glimpses of a 90's child’s musical journey

… and how it slowly drifted into the realms of ambient music

I listened to a lot of music when I was a kid, going through the eclectic discography of my mother. It is soothing to recollect these moments, how different my young ear was, without any prior knowledge or social constructs to alter my feelings about a track. As an only child, I lived this discovery as a secret and intimate journey through the different soundscapes the world had to offer. I had no words to describe the colors, shapes and hues of these pieces. So liking them meant gathering a pool of raw emotions which had to be consumed physically: singing phonetic English, dancing, crying, shivering, playing on repeat while gazing at the fields behind my backyard…

Among all the records I went through, the one that will stick forever is Animals by Pink Floyd (1976). My mother used to play it for me on my way to school. She knew some of the lyrics of Dog and she would teach me so I could sing along. Yet it is only years later I grasped the depth of this allegorical essay, sonic translation of the Animal Farm by George Orwell. So at the time I liked the track because it sounded cool, because it was novel to me to take 17 minutes to lay out a track with many different parts. To take the time to pause and bubble through space for minutes on end so the guitar and lyrics could come back with even more power and cascade down to the grand finale hammered through efficient syntactic and riffing repetition.

Needless to say the eight year old me kept asking for more, lucky me the year was 2001 and was released a compilation of Pink Floyd remastered tracks, featuring (among many others) Echoes (1971) and Shine On You Crazy Diamond (1975). These two tracks were originally separated in parts and spread out across the albums they appeared on, serving as introduction and conclusion. So purists blamed the album for being untrue to the original releases when these tracks each appeared remastered and stitched together into one single part. But I could not care less. I literally spent my Wednesday afternoons listening to them. The earlier work of Pink Floyd was more psychedelic, relied more fiercely on the synths and esoteric parts of Wright. He could mix together 18 minutes of pure bliss, creating a time sink, a singularity in the space time continuum where minutes become hours until the end of the track awakes you from the limbo and leaves you adrift, wondering where time went.

But music percolates from many other sources than listening directly to physical albums. People tend to remember soundtracks of movies, I remember the soundtrack of my childhood… video games. My father gave me my first PlayStation 1 as a Christmas gift, when I was only not even 5… Even as a kid I understood he wanted this console more than I did ahah. He had bought it with Crash Bandicoot and Gran Turismo. I played the latter a lot, I can still remember all of the manufacturer soundtracks, especially Honda. I would stare at the NSX special car for hours with the music below in the background, hoping I’d one day farm enough money to buy it.

When my parents divorced in 1998, my mother moved back to her parent’s in Normandy. I am an only child, so in order for me not to feel too alone, she arranged so my cousin Pierre would spend almost all of his week-ends with me at my grandparents’ house. We were almost 2 years apart, him being my cadet, and he quickly became the brother I never had. We spent so much time together, playing, or just watching each other play. We would wake up at 6am and go downstairs on the tip of our toes not to be spotted by my grandfather to get to the room where the console was. It is impossible to cite all the games we played, but some of the most vivid memories I have are on Crash Bandicoot 3, Crash Bash, Crash Team Racing (the only true kart racing game, change my mind), Gran Turismo 1 and 2, Spyro the Dragon, MDK, Syphon Filter, Tekken 3, and so many more…

I was lucky enough to grow up as the fifth generation of console came out, more specifically the PlayStation (and its successors) which had the specificity of having a CD-ROM player, making it de facto the console of choice for music lovers. In this interview of Stewart Copeland, the former drummer of the Police, about his composition work on Spyro the Dragon game (1998), the genius himself says:

Yet, the video game scene did not only attract composers from the general public scene. A lot of the video games at the end of the 90’s had fast-paced, techno oriented soundtracks, heavily influenced by the then vibrant raving scene. One of the most obvious examples is the soundtrack of Wip3out (1999) featuring the likes of Sasha and the Chemical Brothers, or the title track of Ghost in the Shell (1997) produced by Takkyu Ishino himself (some Japanese version of Jeff Mills when it comes to mixing). I even realized I made my first encounter with acid techno while playing Colin McRae 2 (2000) when I was eight and did not even know Roland existed… Just listen to that crazy 303 line for fuck’s sake!… These two genres stayed rampant in my brain and creeped into me so much that, 15 years later, my friends and I created a social digging group on Facebook to scout for acid techno bombs in the depths of the Internet: all we need is acid.

