I’m cross-posting this from my Spectral Type substack. Nominally a newsletter for my writing business (Spectral Type), I’ve taken to calling it my “livejournal” due to its personal tone. As a rule, I won’t be adding my substack posts to this site, but it felt like this one belonged here since it touched on some of my musical past lives. If you dig the post, read more entries and subscribe for free here.
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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.
What brought me back–not only “back,” but actually, forward–was a long process of trial and error, but the real push was a local internet radio slot, a chance to DJ again as much as to invite other artists and have conversations with them. Connecting the dots between my experiences in disparate moments and locations in the energetic whirlwind of New York, I began reassembling my musical identity.
Just as this momentum began picking up, I had to put my activities on hold while working out paperwork issues, a break prolonged by relocation and the pandemic. When I finally dusted off my CDJs last year I nearly wept, not taking for granted all that I had been through since I packed them up two years earlier. Re-learning to mix and reawakening my “taste”–such an ill-fitting term for an emotional and experiential mark of personal identity–has been especially profound while done in isolation from my former environment in NYC that brought me so much inspiration and energy.
Meanwhile, performing for the first time (again) in the place where it all began for me many years ago has awakened an unexpected sense of urgency, intention and focus that is miles away from the antics of my youthful self. Somehow I feel the energy resolving, reconstituting, gathering power across time. I shouldn’t be surprised that music is the force opening up these non-linear connections. That’s what it does, after all.