Electro Music Quotes

James, you’d like Lou Reed,” Michael insisted. “He was bisexual.” Their laughter turned to coughs. They were all staring at me when I turned around. I told myself to relax. “Oh, yeah?” I said. “He doesn’t sound bisexual.” Michael just shook his head, but Ronan and Glenn smiled. “They did electroshock therapy on him when he was a teenager,” Michael said. “Electro-what?” said Glenn. “They electrocuted people?” “Kind of. They zapped their brains to alter their personalities. That’s how they tried to make gay people straight back then.” They all looked at me for a response. I shrugged. “So, he was bisexual? It worked halfway?

The music was intended to replicate or even enhance the mind-altering experiences of the psychedelic drugs. They were using electric guitars, wah-wah pedals, loop music to create ostinato patterns, electric organs, synthesizers (nobody even had any idea what that was at the time, but it was cool to throw it into a conversation), electro-mechanical polyphonic tape replay keyboards, fuzz box effects, backward tapes, you name it. Anything went

I Feel Love,” by Donna Summer, and this had a profound influence on how I perceived music from that point on. Additionally, it led me toward a greater appreciation of disco; Chic were now filed next to the Clash in my album collection. These elements, merged with many other stylistic references, formed the basic blueprint for Duran Duran: the raw energy of punk, disco rhythms, electro pulses, and the panache of glam rock, which was already deeply embedded in our consciousness.

Turbo Sasquatch, or T-Squatch, was a Redwood original, a hardrock pop-punk bhangra electro surf hybrid that did highly danceable sambas. It was a supergroup, a mighty Voltron formed from three other successful local bands. Sometimes they had a dhol drum and horn section depending on the lineup, becoming Ultra Mega Turbo Sasquatch, a musical macrophage mashup absorbing other bands at will. They played only by the light of the full moon and were not to be missed under any circumstances. “The only band that matters,” it was said.

The Telharmonium was installed in New York City in 1906. It wasn’t a single, self-contained musical instrument, but a vast 200-ton complex of equipment the size of a power plant. Each of its massive, electro-mechanical rotors—giant tone wheels—spun around to generate a sine wave (the basic building block of sound), along with other sine waves above it of a higher frequency. The idea was to simulate the physics that determine the distinct tone colors of different acoustic instruments, each note of these instruments being a fundamental sine wave tone, with overtones on top of it that give it its special character. Stacking up sine waves to build sounds of distinct timbres is the principle of “additive synthesis,” and Cahill, in his patent, anticipated the term “synthesizer” when he explained that, out of these “elemental electrical vibrations

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours? There was a period when I was drinking at every show, and I was DJing a lot, maybe four nights a week, playing local shows in Los Angeles. I had a couple of Dim Mak parties, and we were on top of the world! We had cornered the market with our sound and culture, and I was just getting booked left and right. I was the ambassador of this new culture that was burgeoning in electronic music called “electro,” and my ego was flexing a bit. I was drinking and having fun. It was a great feeling, but then you forget about the most important things in life because you’re in that fog of self-indulgence. My mom was coming to visit me, and she never flies in. This was one of the few times she had. I was supposed to pick her up in the morning. I had a big night the night before—we had a party, I drank, and I stayed out super late. The next morning my mom landed around 7 A.M., and I slept through it. I woke up at 10 A.M., or something awful like three hours later. I saw a text message from my mom—she barely even knew how to text! I don’t know why, but she waited at the airport for three hours, sitting outside on a bench. My poor mom. Once I got to the airport an hour later—making it four hours she had been there—she was just innocently sitting on this bench, and I broke down. She was still so sweet about it. It was at that moment that I felt like this whole life of partying and drinking was all bullshit, especially if you can’t maintain your priorities of valuing and taking care of your family. That was one fail I will never forget. After that, I stopped being caught up in that Hollywood bubble where everyone parties and drinks every single night. You can live in that bubble and forget about the realities of your family and relationships outside the bubble. But those relationships are vital to who you are and are important in your life. Eventually, I quit drinking, which I am happy about, partly because of this major fail.

Some of my favorite nights were when I would go out with my dancers. One time in Europe we went to a gay club where I felt like everyone around me on the dance floor was so tall. The club played great electro dance music and I loved it. I danced until six o'clock in the morning and felt like it went by in two seconds. My heart was so alive. It was like the mystical time in Arizona - it was a spiritual experience to be with people who I could feel loved me unconditionally. With friends like that, it doesn't matter what you do or say or who you know. That's true love.

So there we were before breakfast in the hotel garden beneath palm trees, all wearing our matching conference T-shirts. The sound of waves crashing into the hotel beach was drowned out by a boom box playing loud electro workout music to pump us up: exuberant, high-octane tunes with pulsating rhythms that keep building to new crescendos. After dividing into teams, we spent the next forty-five minutes racing from one exercise to the next—planks, squats, sit-ups, sprints, and burpees (a combined squat, push-up, and vertical jump)—constantly high-fiving each other and shouting encouragements. At the end, everyone was exhausted, and we all congratulated each other for our efforts, agreeing vociferously how much fun it was. I enjoyed myself, but was it fun? I did the exercises as best I could, but what I actually enjoyed was the camaraderie, the beautiful setting, the high-fiving, and even the music. Afterward, I also enjoyed the feeling of having exercised intensely. But frankly, the planks, squats, sit-ups, sprints, and burpees were hard. The routine brought to mind the running guru George Sheehan’s observation that “exercise is done against one’s wishes and maintained only because the alternative is worse.

18 “Cybotron coincided with the birth of a sound known as ‘electro,’ presumably a shortening of ‘electronic funk.’ Electro was one of the great dance music developments of the early 1980s that was neither a derivation nor an extension of disco. Instead, it was a ‘switched-on’ funk variant, exaggerating the electronic sounds that Midwestern groups like Parliament-Funkadelic had perfected in the studio and brought onstage. Most critics point to New York, however, for the genre's watershed moment.” Dan Sicko, Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk [1999] (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 45.