As I delved into the OST’s of the video games across all gens of the PlayStation I realized I could go on forever… So to remain concise I made a playlist gathering all the not-so-hidden gems I found during this nostalgia trip, ordered by video game release year. Be sure to check it out, it contains anything from hip-hop to rock with bits of neo-classical and of course some more techno / jungle induced sweetness.

Anyway! Going back to ambient, I think my first true encounter with the genre was through the second edition of Spyro: Spyro Gateway to Glimmer (or Ripto’s Rage in the US, 1999). The three hub worlds had music very akin to Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon, simple and efficient layering of far away synths cleverly capturing summer, autumn and winter feels. I have to say tears filled my eyes as I was listening to them and reading the comments of all these people reminiscing the past, writing (cheesy) comments like this one:

And a comment more on point with our actual topic:

As I grew older, my father gave me the responsibility to digitize his music collection. His collection was vastly different from my mother’s. While still very eclectic, his was more leaning towards jazz and blues music. He bought the big iPod classic and a station so we could play music while he was cooking. Those were special times for us. As the years, places and girlfriends passed, the “music while cooking” times stayed. From the many names coming back to my head I would cite Thelonious Monk, Fats Waller, John Lee Hooker but also and more surprisingly Saint Germain’s infamous Tourist album.

One day in 2008 he came back from a trip to Paris where he had enjoyed both Buddha Bar and Hotel Costes music. By that time I had taught him how to download music, and the student had soon surpassed the teacher. He basically ripped the whole discography and fit it on his iPod. I remember smoking a cigar with him on a warm summer night listening to the 11th Hotel Costes compilation. He would tell me to remember these moments of bonding.. and they did crystallize in my mind. He was happy he could share them with me, taking revenge of the absence of such moments with his own father. When I think of these times, this next track comes with them.

While lounge music does get us closer to ambient, we are not quite there yet. Closing the loop is an artist that my mother and father had in common: Moby. His (best) albums 18 and Play played so many times throughout my childhood. I remember listening to One of These Mornings on repeat, picturing an imaginary scene of my mother leaving my father in my head. The first part of Play was also very moving to me. It is funny how we all have that masochistic trait of playing music which unearth our deepest sorrows, just to contemplate our despair and cry. In fact it has to be a coping mechanism, yet another channel to express feelings which cannot merely be captured by words or thoughts.

While most of the sonic discoveries I described so far were through a third party, either a relative, a movie or a video game, I did search around for some music for myself. Yet, it only happened relatively late (circa 2008), almost like I had to go through a burn-in period to digest the different genres presented to me and find my place. A more down to earth explanation is that 2008 corresponds to the true beginning of YouTube as a music platform, following the explosion of P2P file sharing in 2006. Music was not only free, it was easy to reach.

Unsurprisingly, the first genre I started digging was hip-hop. It sits right at the boundaries of all the genres I presented above: electronic for the beats, jazz and rock for the looped samples, while preserving the importance of the lyrics. It is also the genre I identified to the most. It was the only genre that was “mine”. Nobody helped me discover it, I discovered it in my video games. I had been blaring West Coast hip-hop through Radio Los Santos for the past 4 years, and it had that rebellious hook to it… “how can you listen to this, Guillaume?”

