Music is one of my main passions. Here, you can find playlists, writings, and my personal favourites when it comes to music.
"Music is usually telling a story. Not always, but most times." Those words made the hazy night driving home in her 2005 Sequoia down a major street in LA county stick with me my entire life. Little me accepted it as fact, when you older you start to question everything that has ever been told to you. No matter how many times I try to detach music from this meaning, I just can't. Are the lyrics non-sensical? Are they not telling a story at all? Even if there is no visualizer, no music video, and no lyrics.. we as humans tend to append our own stories and feelings and life experiences to pure sound. Art tells a story through our own conscience.. We view everything through our own lense of life. Art is what we make it.
Everyone has that album or band that is *theirs* even if they didn't make it. Something they highly connect to and is their favourite thing to hear. I can tell you now that I have one of those albums for almost every genre, or year! I love every genre. Yes. Even country. I grew up in a very musical household. Not in the sense that instruments were taught and played by every member of the family, but in the sense that everyone was very passionate about music. There was always music playing in some way. It made our home complete.

Growing up (infancy to elementary school)

I seldom listened to albums growing up. My dad liked his IPod and our local radio station alot.. which is still the same to this day! Anyways, I grew up listening to a myriad of different music as our local radio station is KXLU, from Loyola Marymount College. Some tracks I remember most prominently are:


  1. Molly's Lips - The Vaselines
  2. Blue Clouds - Modeselektor
  3. Bam Bam - Sister Nancy
  4. Mercy Mercy Me - Marvin Gaye
  5. Odessa - Caribou

The most popular albums of my childhood were:

  1. Rated R - Queens of the Stone Age
  2. El Camino - Black Keys
  3. Greatest Hits - Sublime
  4. Many, many bootleg compilations

And this is JUST the stuff from my dad! I can attribute my musical open mindedness mostly to this period in my life.

Growing up (elementary to adolescence)

Of course the internet was VERY pivotal to me finding new music. Since then, I have been very (much more) attracted to anything electronic. Aside from the internet, my sister also played a huge hand on what I like. I got introduced to Anamanaguchi, which is still a band I absolutely love TO THIS DAY thanks to her! That was my first concert. I'd say almost all of my music taste was from her. I ended up getting very obsessed with Gorillaz. Something my sister and I both share, but surprisingly, wasn't because of her! I bought every single one of their CDs and vinyls. and then because of that, I got very into Blur. Shortly thereafter that, I switched from playing only from CD to finally signing up for streaming. I absolutely refused to use Spotify when I was younger and I would listen solely from my physical media, my downloads, & (rarely) Youtube. Since I was very into punk and metal, it lead to me trying to find solo work for Kirk Hammett. I found the Spawn: the album compilation on Discogs under his name. I listened to the whole thing since there were names I recognized in both electronic and rock. I cannot explain how much my mind was blown when I heard Atari Teenage Riot for the first time. As you read earlier, I grew up listening to stuff like Modeselektor. I had no idea electronic could ever be that explosive. I was hooked on the first listen. Since I was no longer limited by CDs, I decided to explore nearly every genre. Songs About My Cats by Venetian Snares was one of the records that really marked the beginning of what I like now, if not for the Spawn soundtrack.

Growing up (elementary to adolescence) - continued

My musical journey from then on was much, much more experimental, and every year, or month has been coloured with different music. Its impossible to name them all. To shorten it, I went from exploring punk, to garage rock, goth, (cont. soon, sorry!)

Streaming

I have such a huge disdain for streaming though this is what we have in the modern world. This is whats most convenient and sadly what alot of music infrastructure seems to be built on nowadays, & even I am very guilty of using it! It actually pisses me off that official streaming files will be very compressed and muddy compared to what files I have from my phone. If you want a great example, check out Spotify's version of El Mañana by Gorillaz and tell me that compression isn't fucking outrageous.

Emotion & Brain

Archivial

I dabble in preserving music and keeping Discogs and Last.fm/Musicbrainz as accurate/up-to-date as possible! Maybe you would be very surprised to know how much music gets lost over the years. Whole record labels can disappear practically overnight.