# AKA - how I learnt to be narcissistic and be ok with it.
You will have noted that I've been posting my content from Inverted Audio over here pretty regularly now. I hope you've enjoyed my lengthy summaries of sounds that go beep boop. However, have you ever wondered how I found myself writing at Inverted Audio? Obviously you haven't, but you're going to hear about it anyway.
What is to follow is a few pieces of how I ended up doing what I'm doing now. Interspersed with a few musical links of significance and including some mixes to illustrate the sort of sounds that were going on in my life.
# I am me. I am Simon.
I am 40 this year and I've been into electronic music since the pretty much first time I had the pleasure of it hitting my eardrums. My family is musical, but not anywhere in the circles of the music I'm into now. I have an older brother who was a bit of a piano virtuoso on the side of his legal career. Another who has been a top flight clarinettist for some time now, who you will have heard by proxy no doubt if you've watched any of the Lord Of The Rings or Harry Potter films. A sister who followed the curve of whatever was casually cool at the time. Then, finally, another brother, closest in age to me, who erred towards goth and indie vibes in the days when I was just a niblet. Think The Cure, Wonder Stuff, Depeche Mode, and you're halfway there.
Musicality there was, inspiration there was not. Counterbalancing this was my somewhat inquisitive nature, where I determined what I liked on my own terms and actively put myself in positions to experience more unheard of music. Back when I was a child, sources were hard to come by. It was the radio, BBC's Top Of The Pops or ITV's (no doubt long forgotten) The Chart Show.
Despite this, I was gravitating towards music of a certain nature. It wasn't number ones - and, *fuck me*, the fourteen week patch with Bryan Adams at the top of the charts was a dismal time - it was what was lurking in the lower reaches of the charts that was perking interest.
It was time for a major step - my first cassette.
I should have just tossed the first cassette away for all the use it got. Over on the second was Sasha's remix of Urban Soul, Bomb The Bass, The Shamen, Crystal Waters, and The *freakin'* Prodigy, that was getting a workout in my ears. Having been just about too young to experience the late eighties peak house music movement, I was keenly poised for the burgeoning UK and rave scene.
The electronic music bug proved to be catching. My bro, who had once donned full black garb in order to go to The Rocky Horror Show at one point in life, had started to ditch his love of indie music and was of age where he was actually able to go out and experience this music in its natural context. Being the kindly soul that he was, he bought me a fresh album as a gift.
Binning off the pop completely, here was two cassettes of pure rave to get stuck into. And I did. I hoovered up rave classics, loving them utterly. Rave had pretty much crossed over into mainstream at this point, so it was pretty easy to find and absorb. It became my pop. No time for standing still though, it was time for a further evolution.
One day I went into my room to find a pair of CDs sat on my bed.
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Think of a DJ you like. Want to hear what they sound like right now? I bet you can find a set of theirs within about 15 seconds. It was nowhere near that easy in the early nineties. Unless you went to the club and heard them specifically, the only vague chance you would be able to hear a DJ was on a shady bootleg cassette. Fresh to the scene London club Ministry Of Sound had other ideas though. It wanted to be spectacular, a brand. It began a series called 'Sessions', which signed up some of the premium Saturday night guest DJs - Fridays belonged to techno and its Open night - and captured it in pristine CD format. It was inaugurated by legendary US house DJ Tony Humphries, followed by rising star Paul Oakenfold.
I had never heard anything like it before. Sure, the energy of rave was there, but the *warmth* and the *range*. It was amazing. Then nothing quite prepared me for the moment when one track segued into the following one. The play of sounds against each other, it was like rubbing MSG into my eardrums - they tingled. Both sparked a love of house music and that instinct to explore kicked in.
The first step was to seek out what I was listening too. I quickly picked up on names such as Masters At Work - both Hardrive 'Deep Inside' and Nuyorican Soul 'The Nervous Track' are firm favourites of mine - but individuals were just one part of the picture. I needed to know where I could find more names. Going up a level led me to the labels the tracks were on and one of the first I discovered was possibly one of the best known purveyors of US house music, Strictly Rhythm.
Let us revisit to the concept of how difficult it was to find music back in that era. More often than not, you were at the mercy at how adept your independent record store was for drafting in vinyl. Andy's Records, Woolworths, HMV ... they weren't going to be pulling in the sort of undiscovered nugget I craved. Thankfully, being the behemoth they were, Strictly Rhythm put out compilation CDs. They became my encyclopedias, and an incredibly vital bedrock for my future too.
