Category Archives: walk in silence

I need to revisit 80s 4AD again…

Posted on by
Reply

…it’s been far too long since I’ve sat down and let myself get lost in this stuff. I mean, considering I’ve been working on reviving the Walk in Silence book, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of these albums were a huge influence on my high school years, and would fit nicely with the current iteration of this project.

I always call this era of the label’s output autumnal, because a lot of it, at least for me, evokes the feeling of an impending change of seasons near the end of the year. The air growing colder, the sounds of nature growing quieter, the sky greyer. Many of these albums — most of which I had on cassette and played incessantly at night as I went to sleep — might not always invoke a darkness, but more of a sense of desolation and breakdown, and even abandonment at times. You can hear the dust being kicked up as you walk through the wide emptiness of this music.

That, now that I understand music a lot more, was the key to 4AD’s signature sound then. A clever mix of heavy reverberation with sparse instrumentation gives it that same sound that Cowboy Junkies achieved with The Trinity Session when they recorded inside an empty church. Listening to these albums with my Walkman, volume set high and bedroom darkened, I entered another world, sometimes an escape but often times a safe place. I could let my mind and creativity get lost within the music, letting it take me on a metaphysical trip somewhere.

The collection Lonely Is an Eyesore is a great place to start. I listened to this one just a few days ago. Several of its accompanying grainy 8mm and 16mm videos were shown on MTV’s 120 Minutes, which in turn inspired me later on during my college years for my film production classes.

This Mortal Coil was a huge favorite of mine, especially after hearing a few tracks from their second album Filigree & Shadow on college radio in late 1986. That particular album was one of my top favorites in 1987-88 and inspired a lot of story ideas.

Dead Can Dance was a band I’d heard of in passing but it was 1987’s Within the Realm of a Dying Sun that became my all-time favorite of theirs. Not quite chamber music, not quite alternative rock, not quite current orchestral music, this album wasn’t just one that I’d lose myself in at night, it helped me find a Zen calm right when I was at my most anxious.

Cocteau Twins was of course a major influence on my bass playing, thanks to the Blue Bell Knoll album. By late 1988 I had a good portion of their discography on cassette (and a few on vinyl) and I was constantly listening to it. The twin 1985 EPs, Tiny Dynamine and Echoes in a Shallow Bay, remain in heavy rotation after all these years alongside their project with Harold Budd, The Moon and the Melodies.

And of course, let’s not forget the surprise hit by MARRS, a one-off project between 4AD label mates Colourbox and AR Kane. While this one goes against the grain of the typical autumnal sound of the label, it’s so damn catchy and inventive that you can’t help but love it.

Wish I was ocean size

Posted on by
Reply

Here we go, once more unto the breach.

I was reading some random posts on Threads the other day and someone mentioned how when some people talk about ‘the 90s’ (specifically about music), a lot of what they mention really started in the 80s, like Jane’s Addiction and their amazing 1988 album Nothing’s Shocking.

To which I responded: “I always say the truly formative alt rock years were really ’84-’89. It just happened to reach wider popularity in ’91.”

Which of course made me think that I really need to get my act together and finally write and complete that Walk in Silence book project. I think at this point it would be less a historical book and more of a personal memoir in which I write about the important albums and singles that influenced and inspired me during that time. And I’ve kind of been doing a very abbreviated version of it with my daily 750Words, so perhaps I’m a bit further ahead on this than I think I am…?

We shall see.

Two new mixtapes!

Posted on by
Reply

Unlike last year, where I was just too preoccupied with Real Life and other things and hadn’t allowed myself to really get to know the new music I was acquiring, I’m making a concerted effort to pay attention to what’s coming out these days, and I’m quite happy to say that I’m finding a lot of really good stuff out there!

These two mixtapes were basically holdovers from late 2023 where I’d started a list of songs but hadn’t gotten around to completing it and arranging the tracklist flow. I’m quite happy with how they came out, however, and I hope you enjoy them as well!

From the Open Skies: In My Blue World 2, created 14 January 2024. No, I have not written the sequel to In My Blue World just yet! I only have a very rough two-page outline of an idea, but I think it’s worth working on as a future project later on in the year! All I’ll say that it involves our heroes facing off a new foe with a much stronger and creepier ability to siphon magic for their own nefarious uses! And what better way to prep for a future novel project than creating a mixtape soundtrack for it? [Note: for those of you playing along, the title here is borrowed from another ELO song, heh.]

Walk in Silence XXVIII, created 30 January 2024. First of all, I can’t believe I’m already up to twenty-eight volumes of this series!! (Then again, I’ve been making them since 1988, so…) This, Listen in Silence and Untitled have pretty much become my own NOW That’s What I Call… compilations that just won’t quit. This one came out surprisingly well and I’m finding myself returning to it more and more.

