aphex twin | "alberto balsalm" | i care because you do | 1995
you may have noticed that around the time i was leaving high school i also left behind new music to explore everything i missed before being born. i realized that i had been missing some really cool music while not paying attention when graham harker gave me a mix-tape (yes, tape) back in the '90s (when I was still wondering what i needed email for) that introduced me to "electronica". like every nomme de genre (like the ignorant, improvised french?), electronica covers a lot of crap as well as some of my favorite music. up until graham gave me this tape i had stagnated for a few years, keeping my aural wanderings limited to genres i knew. upon returning from my mission, i found that “alternative” had become more mainstream than alternative, and most of what was being made was no longer to my liking. i never got into the “seattle sound” – soundgarden, pearl jam, etc. – and to this day i prefer the original punk to the 90s revival (green day, nofx, etc.).
i was really hungry for something new, but wasn’t really finding anything that interested me. then graham gave me this tape. i won't call it a watershed... oh, i guess i will. this tape brought me back into the cutting edge. it made me aware that there was good stuff out there that i didn’t know about yet. i had wandered familiar paths long enough and this weird, loopy (literally) stuff captured me. this tape opened my ears to what was possible with samples and knob-twiddling. before, electronic music meant depeche mode and their ilk. i loved dm in high school but had grown bored of it after my mission (excepting a couple of great songs – no, not "somebody"). synthesizers had become passé to me. then this tape…
i was studying the life of siddartha gotama at this time too, and this song always conjures a fantastic image of him sitting beneath the bodhi tree and a huge karmic wheel filled with moving images of all kinds of life and random events of various individual lives rotating in space above him. one day i will paint what i see.
