What I'm Listening To Now: loscil, "Ash"
Lately I've been listening to more by Vancouver electronic/ambient musician Scott Morgan, aka loscil. "Ash" is his latest EP, and one I'm enjoying very much. Googling to learn more about him, I realized that back in 2014, one of my high school friends was part of a musical showcase with him. Very cool. Different styles - from what I've heard by loscil, it's a bit spacier, expansive, whereas my friend's music has often been more aggressive, noisier.
I had a bunch of friends in high school who made electronic music, as we called so much back then. A few, happily, are still at it. One of my old friends, the one I thought might go furthest with it, has as far as I can tell not made anything in a couple of decades, focusing on his radical academics. So it goes.
I tried my hand at making electronic music very briefly then. I had a shitty computer. The best I could run was Impulse Tracker in MS-DOS. I tried to make some music. Shared it with a friend. In an act of kindness, he re-mixed it, and it was so much better. But I was crushed, realizing just how little I knew, and how much I'd fought just to get to a shitty initial piece.
So I put it aside. During the pandemic, I discovered the music of Richard Skelton. I started getting into expansive, open drone and ambient music. I started messing around with my electric guitar again, after probably an entire decade. I had a few pedals from before. I acquired a lot more. I got obsessed with the crazy range of sounds I could now produce.
Better late than never. Better your teens than your twenties, your twenties than your forties, but better your forties than never at all. For me, enjoying something has often impelled me to make something similar: poetry, composition, and now this.
I'm grateful for it.
And for what it's worth, I still remember the melody of the thing I tried to create. For whatever reason, it's still in my head, twenty-seven years later. Maybe one day I'll come back to it, hide it somewhere. It's strange what we remember.