Crashing Back to You

Posted on by
Reply

I’m…kind of bored with what I’ve been posting here. And if I’m bored, then you probably don’t pay too much attention either. I feel like I’ve been repeating myself here for a bit too long. Using the same overused descriptions for every album or song I’ve been posting. Mentioning new releases and sharing a video but not really talking about them. And I’m sure I’ve told you the same personal music-related stories twice or thrice over already.

So.

I have an idea of how to change Walk in Silence into something that I think I’ll enjoy, that I think you will enjoy. It’ll take some time, planning and buffer-building to get it done, but once it’s ready, I think you’ll be entertained.

So in the meantime, I will be taking all of June off to get this plan in motion. At the end of the month I’ll get back to you and let you know when it’s ready to go live again. Sound good by you?

Cool. See you then.

Keep Coming Back

Posted on by
Reply

I mentioned over at Welcome to Bridgetown that I find myself once again returning to the 80s (surprise surprise), via an old story I started my senior year in high school and attempted to revive numerous times over the ensuing decades. This is the story that went through so many different titles, versions and mutations that it has its own report binder here in the file department of Spare Oom.

And here I am, half-seriously coming back to it. Again.

I mean, this is the same story that also inspired my much more recent nonfic book idea that shares the name of this blog, Walk in Silence. The college rock era of the late 80s will always be near and dear to my heart for many reasons.

So why bring up this old story again, you ask? To answer that, I’d need to explain why it failed so many times in the past, and it’s called roman à clef. Each time I resurrected it, I made the mistake of wanting to write it as a self-insert piece of fiction, and therein lies the problem: my life back then wasn’t nearly as exciting as I often make it out to be. A lot of silliness and a lot of gloominess and everything in between, but not enough to make it an excitable read. So what’s different now? Well, thirty years on I’ve learned a thing or two about how to write fiction and realized roman à clef is not what was needed here. I knew what I wanted to write, but real life self-inserting wasn’t the way to go.

I’m not taking this project too seriously at the moment, as I’m already focusing on a few other things, but I’m letting myself devote an hour or two a day for it anyway, making notes and revisiting mixtapes and looking at discographies and chronologies. I’m also resurrecting a writing style I haven’t used since those same 80s days: using music to inspire and influence certain scenes, Michael Mann style. The difference here is that I’m not leaning heavy on memory here. I’m taking ideas from the songs I loved and expanding on what images and thoughts they inspire and evoke in me. Sure, there’ll be a few self-inserts in there — there always are in my books — but it won’t be as obvious this time out. And I’m making an expanded mixtape that’ll have both the obvious (say, “Under the Milky Way”) and the deep cut (such as the below Love Tractor song). That, of course, is the most fun part of this project so far.

I have no deadline for this particular story, but I am looking forward to spending more time on it if and when I can!

Wrapped Up in (Music) Books

Posted on by
Reply
The music bio bookcase in Spare Oom — I am actually in one of these! And yes, that is a Groot doll and Ezra Bridger’s light saber.

Over the last month or so, I’ve been making a significant dent in my music bookcase in Spare Oom, and I’m happy to say I’ve got it under much better control now. Only the bottom shelf is full of Books To Be Read now, and I’m being harsh in culling what I no longer want to keep. This of course will give me more room for newer purchases! And the circle goes round and round…

Right now I’m on a binge of punk and post-punk bios and histories, having just finished John Doe and Tom DeSavia’s Under the Big Black Sun, and I’m currently reading its sequel, More Fun in the New World. I’m probably going to dig through a bunch of the trades after that.

I love reading things like this because I’m such an obsessive music fan. I was never one to be part of any ‘scene’ (I was way too broke to be part of one anyway), but I always like learning about their histories. For instance, in the Doe/DeSavia books, I learned that the death of LA punk in the early 80s wasn’t just the encroachment of hard drugs like heroin, but also due to the arrival of frat bros and skinheads from Orange County wanting to start shit during Black Flag shows. [This second point is confirmed by multiple musicians in both books, who saw it firsthand.] The scene died because it wasn’t fun anymore and because outsiders appropriated it into something unlikeable.

It’s things like this that make me rethink my own musical history, Walk in Silence-style. Ian Underwood’s Smash! (about the 90s punk resurgence) made a good point about the fact that there were rarely any decent punk bands in the late 80s because the scene was so dead and/or dangerous. This would, in turn, explain why my experience with college radio at the time was almost exclusively post-punk, new wave, industrial, experimental and often Eurocentric, with a hefty cornucopia of unconventional hard-to-label bands in between. I do remember the punk bands of the time, but they were few and far between, and often super-local.

