Scribblings about music from a 15-year-old me

The thoughts of a teenage ambient fan

It's been a while since I wrote a blog about anything music related but I came across an old essay I wrote at school when I was just 15 and thought I'd share part of it.

The essay is entitled 'Where in the world do you find beauty and what is your response to it?' and gives you some insight into my young mind and reveals the roots of a future music hack. I'm not sure if its naivety is endearing or annoying but you can see the 1992 version of me adopting several (questionable) journalistic traits.

These include dealing in absolutes for effect, displayed by the 'I loved rave music and now I hate it, I love this ambient music instead now' stance. The fact is I still love rave music and never stopped loving it (though admittedly I don't listen to Tetris by Doctor Spin any more) and I also still love ambient music. That wouldn't sell (or at least get my English teacher's attention) though would it?!

This old build it up, knock it down mentality has been used by hacks throughout the ages, mostly by the NME. My excuse is that I was a fickle 15-year-old, I'm not sure what the NME's excuse is. Anyway, here is an excerpt complete with the bad punctuation, the scarcity of paragraphs and never-ending sentences it was originally written with.

Where in the world do you find beauty and what is your response to it?

GCSE English essay, 12th October 1992. (Aged 15)

[…] Beauty for most people makes them feel at peace and tranquil and extremely happy and restful. But the question is, what do I see beauty in? 

Above all, above nature, architecture and art, I must say that it is music that gives me immense pleasure to listen to and I let myself be taken away by the beats, electronic instruments and melodic, mellow sounds that have been used to create a wonderful sound. I, like many others now, used to be into Rave music. This music is made up of one-hundred and forty to fifty beats per minute backing, a repetitive “chorus”, (made up of up to five notes played over and over again), or a singer, singing the same few words (that have no meaning) over and over again. Plus, in many of the tunes these days, there is a sample, or extract, from a television tune or computer game. These have included records like, “Roobarb ‘n’ Custard”, “Sesame’s Treet”, “A Trip To Trumpton”, “Super Mario Land” and “Tetris”. All of which are popular for about three weeks and then the creators of them are never heard of again. I began to go off this music when it turned into a novelty, a joke, a gimmick, and was solely aimed at five-year olds. But, I thought to myself, what is there to go on to after listening to this weak, soulless music for so long?

It took a trip to my sister’s, who also liked rave for a long time before me, to realise what I should be buying to replace the mind-clamouring mess I had been wasting my money on. It was fairly late on a Friday night and my sister took a tape from an old shoe box and put it in the deck of her expensive stereo system. As soon as I’d been listening to the music for about two minutes I had been taken in by it. It filled my senses with happiness and joy and lifted my spirits endlessly. The long melodic chords and the dream-like instruments were indescribable along with a female singer at times with the odd sample, in better taste than the rave ones, winding its way into my ears. My sister called the music Ambient or Dub music and it’s still my favourite music today. I really let myself become engulfed by the music and absorbed by the slow, inconsistent beat. Nearly always when I am lying down on my bed and I’m listening to the music I get so taken in and relaxed that I fall asleep. Sometimes, if I concentrate hard enough, I can let my mind create “pictures” and these also help me to doze off to sleep until the tape reaches its end, produces a loud clicking noise and wakes me up.

This music is slowly finding its way into the hit parade and becoming popular. One of my favourite bands The Orb have already had two top twenty singles plus the prestige of a number one album. Their song titles include “Little Fluffy clouds”, “The back side of the moon” and the incredibly long “A huge ever-growing, pulsating brain that rules from the centre of the ultraworld”. So not only do the tunes have a good, melodic, beautiful sound the titles of them do too. There is so much going on in the records that each time I listen to them my ears seem to pick out something new, like a sample or instrument I haven’t noticed before. I find this type of music beautiful.

However, sound and music are not the only things in life I find beauty in. I also find certain scenes in nature beautiful and an example of this is the sea. […]

Procrastination

Well, I was going to write my next blog entry sooner but I needed to erm wash the dishes and watch that programme about the sex life of fleas and then there was the reorganising of my bank statements into date order which I really HAD to do NOW, OK?! Anyone who remembers studying at school or university will identify with being faced with a deadline and feeling compelled to do just about anything else under the sun aside from the task in hand. It can be the same when faced with writing an article. Out comes the hoover, you feel compelled to call that friend you've quite happily neglected for the past three months and you find yourself taking a real interest in Murder, She Wrote for the first time in your life.

If the TV isn't a big enough distraction then there's the time sapping black hole of the internet to contend with too. The interweb is a devious beast as well because even when you do finally start researching your article online you can either find yourself distracted by the 'related links', which often send you off on a completely useless tangent, or you automatically log into your Facebook account out of habit. This can often lead to the obsessive compulsive procrastinators loop of Facebook, Hotmail, Facebook, Hotmail, Facebook, BBC Weather, Facebook, Hotmail. Neither direction is a good one to go in when you have that big black dreadline cloud hanging over you and can only lead to a very late night, two hours sleep face down on your keyboard and then the realisation when you awake with marginally more sense that nothing you wrote before you passed out makes the slightest bit of sense and even if it does there's five times the amount of words you were commissioned to write. The wood and the trees look remarkably alike but you're on a promise to get the article in first thing in the morning and that happens to be a mere 90 minutes away. You struggle through in between swearing and frustratedly tugging at clumps of your hair while feeling like some kind of drug-addled space cadet.

But somehow, you make it. You meet the deadline. The editor is happy and no one aside from you knows the ordeal you've been through to get the article written. To think you could have just bloody well got on with it without the impromptu spring clean or the assistance of Angela Lansbury... but that's something the professional procrastinator can only dream of.

Anyway, time to exorcise some more chart trivia from my overloaded noggin with useless music fact #2: The Prodigy reached number three with their debut hit 'Charly' in August 1991. The fairground style follow-up 'Everybody In The Place' went one better and hit number two but it wasn't till 'Firestarter' in 1996 that Liam Howlett and co. finally hit the top spot. However, even though that is their best known track to date, follow-up 'Breathe', which also hit number one, sold more copies. Fancy that eh??

Till next time…

Originally posted on http://blog.ianroullier.com on 8 June 2009.