How I found to this music

Kyle Gann, in the middle of an old post found here, explains a bit of how I ended up listening to all the music that I now play on my show. I ended up liking the 20 second intros and outtros of songs more than the songs themselves. I liked it when artists goofed off just as the volume faded out. I loved hearing the weird chord to end the song, the odd drumming pattern that started off just as you thought they'd repeat the chorus one more time, etc. I loved the crazy starts to songs that finally wrapped into the more usual rock song format. And, like I said, i started liking them more than the actual songs that came in between the intro and outro.

So I started looking for new sounds in music. This started in about 1992. This was right when I started missing musical movements, like, oh, My Blood Valentine (whose Loveless I now love, but didn't hear for roughly 7 years) or Radiohead (a group I only liked again after Kid A, mainly because I hadn't even heard OK Computer for the first 3 years it was out) . First I veered into free jazz, lots of Coltrane, and John Zorn, including Naked City and Masada. Some time in 1993, I heard Crumb's Black Angels and Reich's Come Out and in my first year of grad school, for no good reason that I can recall, I bought Glass's Einstein on the Beach. I'd had some other Glass, old records and such, but that opera blew me away. I didn't know how to find more of the music until years later. I was just kind of ignorant until roughly 2001 or 2002, to be honest. I spent the late 90s listening to international music of all flavors, anyway.

Anyway, it's amusing to have Gann describe the problem of a listener like me before the switch to listening to minimalism. As Gann writes, "For many of us, the large-scale course of the piece is precisely the point, even (or especially) if it goes nowhere." I love that line of his, and steal it all the time: music that ends up going nowhere. I seem to play a lot of that on my show.