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History II Enter the Rotten one; all sneers and nastiness and totally unlike anything else. Initial revulsion was replaced by curiosity and then fascination. The rules had been broken and the game had changed. Someone had stolen the music from purely commercial preoccupation and given it back to the people. Soon others came along breaking more rules and pushing boundaries. Strange and wonderful new tools and devises also began to emerge that opened up the gates even more. There were so many possibilities that it was imperative to become involved in a productive way and not just as a consumer. By 1980, the time had come to make an earnest attempt to participate in this "new wave". Fellow high school misfits coagulated together and picked up instruments. Portable cassette recorders captured evidence. Getting it on tape was key. It had to be materialized in solid form as some kind of proof of existence. Recording studios? Producers? Managers? Useless, all of them! "DO IT YOURSELF" was the order of the day and that is one thing that hasn't changed since. Early recordings were raw, sloppy, juvenile and often unlistenable, but they were also vibrant, funny and showed a promise of things to come. Upgrading to a reel to reel deck improved things drastically and serious attention to production started to take shape by the end of 1981. 1982 brought a move to a big city and things changed again. Vancouver (BC) was by no means a cultural hub, but it did have a very tightly tuned in underground which was soon tapped into. This culture proved highly fertile, yet ultimately destructive to the original collaborators who soon went their own way. In their place, new people came and went, each bringing another facet to explore. By 1984, the reel to reel was replaced with a portastudio and finally it was possible to reach a level of production which seriously rivaled that of the big boys! By the middle of the decade, music could literally be any kind of sound presented with some willful intent. Old structural limitations of rhythm and melody had been transcended and the music could effortlessly drift from rigid formality to nebulous clouds of sound in the blink of an eye. |
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