It would also explain the 90s in pretty much the same way: the resurgence of American punk with Nevermind and Dookie (among numerous other albums and bands) competing with the newly-minted Britpop/Madchester scenes. And moving further, the eventual mainstreaming of alternative rock by the mid 90s, mixing sounds from both sides of the Atlantic with a splash of easier-on-the-ears alt.rock like Collective Soul, Dishwalla and Third Eye Blind. And like the original LA punk scene, the early-to-mid 90s alt.rock scene was a lot more inclusive, from Bikini Kill and the riot grrl scene to the trip-hop sounds of Tricky and Portishead.

And even then, the frat bros entered the scene like cockroaches, injecting their testosterone into it all, thus Marilyn Manson, Korn and Limp Bizkit and so many other ‘alternative metal’ bands with down-tuned guitars and grinding bass riffs. (As someone who worked at a record store in the late 90s, I can definitely confirm that most of the purchasers of meathead metal were in fact the bros, with many of the alt.rock stations then following the money.)

Which, in response, brought in a wave of twee music from Belle and Sebastian, Sufjan Stevens and Bon Iver. Inject the sounds of late 90s/early 00s techno into that and you’ve got chillwave. Inject reverbed guitars and you’ve got the next waves of shoegaze. Add a bit of proggy nerdiness and you’ve got post-rock.

Everything in circles. Everything influencing and inspiring everything else. Despite the ups and downs and the explosions and implosions of the music industry, there are influences and inspirations between bands, fans and musicians that feed the next waves. And the interesting thing is that often they aren’t aware of it happening; a lot of it really is all about ‘hey, this sounds kind of cool, I think I can play something like this.’

[Note: if you’re curious about which book I’m in, I donated a silly suggestion for Michael Azerrad’s Rock Critic Law. Look for the one featuring Joey Santiago.]

WIS: Unexpected inspiration

Posted on by
Reply

The other day while reading Martin Aston’s book about the 4AD label, I came across a single sentence:

By 1985, American college radio had gathered momentum alongside the spurt in independent record labels, with the likes of [Clan of Xymox’s] “A Day” striking radio programmers as adventurous and commercial, and a modern, gleaming alternative to the guitar-centric homegrown scene spearheaded by bands such as REM, Sonic Youth and Hüsker Dü.

To be honest, I hadn’t been thinking of my Walk in Silence project lately, partly because I’d put it aside some time ago.  I didn’t trunk it, I just put it aside so I could focus on the Trilogy Edit and newer fiction.  I’d also gone through my projected timeline last summer on a personal level, if only to purge it from my writing brain for a while.

That personal version really wasn’t the original idea that I’d had.  I was thinking more along the lines of a chronological book about college rock.  The releases bracketing the story would be The Smiths’ third single, “What Difference Does It Make” (January 1984) and Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine (October 1989).

I could never quite figure out a way to solidify my idea that that was the golden era of college rock, before it became much more mainstream in 1991 with Nirvana and everyone else.  Until that one sentence.  It made sense to me, though…1984-85 was about the time that a lot of independent distributors and labels in the US, such as Relativity and Caroline, started licensing British bands that had only been available on expensive imports.  [Only Sire had any sizeable share in that field as a major label, having signed the Smiths, Depeche Mode, and others.]

So it occurs to me that perhaps it’s time for me to resurrect the Walk in Silence project as it was originally intended, focusing on the sounds of college rock in the mid to late 80s.  Maybe without so much of the personal added to it this time out.

Of course, I already have a few writing projects on tap as it is, so I’ll have to figure out how the hell to fit this in.  Heh.

More on the 90s

Posted on by
Reply

So yeah, I’ve still been contemplating expanding the Walk in Silence series to include the 90s.  I’ve started listening to the decade chronologically, much as I did with the original series and going through the 80s, and once again it’s been an interesting ride.

Presently I’m listening to Living Colour’s sophomore album Time’s Up, which came out in late August 1990.  It was the back end of summer, and I’d chosen to take the last two weeks off between my summer job (second year at the DPW) and starting my sophomore year at Emerson.  Chris and I got together to reform the Flying Bohemians as a duo, and recorded a few tracks in my parents’ garage.

I spent those last two weeks doing not much of anything: made a pretty decent compilation that I still listen to in 2016, did a bit of poetry, lyric and journal writing, a lot of Solitaire playing, and met up with all my friends who’d come home for a brief time.  For the most part, most of them had taken root in their college towns and gotten local summer jobs or were taking summer classes, so there was only a narrow window of time that we could meet up.

