To much time listening to Dance Music on Large Sound Systems!

Music wise:

Ritche Hawtin . Plastickman really freaked me out 'after listening to lots of regular trance music. FSOL 'ISDN album still makes my skin crawl when you hear the boys in the studio yelling at the camera guy to "turn off the fucking light"

The idea of people playing electronic music though the wire was just so cool .. aside from the music being very spacial and sound scape surreal.
Autechra ' Photek ' T Power ' KLF ' Mechanism ' Son Sine ' Gemini ' Sun Electric ' Mouse on Mars ' Basic Channel ' Maurizio !!

A major discovery for me was phase spots in front of reinforced systems.

I am the guy bobbing his head side to side ' in phase ' out of phase.

This lead me to spend dance parties standing on a chair with my head in the top corners of the room listening to the reverb cavities, or walking the walls stepping in and out to find the doubling point of the bass wave.

Part of this was from being at an average of three dance events a week for three years, so the actual interest in the music faded and I started to look for the freaks in the system, the sonic character of a room, the weak or cheap components the signal path. (ie Dj mixer)

Learning that I could tell when it started raining outside a venue because the humidity shift would alter the sonic properties of high frequencies.

By this point I was over the edge, spending most of my time at events mapping sound space. Doing the cheeky 1cm tweak on the speaker stack because the phase array was not to my liking. Walking left to right all night until I could find the exact sweet spot of different frequency groups.

..

For me it started with the music. The sounds interested me and lead me deeper, I needed more abstract sound, or sounds less predictable sounds, until I figured out where the music stopped and the system started. Then I started listening to they system because the music kept remaining the same.

Nowadays I have learned to look for the interesting music, but I still listen to the system. Often its all I hear at events, no matter what the music is all I can hear is the drivers peak inefficiency, or the feedback wormholes in the reverb ' or the phase chambers caused by the delays.

I'm kind of against a wall at the moment, where I can't go any further forward. I can move left or right and up or down. But I need more information to go deeper, I need to understand musical structures better, I need to understand technology better, and I need to understand the physics of sound with clarity.

I have tried pointing much of the above information out to people, including dragging people around PA's and getting them to bob their head like mine, but I had security called on me once ..

"there seems to be a nutter on the dance floor"

Sometimes it really bothers me, because I go to events and can't help being miserable because the sound "guy" has left a large sloppy mess at one end, and whole basket of knives and forks at the other, while the performers (Dj's) unknowingly act as test dummies for circuit loading.

I don't care if you do it on purpose, in fact I love it if you do, but if you have no idea what you are actually doing on a mixing desk or with a sound system at least pretend to be an idiot, or have the decency to take abuse like you are giving it. My theory is that 'ego's and bad sound are old buddies.

Anyway . much love to the fringe
may it for ever be on the edge!

.simon