked it up and kept entering. The next month’s competition was the impetus for some seriously amazing times in my life, which I’ll have to talk about at another time because those times deserve their own post. I’m still a regular at The Shizz after four and a half years and still enter Dwelling of Duels on occasion, mainly because the community is that strong. My continued visits there also have to do with the two yearly projects I run that are based around my fellow musicians there and it’s always a joy and a learning experience putting albums together with so much quality material. Concatenation Records I had just put [my 3rd album] out and was beginning to realize that using [Vincion Records] for recording output was on the narcissistic side. I didn’t have much on my musical agenda at the time (mid-2007), so I made the decision to retool things with how I released my music. I went with the name Concatenation because it means to link things together that depend on each other and it’s one of my favorite [Meshuggah] songs. I didn’t realize at the time that other folks would be interested in linking their works together with mine, but after the [Nevar Say Die! Compilation] fell into my lap, I realized that it was a sign for me to become even more proactive in such a creative community. Since then, I’ve released [17 albums] on the label (with two more arriving on Tuesday) and am hosting [41 musical collections] – three of which are my old albums on Vincion Records and 22 of which are a lot of my older material from 2001-2007. A Seemingly Never Ending Future With the label still going strong and all of the active projects I’ve got going, I know I’m going to continue making new music for a long time, as I don’t think I’ll ever run out of steam for either of these pursuits. The projects may end up getting trimmed back a bit (they do reach the end of their lifecycle on occasion), but I know I’ll always have something going on. I know this because I have somewhere between ten to fifteen albums conceptualized between six different projects at the time being, not to mention that I’ve been rather productive over the past few years with my output. The past two decades have been a rather interesting adventure to me – hopefully they’ve been interesting to you as well. If you’ve made it this far, I suppose they have been. Even with this post being 3000 words or so, I’ve skipped over a ton of things. Still, this is the basic gist of how I came to be the purveyor of music that I am. If you’re still with me (and are a musician or artistically inclined), does this sound anything like your history into the wonderful world of music? Let me know! Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]! Posted on December 4th, 2009. |
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 Shizz Block Volume One |
 It Came from Beyond the Oort Cloud |
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[December 2009 Index] [2009 Index] [Index] |
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[A Creative Introduction] [Creating a Music Project] [Daemon9623 - Fleshfeast] [Evolving Projects] [For the Love of Finance] [For the Love of Fitness] [Musical Goals for 2010] [Nevar Say Die! Comp., Volume Three] [Philistine on the Sidewalk] [Projects from Days Gone By] [Punchfest] [The Sticky Situation - Strongth!] |
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