While hip-hop is all about being gangsta and shit, the nerd in me applied the scientific method to the genre’s discovery, following carefully the same process for each artist: look for their wiki page, check all their albums, listen to all of them chronologically, never read reviews to come unbiased. The duo Guru/Premiere, also known as Gang Starr, was the first to undergo this meticulous process. I remembered them from Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 (2002), and wanted to hear more. Their second album, Step in the Arena (1991) is my favorite. DJ Premiere was godlike, putting out many classic East Coast instrumentals like in Who’s Gonna Take the Weight. But he also knew how to “step aside” to leave room for Guru’s flow to engage you more directly like in Precisely the Right Rhymes.

Of all the hip-hop albums I listened to at the time, two will remain forever: Liquid Sword by GZA and Temple of Boom by Cypress Hill, both from 1995. The latter stayed for a very long time my favorite hip-hop album before being uncrowned in favor of the Psycho Realm. It just ticked all the boxes (see how the older me ‘ticks boxes’ while the younger me only listened). Before anything else, it had absolutely mental instrumentals. Take the one from Stoned Raiders… unbelievably gloomy atmosphere introduced by an echoing sample from the Exorcist: “It’s the Lord who expels you… He who is coming to judge you…”. On top, B-Real’s voice and flow finishes to deliver that fiendish hook to an already evil beat.

Needless to say lil’ white boy from the lush green hills of Normandy was kinda ridiculous bumping hard gangsta rap, but I couldn’t care less. I even started learning the lyrics. As a matter of fact, it quickly became my main source of vocabulary. Would you believe me if I told you I once knew all three verses of Today Was a Good Day? The three verses of Hood Took Me Under? That I would mimic shooting a cop with a tec-9 while listening to Creep’N’Crawl? Ahah, fuck this me neither, but I sure hope some of you guys did that too.

As any teenager entering high school, I also started going to parties. It is funny how the vibrant scene from back in the days is almost completely irrelevant now. But man… what a blast! I remember one guy that came to a party we organized in my mate’s barn. He had the old batman logo tattoo-ed on his lower belly, and looked high as fuck. He had burned a CD, had written “¡check this out!” with a marker on it, and we played it to death that night. I found the CD years later while sorting my old stuff, hence I was able to re-create the part of the playlist here. I think it summarizes perfectly how a high school party would sound like in France circa 2008.

Because I also wanted to play some nasty electro at parties, I started dusting off some of the electronic albums I had listened to when I was younger but did not really catch my attention. I re-discovered and played on repeat the 3 first albums of Daft Punk. By far my favorite, it is hard to express what Homework (1997) represents… it defines a generation. It was the soundtrack for many kids’ lives, going to high school rocking Da Funk on the iPod nano, feeling untouchable. Rollin’ and Scratchin’ is a track you still hear many DJs play, straight up techno track which builds its momentum in scratching metal across your whole face, shaping white noise into kicks, loud tire screeching into synths.

I’d rather skip a few years to the end of high school, as delving into my playlists from 2008–2010 was more painful than rewarding, to the exception of few rare tracks that survived the test of time. Right after the baccalauréat, I went of a camping trip with two of my best friends in Hossegor. While going there, we stopped at Lacanau where a friend of us owned a camping site. We drove all night, and arrived very early in the morning on the beach to see the sunrise. We levitated there for the day and finally joined our friend in the late evening. He took us to another beach and played a track that will forever stay engraved in my soul: Aaron by Paul Kalkbrenner. It was a moment of pure bliss, when weariness transforms into nothingness, floating a few meters above my body, gazing at the starry summer sky… Needless to say his album, Berlin Calling, stayed on repeat for the remainder of the trip. Couple years later I bought a physical copy for my mother, her favorite track is Altes Kamuffel. Each time I listen to the track I picture her dancing and mimicking the hats coming in at 01:10: “shhhhlack, shhhlack, …” ahah mayn good times.

After that summer, I entered preparatory class, which essentially means I sacrificed two years of my life to the gods of mathematics and physics. It was a 6 days week, 18 hours of maths, 14 hours of physics, with 4 hour tests every Saturday morning. Long story short, I did not have the time to make playlists or discover anything. Yet, a friend of mine, Charles, played from times to times some nice tracks at my place. He was the first one to confront me with the idea that I was going in the wrong direction in electronic music (there is a reason I told you I skipped the 2008–2010 playlists…). He was the first one to show me salut c’est cool, and also introduced me to deep house with this following track.

