Influences We're searching for a drummer, and for a while there, we were searching for a bass player. One of the first things that folks who might be interested in joining the band ask (of course) is, "what do you guys sound like?" Sometimes it's even "who do you guys sound like?" Maybe this question wouldn't be such a gargantuan poser if it weren't for how much time I've spent listening to, categorizing, and thinking about music over the years, but I'm too entrenched inside my own head to know for sure. The simple answer is, I don't know. If I'm pressed to name influences, a truly bizarre, random stream of names starts to issue forth. Swans, who are my favorite band ever, and who pushed rock off a cliff and then jumped off afterwards with their last three or four albums. Half Film, a San Francisco band of modest ambitions who broke up after only producing one really good album, but it was a stunner. Failure, who never found a song they couldn't cram a few more gloomy hooks and some more distortion into. Neurosis, who are far heavier than I'll ever be, but I love the meditative way they write their songs, which occupy an emotional space that pop music can't reach. Lungfish, another criminally underrated band from the Washington DC area, who are brilliant post-rock minimalists and even more exceptional poets. Radiohead, but these days, who isn't influenced by Radiohead? The reason I was up so late tonight was that I was making MP3s out of a bunch of newly-acquired music. I ripped 73 tracks, or a total of about 7 hours' worth of music. Some lists: The genres in the tracklisting:

• ambient
• avant-garde
• experimental
• funk
• hardcore
• hip hop / rap
• improv
• indie
• industrial
• krautrock
• metal
• noise
• pop
• post-punk
• rock
• shoegazer
• space rock
• techno

A random sampling of band names:

• Bardo Pond
• Björk
• Enslaved
• Dismemberment Plan
• Heaven Shall Burn
• Holy Ghost
• Devin Townsend
• Johannes Heil

Somehow I have to take all this sound that comes into my head and distill it into music that I can make with my actual hands and lungs and mouth. The sad truth is that the songs I write are far simpler than almost all of the stuff I listen to. I'm getting better all the time, but I listen to a song like "Like Spinning Plates" by Radiohead and get discouraged -- it's so simple, so beautiful, so sad. Still and all, it's next to impossible for me to reduce the simple little blocks of cheese that I do write (and that Tammy writes, because we shoulder the responsibility of songwriting equally) down to a phrase or two. It's mostly midtempo. It's got some guitars and bass and vocals in it. It's vaguely rock-oriented. Beyond that, I guess, everyone's just going to have to be patient and wait until we put music out there for everyone to hear. Then you all can tell me what we sound like, and I'll know what to tell everyone else. Posted by ogd at January 23, 2002 03:22 AM