verbosity

Shan's Musik Skool

DJ Shan came over to my house earlier this evening. I must say, the sex was great. And by "sex," I mean the instruction I received in electronic music. No, that's not a metaphor. Shannon came over with the express purpose of laying me...err, the ground work for my electronic music education.

I was raised on some country, dabbled a bit in classical, pop, early hip-hop, and eventually settled firmly into rock, industrial, and some forms of metal, with a smattering of jazz and nerdcore. My experience with "techno" went little beyond what was attached to movies, commercials, and the occasional song that was "mainstream" enough to find its way to my ears through personal channels.

Enter Shannon. I've known for years upon years of her passion for this exploding genre. She spins it even, although not quite for a "living" yet; doesn't seem to be much money in that market unless you make it really big. After another friend of mine pointed me to Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music, I decided to give ol' Shan a ring for some personal instruction. She was not only interested, but seemingly bordering on ecstatic for the opportunity to school this metalhead. Girl's definitely passionate about her music.

After dinner at Imperial Palace -- always excellent, although I didn't care much for the sizzling rice soup that Mr. Peck recommended to me earlier in the week -- I led Miss Shannon out to my pad in BFE. She brought a stack of CDs with her, but they never left the case. Flexing my internet connection, she went to town downloading tracks from all over the genre roadmap. Not 20 minutes into her copyright-pushing excursion (she potentially owns everything she demo'd for me), my land-line rings. I danced out to my living room to see what Mr. Caller ID had to say:

"No way. No bloody way," I exclaimed entirely to myself. "No way in hell Time Warner is watching their pipes that closely. That's not even practical."

With trepidation I answered, futilely attempting to shield the phone's pickup from the downtempo tracks booming from my room. I usually answer my phone by identifying myself, but hell if I was going to do that this time.

"Hello?"

"I see you're a Roadrunner cable internet subscriber blah blah blah sign up for cable television blah blah."! "Blah, buh buh blah."

"No thanks. I don't have television service because I have no interest in watching TV."

I guess the sales lady detected the "I'm not budging even if you offer me your firstborn" undertones, for she ended the call after barely squeezing in a comment about thanking me for my time, or some similar canned closing line. Back to the peer-to-peer networks I went.

The other event of note was that I finally found a track I've been searching for for nigh on 6 years. Not continually, obviously, and I'd completely forgotten about it since $deity-knows-when until tonight. Remember the movie Blade? In one scene, Deacon Frost is chilling in the vampire archives while some cheesy Hollywood "looks good but is complete horseshit" computing thing that's supposedly decoding the La Magra prophecy runs on the workstation next to him. Vampire elder Dragonetti strolls in and begins to chastise Frost, who slowly removes his headphones to bless us with a wickedly twisted drum n bass tune sample.

When the Blade soundtrack emerged in stores, I pounced upon it only to find it was "music from and inspired by the movie," which I quickly learned meant "4 tracks from the movie, padded with crappy rap and other junk instead of the kickin' electronic beats that you might actually be interested in listening to." It didn't have my track, no one I asked knew what the music coming from the headphones was, or even if it was a song that existed outside of the movie.

But I found it, thanks to Google's cache. Source Direct's "Call & Response" from their Exorcise the Demons album. I need to listen to more of their material to decide if it's worthy of purchasing.