It’s only when I got into my Engineering school that I got back at music. I quickly became good friend with Kerbaul, a guy already in his second year. He was quite the party-goer at that time. I owe him my first experiences with drugs and music. He made me discover a whole span of chilled out minimal techno artists kicking similar vibes than Kalkbrenner, the likes of Nicolas Jaar, Rone, Jamie XX, Sascha Braemer… I still have the playlist of that time if you want to check it out.

2013 was the turning point in my relationship with music. It became a mean to escape my loneliness. I had moved to Paris for my second year, while I was supposed to study in Angers with all my friends. I had overlooked a small detail when choosing my specialization for the second year: it was only taught in Paris. I was forced to move, it felt like a second divorce. I was taken away from my friends and the never ending student parties to meet a dull and unknown city where I barely knew anyone. To top it all, the director of my master left after only two weeks, so the teachers would stop coming after the first 2–3 months. Between January and April 2014, I had a grand total of 28 hours of university courses. Moving to Paris was not even worth the effort. I was thinking deep inside myself that I was missing the train, wrecking my student life. I felt like the gods had abandoned me, leaving me stranded and on my own in the city of the Big Man. Because my only (reasonable) choice was to endure and wait to get the diploma, I turned to the only thing that followed me to Paris, music.

I cannot count the number of nights I went on my own to the Rex club and Concrete. I went full blown techno, trying relentlessly to find which scene suited me best. I discovered what it meant to be lost in a crowd. Memories of these times are made of flashing faces, throbbing lights, heavy ear pressure and sound waves sweeping through the shapeless mass of people dancing. The good thing of going out alone is that nobody is waiting for you nor expects anything from you… Getting lost as an art, the art of not giving a flying fuck about where the damn thing was going. It is hard to nail down a single track that best describes this period, but I think the closing track from Roman Poncet’s set will do its job of convincing you this was no kindergarten matter.

My parents quickly understood (or did they?) that Paris did not have the best influence on me. After being threatened to get thrown out of my school because I was complaining too much about the quality of the courses, my father told me to lay low for a while and try to get something out of this year other than taking drugs in clubs in the week(-ends?). Pretty reasonable advice I shall say. So he found me an internship in Liverpool. As I was finally making friends in Paris, I moved again. I ended up sharing a house with 5 young fellas of the pure English breed. They were a lot of fun, but none of them were of the 24 hours party people kind. Because raving already developed as an habit, I decided to rave on my own. Cheese was plentiful and butterflies would be stamped on the back of them pills. I ended up wandering around Manchester quite a lot, but also did quite a few underground parties in Liverpool. One of them at kitchen street will stay forever. It was a party where Dettmann would play a 14 hours set… In fact, I even found a text I wrote a few days after the party which summarizes well that night…

As I was stacking for the first time of my life a bit of money, I told to myself that all my investment from this day on would be in music. I started off by buying a controller, started fucking around with it and mixing some sets in my living room. It’s only when you start mixing that you realize that you need to get serious about digging, because keeping a flow requires an extensive library of sounds. A set is just the tip of the iceberg, you end up playing 20 tracks out of the hundred you had in mind. So I started digging… on YouTube. Came across the classic channels every head knows: CMYK, techno scene, prisoneer, deepspace, 7296272962, Fuccyootoo, mickooy, all of the29nov flavors, etc. At the beginning, it was hard for me to find my true identity. We use the term techno as if it was one solid entity, but man is this genre intricately ramified. Unlike metal where every album is its own subgenre (no offense), nobody took that much time drawing clear lines in the techno realm. Of course there is straight up autobahn techno like I used to like, but what about dub techno? tech-house? microhouse? breakbeat? house? deep house? lofi house? deep techno? ambient techno? drone techno? acid techno? old school? anything lying at the borders of any of these genres? anything experimental enough not to approach any of these definitions? and what about all the other sub-genres I have not come across yet? Anyway, you get the drift.

