A few years ago I didn’t know Electro Swing was a genre, now it’s one of my favorite forms of music. My first exposure was the video “Derpy Groove”, then I found out what the looped sample was from, and who by, and then YouTubeMusic made suggestions, and now I spend time listening to Parov Stelar, Jaime Berry, Postmodern Juke Box, Infected Mushroom which TBH is a little trance and some electro swing, and Caravan Palace, and some other bands like Electric Swing Circus.
Of course I still listen to Classic Rock, Arena Rock, Jazz-Rock Fusion, Boogy Blues, Rock Blues (think Yardbirds and early Deep Purple), and a bunch of stuff I have no idea what genre it belongs to besides “music”. I used to watch “Hee Haw” when I was younger and we only had one channel on the Tee Vee, so I appreciate the good parts of country music like Roy Clark and Buck Owens guitar and banjo duets, and also genre-busting instrumentals like Mason Williams’ Classical Gas. Trivial aside, Mason Williams was the musical director for the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour when he wrote Classical Gas. But as I put it when I was in high school, I have a very catholic (small “c”) taste in music. I listen to many of the classical greats, I had both editions of “Switched On Bach”, had a few Beethoven pieces in my record collection, and also had “The Stripper and other family Tunes” in the stack.
My YTM Supermix is practically schizophrenic, today’s first page of artists are: Led Zeppelin, The Electric Swing Orchestra, Vertical Mode & Astrix, Infected Mushroom, Joe Walsh, Alpha Portal, Kraftwerk, Delta Heavy, and Billy Thorpe. That first cut is off Zep 1, which is basically the last record from the Yardbirds recorded under their new name, and while some of the pieces are from this century, there are many from the middle of the previous century. The point being I like lots of different music.
One thing I have noticed is a heavy preference for percussion heavy instrumental tracks like some Trance and House, and also the works of Blue Man Group. There is a jam session that has about 20 minutes of continual music by the Blue Men, and a traditional Japanese Tyco drums group, and it ROCKS!
I’ve been blissing out to the long version of “Autobahn” while thinking about what to write next when it occurred that I should write that I can bliss out on pieces such as that. Seriously, before I knew what meditation was, I meditated to things like “Autobahn” “Tubular Bells” and the long cuts of stuff from Yes and Rick Wakefield. For a long time my favorite album was “Welcome Back My Friends to The Show that Never Ends, Ladies and Gentlemen Emerson Lake and Palmer” And if that’s not the longest album title ever it’s certainly the longest in the Rock Era.
Seriously, I can get completely lost in Karnevil 9, or the first side of “Tubular Bells” or the aforementioned title track from the breakout Kraftwerk album. The saving grace of Blue Man Group for me is their pieces only last about 7 minutes, otherwise the texture of their music would likewise take me away.
Witch on a Bicycle 