Taking a break from WC-III to say:

[garote]

I almost never do online surveys, but a scrap of one that crunchpod did caught my eye and got me thinking. So here I present the music that "changed my life", in chronological order. Each of these albums caused a paradigm shift in the way I relate to music, and the way I relate to the world, with an immediate intensity that I could feel, thundering around the back of my brain on the very first listen.

1. Pink Floyd - The Wall
   
2. Greater Than One - London
   
3. Skinny Puppy - Last Rights
   
4. Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral
   
5. Tori Amos - Little Earthquakes
   
6. Delerium - Spheres I

I remember where I was and what I was doing the first time I heard each of these. That's the true test, I think.

1. Coming from the boombox of my cousin's car. I dubbed a copy immediately.
   
2. The day after that, when I first listened to the tape I'd copied from him. The other side was filled, he said, with "Industrial Music, like they listen to in German factories." In particular, "Dance of the Cowards" was magical. The bassline, of doctored voice samples, is to this day one of the weirdest pieces of sample composition I've heard.
   
3. The second CD I ever bought. I was lying on the arm of the golden Turkish chair in the living room listening to it on headphones, feeling my brain change forever. This was a journey beyond hell. I was ecstatic.
   
4. I was leaning on the backless computer chair in my room, listening to 'Closer' on shitty speakers. When the chorus hit, I almost fell over, thinking to myself, "He's singing the word 'fuck' in the chorus of the song. Can he do that? ... This album is going to be big."
   
5. Driving back from a camping trip. My friend Kathleen put in a mix tape and 'Silent All These Years' came on. I turned to her and said, "Where has this music been hiding all my life?"
   
6. In my room in Davis, with the ultra-cool stereo system, and the lights off. The alien sound of the analog keyboards, and the brilliantly stolen atonal 2001 chorus, was exactly what I'd wanted to do, and here it all was. I remember thinking to myself, clear over the music, "but, I could do it better."

Honorable mention: Delerium's 'Euphoric'. I remember sitting with my head between two speakers as Zog played me a copy, and telling him, "Holy shit. This is amazing."

Comments

[zeroheretic.livejournal.com]

My sister had The Wall on that fat double-cassette deal. I remember laying on my carpet, head hovering over the speaker of one of those lunchbox-style tape players, and studying every sound coming out of it. I was never the same after that.

Last Rights - my second acid trip. I sat in a friend's car by myself and stared at that tape deck as if it were possessed. I could not believe what I was hearing, "it must be the drugs" I kept thinking. That album is comfortably in my top 3 of all time. It is art.

The Downward Spiral - Living in an apartment in FL, pothead at the time, going to audio engineering school with a bunch of other pothead music nerds. (Recorded my best music in that apartment, music I'd love to put on my LJ but can't.) Anyhoo, a knock on the door one night. My friend Pat. He has pot and the new NIN with him. "Dude." he says. "This album, it is going to blow your mind." Needless to say, he was so right! That album was everywhere in my friend circles for about a year. It became a part of us. It is now the soundtrack, (for most of us, I'm sure,) of that time.

Most significantly, it reminds me of a specific girl that ripped my heart out at the time. Thankfully, Trent was pissed off as well, so listening to the album now doesn't make me cry - it just makes me rock out. : )

You do have that remix EP from the Fragile release, right? 'Things Falling Apart"? Awesome.