## FFWD>> 12th June, 2011.
I'd just signed up to the (then) relatively new Mixcloud platform. Uploading mixes and being able to share them with friends was a pretty fresh novelty. We were just getting out of the awkwardness of burning CDs or uploading to file sharing services. While browsing the general news of the site, I noted that they were running a competition in tandem with Strictly Rhythm. The premise was to make a 100% Strictly mix, thirty minutes long, with a play on their radio show and a hefty prize of a [Traktor S4](https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/traktor/dj-controllers/traktor-kontrol-s4/) up for grabs.
Scanning through the entries, I noted that pretty much everyone had been dumping out mixes containing near to the same tracks between them, all culled from the (rather tepid) recent years of the imprint. What was wrong with them? Why was everyone ignoring the rich history of this label?
I opened up Ableton, raked through the archives, and produced this:
[](https://www.mixcloud.com/fourfourfun/strictly-rhythm-dj-mix-contest/)
Out it went. Comments and likes came in. And I waited.
And I waited.
<sub>And I waited.</sub>
## 5th November, 2011.
Shopping! Grocery shopping. Cue sitcom groan. The weekly shop was upon me and I was standing in line at the checkout. My usual pose was in effect - headphones on, blank stare to the horizon.
I had my phone in my hand, browsing through a bunch of inconsequential things, when I saw a notification pop up.
<center></center>
*What.*
Quicker than gabba, I went to the Mixcloud site to check my mix. Joy of joys, I'd won. My actual reaction was to shout SHIT rather loudly. Which if you put in the context of a supermarket and this sound emanating from a previously incredibly still and silent human, rather surprised everybody around me.
God bless Strictly.
<sub>note: my mix *wasn't* busy :(</sub>
## RWD<< Back To The Nineties. And Beyond.
The next obvious step was to stop being passive about music and start being active. My brother had bought a pair of Technics SL1210s. Lacking space in his room, they found their way into mine. Having a little dabble to replicate this wondrous skill I had heard on mix CDs, it turned out to be something I just *got*. My bro was rather astonished at how quickly I picked up mixing and pretty much applauded a huge blend I perfected going between David Morales remixes of Mariah Carey and Jamiroquai.
Obsession took over. Vinyl was a necessity. Knowledge was mandatory. Every time I found something I liked, I found out what else they had done, who they had remixed, who else had been remixing that, what label it was on, what else was on that label. A human mining an aural blockchain. Standing still was not an option.
Scene magazines became vital. My closest companion was the long gone Musik Magazine. Every purchase, first place to hit was the reviews. Terry Farley of Junior Boys Own fame looked after the house column and was an exceptional ear, while my love of the vocal side of things drew me to the garage column. Have a click below to get an inkling of the vibe I was all about.
[](https://www.mixcloud.com/fourfourfun/foundations/)
Then things began to change. Having idolised the US house jocks for many years, it all started to wane. There was a bit of a split - major names like Todd Terry, Roger Sanchez, David Morales and Armand Van Helden began to chase the limelight, while others started to go on a roots mission of discovery and ending up in empty and saccharine soul. It was disillusioning.
When faced by situation like this, [people tend to just lock up at that point](http://www.nme.com/news/music/various-artists-1084-1208596). They stick to what they know, lament for the good old days, and meekly follow whatever is served up to them. The light goes out.
Not for me. It was time for something new and not just one thing new.
[](https://www.mixcloud.com/fourfourfun/the-death-disco-vol-1/)[](https://www.mixcloud.com/fourfourfun/we-are-still-dead/)[](https://www.mixcloud.com/fourfourfun/my-friends-electric-4/)[](https://www.mixcloud.com/fourfourfun/i-came-to-dance/)
I got stuck into deep house, progressive house and breaks, weird out chill, downtempo and IDM, tech house and techno. The above mixes are but a snapshot and wholly unrepresentative of the full breadth of sounds I have absorbed over the decades. I would readily point elsewhere if you want a showcase mix of mine. However, consider them a few lenses for illustration.
Then, around 2005, I had a slight change in mentality. I stopped reading publications, stopped paying attention to trends and critiques. Instead, I just grabbed music, took chances on things. It so happened that I found myself in an entirely dire job, so I had untold hours with headphones on with which to consume. Eventually, with coffee to one side, I needed something to amuse idle hands.
And, with that, I took to Amazon to write about everything I had been buying, haphazardly mashing my fingers against the keyboard. A seed had been planted that would take time to germinate, but would eventually sprout and grow. However, that is for a future tale. We'll put the bookmark in this for now.
<sub>If, by any chance, you have a burning desire to know about random things like pre-2000's deep house, or the turn of the millennium progressive explosion, or even random mix CDs through history, make it known in the comments below and I'll add it to my pile of future topics.</sub>
hiveblocks