Me?  The only reason I’d come back home for the summer was that I hadn’t prepared myself for any summer position or an apartment to sublet for a few months.  It had crossed my mind, of course, but I hadn’t the time or the money to plan it out sufficiently.  I figured the summer of 1991 would be when I’d stick around.

That, and I’d wanted to spend more time with T, as well as distance myself from the frustration of freshman year.  Summer 1990 was time to start over again.

Walk in Silence 21

Posted on by
Reply

Love And Rockets

(Photo by Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty Images)

The summer of 1989 was spent mostly in cemeteries.

No, I hadn’t decided to go full-on goth…I was in the Cemetery, Park and Tree Division of the DPW, lugging lawn mowers in the back of the town trucks around to most of the local cemeteries.  We on the summer help team would cut the grass around the headstones and the odd niches, and one of the regular full-timers would come riding around on a John Deere and cut the rest.  We’d usually be one or two sections ahead of the riders, so occasionally we’d sneak into one of the wooded areas and enjoy the shade.  The cycle of cutting was such that by the time we made our rounds at all our usual stops, it was time to cut the grass on the first location again.  My favorite cemetery to mow was Silver Lake; it’s the largest in town (a few of my relatives are buried there), so it would take a few days to finish, and we’d have so much more time to goof off.

Me?  I got along just fine with everyone at the job.  They thought I was a bit weird, wearing my Cure and Smiths tee-shirts and all and listening to that weird shit, but I gave as good as I got, and got the job done as needed.  I brought my Walkman (I finally had an official Sony by that time!) and listened to all kinds of stuff during my job, both old and new:  Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade, Bauhaus’ Swing the Heartache: The BBC Sessions, most of my 1988-89 compilations to date, The The’s Mind Bomb, Concrete Blonde’s self-titled, The Cure’s Disintegration and The Head on the Door, most of Cocteau Twins’ Treasure, The Moon and the Melodies and most of their EPs from that era, and so much more.  I’m pretty sure I went through fifty or sixty dollars’ worth of AA batteries that summer.

I also started focusing a bit more seriously on the writing.  The IWN had pretty much gone into stasis, the Belief in Fate project was complete, so I focused mostly on my lyrics and poetry writing.  I also worked on my guitar chops, both on my bass and on my sister’s acoustic.  I’d gotten better, though my chord-shifting still needed a hell of a lot of work.  Given that I was outside for most of the day and hiding inside in the evening during the hot summer, I didn’t have much else to do except listen to a lot of music and let my influences get the best of me.

This was a bit of a double-edged sword, as I found myself returning to my ‘morose bastard’ ways again, even though I was in a strong relationship and was heading out into the Big Bad World in a few months.  Perhaps it was a bit of melancholy I felt in realizing that I’d finally be letting go of both the good and the bad of my youth.  Maybe it was a bit of sadness that I’d be heading off to Boston and leaving Tracey back home for another three years.  Maybe it’s that I’d be even further away from my friends and would have to start over from scratch.  Maybe it was that I really had no idea what I truly wanted to do, but I was afraid to admit it, especially after I’d already committed to my choice of college.  Maybe it was a bit of all of this.

The end of the summer came quickly.  I worked pretty much all the way up to the last few weeks of August, taking maybe a week off before I was to head out the first week of September to my new destination.  Which meant any last minute music dubbing and compilation making would need to be done post haste!

fiasco

It also meant that, for a very brief time, I’d get to see all my Misfit friends again.  Chris borrowed his grandfather’s cabin out on Packard Pond north of town, and invited most of the Misfit crew in for a three day get-together (which he’d amusingly named a ‘fiasco’).  It was a purposely low-key party, just like most of ours, in which we listened to music, played various games, watched silly movies and cartoons, and went swimming.  There was even a tag sale up the street that we went to, where I bought a few things for my impending college years.  It was the vacation we all needed then, a few days of doing nothing but sleeping in, goofing off, chatting and just having fun.

If anything, I’d say this was the point where our friendship had truly become more than just being high school friends.  Many of us have drifted various ways over the years, but that summer was the moment when I truly knew that many of these people would be in my life for years to come.  I wouldn’t know when I’d be seeing them again after this, or if we’d be in constant touch with each other (remember, this was 1989, well before anyone of us used the internet)…but I knew that, despite that, we’d still find a way to make it happen.

I’d borrowed my mom’s car for that weekend, so I was one of the last people to head out when the party was over.  I packed my belongings in the back seat, helped Chris clean up, and saw him off.  He’d be heading back to his parents’ house for a bit and then head back to UMass in a few days, I’d be leaving the first week of September for Boston.