I have to admit I actually quickly converged to ambient / drone techno. The scene was blooming at the time, Northern Electronics were releasing their first records, and the French scene was strong. Dement3d was releasing incredible EP and LP’s from Polar Inertia. As I got back to Paris, I continued digging but grew tired of my shitty Logitech 2.1 soundsystem. I bought myself a decent pair of speakers, the Yamaha HS8. They left no room on my desk in this tiny 7m² residence room, my friends would mock me for it (and also hate me for it since soundproofing was so good I could hear my Chinese neighbor 3 rooms apart spitting in his sink). But MANE what a slap across the face. I distinctly remember playing June by Acronym in the first days I got the kit and it was a revelation. I was high as a kite in my small room, facing this immense wall of sound. There was so much room, it felt so spacious, so precise and live. Virtually tears in my eyes just thinking of that moment where I knew I had finally met myself.

And the search went on. I was attracted by the bleak and desolated soundscapes of Northern Electronics, at first mainly through their records which were more leaning towards techno (and acid ). But gradually, as drone grew in me, I started listening to colder and colder sounds. After all these nights mostly listening to techno in clubs, and searching blindly for my path on YouTube, I had found my shelter. The long lasting drones, these minute changes in washed out percussion layers would put my mind in some kind of stasis. There is no real notion of focus anymore, everything kind of merges together, time and space. The whole remains very danceable, it almost feels like a ritual, people at these parties go there for themselves. There is no real conversation or burning fever. Everyone comes here to meet their inner selves in a nightlong journey. It is very calming not to have to listen to a set to enjoy it. It’s like your mind just wanders around and feeds on these familiar frequencies.

After all these years, I had come back to my earlier self who would wander around Autumn Plains in Spyro 2 for hours, just to bath my mind with a soothing drone and not have to think, watching the leaves fall. I had come back to the kid who would listen to Dogs from Pink Floyd only to enjoy that part where only a distant beep and a droning synth would remain, making you feel at home, making you feel at peace. As an only child living in the countryside, I was lonely most of my childhood. In retrospective, I feel like I was listening to these slowly varying layers of sound to create peace. This loneliness has stick around with me, deep down, it sometimes strikes back and puts me down for a few days. I think the best track which would describe the nostalgia pouring out of my heart thinking of this innocent younger self from which I barely deviated from is the following.

In my pursuit for drone techno, I started adoring Abdulla Rashim like the demigod he is. And as I said earlier, the French drone scene was blooming. The duo As Patria would play at Concrete on Friday nights before midnight, where I would get in for free, watching them pull out the most bad ass vinyl-only deepness. But most importantly of all… Polar Inertia. A project immersed in a deep fog, a thick snow storm. To quote their biography on RA:

Again, I distinctly remember the moment I listened to their album Kinematic Optics, unparalleled to this day, on the day of its release on my soundsystem at home. I was feeling very sad, my master’s thesis was a dead-end, I was having an awfully destructive relationship, and I was smoking way too often to have a clear picture of my future. I came to this album thinking that I already knew it, I heard excerpts of it from parties I had in the months before, and indeed I had heard the A/B faces already (not to dismiss them, they remain some of the best techno tracks I ever heard). But then, I played the second record. That intense bass filled up the space of my room, and I instantly started levitating. It felt like a daydream, like I was gravitating above layers of thin ice. Air was pure, my mind was clear of any concepts. Suddenly white noise comes, like a silent thunder. Tension builds. Electricity around seems to interfere and swirl in an infinite vortex. And comes the rebirth. My third eye is wide open, as this synth blares its relief. Time has come to repopulate space with nostalgic yet joyful sounds. Everything here is to be rebuilt, for the best. Future is lying in front of me, a blank slate…

Here, my friends, is how I fell in love with ambient.