The Last Home Year had finally come to a close.

Walk in Silence 19

Posted on by
Reply

cocteau twins

Cocteau Twins, picture courtesy of Getty Images

The saving grace for me my senior year was my music collection.  It was the one constant that kept me sane as I tried to figure out what the hell I wanted to do with my future, while trying to figure out how to sever ties with my past.  I didn’t have a solid plan other than I want to tell stories.  Whether this was via my writing or my music or my art, I didn’t know, but I was willing to try all the different avenues to see what fit the best.  I’d already made a plan to head off to Emerson College in the fall to study film production.

At the same time, that nagging feeling that I just wanted to get the hell out of town and move on never quite went away.  It frustrated me that I had to wait one more year before I could do anything about it.  I was afraid that this year would hold me back, that I’d settle for what I already had well before I even got started.  Music was there as an open door to remind me that there was a wider world out there.

Earlier in 1988 I’d chosen to expand on my ‘radio tapes’ collection; essentially I wanted to practice the hallowed art of mixtape making, though I chose to call them compilations to hint at my own version of the K-Tel album mixes of yore.  Even the titles changed — instead of using one of the featured songs on the tape, I came up with my own theme.  I made about five or six early wonky practice runs that spring and summer, with pretentious names like Cimmerian Candlelight (theme: quiet and/or dark songs to listen to at 1am) and Preternatural Synthetics (theme: synth-driven alternative rock).  They’re not my best mixes, but at least I made sure there weren’t any dud songs.

That August I came up with the first of many mixes that would start a very long practice of mixtape-making: Listen in Silence.  It was a celebration of the best of past and present college rock, including The Church, The Sex Pistols, Wire, Midnight Oil, Violent Femmes, The Church, The Smiths, and more.  It was also a soundtrack for me to listen to on my headphones, often quite loud, while sitting in the back seat of the bus: in essence, it was a soundtrack for me to block out the rest of the world that was driving me nuts.

That was soon followed up with another mix that would become the template for all my future mixes:  Walk in Silence.  Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” in particular had become somewhat of a deeply personal theme song for me at that point, partly due to a dream I’d had early in October (and had used in my Belief in Fate project).  In the dream, I’d been cleaning out my locker for the last time, taking down the music-related things I’d posted inside and pulled out all the notebooks and trash, when I heard my friends calling me from the other end of the hallway.  They were waiting for me so we could all finally exit the building together for the last time.  “Atmosphere” had been playing in the background throughout.  [In retrospect, I would not be the least bit surprised if I’d fallen asleep listening to Substance and that song had entered my subconscious.]  Since that dream I’d equated that song with the reality of literally walking away from everything I’d known up to that point — in a positive way.  It was me saying goodbye to things I was no longer connected to.  It was my theme of moving on, and that shows in the first WiS mix.

[The mixtape bug hit me quite hard, and I’ve never quite let it go.  To this day I still make personal mixes, the latest having been made three months ago.  I may no longer put them on ninety-minute tapes or even burn them onto cds (I create them via mp3 copies in a new folder, deciding on a perfect running order and retagging the mix accordingly), but over the last few years I’ve reinstated the rule of making sure the mix conforms to two forty-five minute sides, which maintains their tight theme and flow.  I then put them on my mp3 players for travel, work and gym listening.]

*

For most of my senior year, when I wasn’t hanging out with Kris or Kevin in the cafeteria, I tried to maintain a social balance; on the one hand I made it a point to distance myself from those who held me back or irritated me, but on the other hand I also made it a point to be more open and talkative with my classmate acquaintances.  I’d come to the realization that we were all pretty much the same small-town weirdos who were doing our best to fit in during our time here.  The change was a positive one for everyone involved, as they were glad to finally get to know the new me, and I’d tossed my preconception that they were just irritating popular kids.

At the same time, however, I’d noticed I was veering into a bit of a free-fall on a much more deeply personal level.  I’ve admitted before that I can be overly obsessive and even overemotional about things, and that means more than just music.  Even while I was opening up socially, I equally felt myself falling ever deeper into my own rampant emotions.  The lyrics and the poetry and the writing that I’d used as a mental and emotional escape had become an addiction of sorts, in which I found myself feeling some kind of depression or annoyance on almost a daily basis.  I wanted to linger down there in the lower depths, because at the time it felt like the truest emotion for me.  I never showed it publicly.  I didn’t want anyone to make a fuss, and besides — after a night’s sleep and a bit of musical exorcism, I’d be okay the next day.  At least until I headed home and was on my own once more.  I don’t think I was falling any deeper…but I wasn’t rising all that fast, either.

It was an unexpected introduction that spring that made all the difference.