Electronic Music 411 - instrument / life cycle (+introduction)

i recently started learning how to play the flute. i started right after a big change of scenery in my life. i realized that this has been happening since i started making music: big life changes brought changes in my musical noodlings. since trying to describe this will effectively be a story about my relationship with music through the years, i thought i'll use some more space and introduce myself properly here (a few years late...).

hi, i'm delete. i will try to tell you a little bit about the music in my life through the last 15 years.

my first musical memories are from when i was 10 or so, growing up in a small village with my grandparents. well, not really, i had been listening to lots of cool music, including lots of electronic music, before that because my mom and my uncle were really into music. what i mean is that when i was 10 or so i first tried to use tools systematically in order to make sounds. the first things i used were a toy keyboard and a cassette player / recorder with onboard mic. the keyboard had 3 drum sounds, so i'd make beats with those, record them on tape and then play and record the keyboard over that. great fun!

then the first big change came: i moved to the big city (athens). first present i got after moving there was a playstation. i was already addicted to video games before that, so my mom decided that the playstation should stay in the village. i think the 2-hour bus rides to the village almost every weekend, listening to cassette tapes on my way there and back, had a deep impact on me, especially in the connections i make when listening to music. and to get a little bit more sidetracked: do you see a connection between synthesizer sounds and nature? i find that there's a certain cosmic character in synth sounds, something i don't see in other instruments.

anyway, while i was a young teenager in athens, my neighborhood wasn't a ghetto, but it did somehow induce the hip-hop lifestyle. i eventually got into it and i immediately started trying to imitate what i was listening to. these were my first attempts to use software for music. the thing i used was a sampler / sequencer for the playstation. i remember keeping notes during the week so i could try them out on the weekends.

school years passed and somewhere along the way i got a computer. i briefly tried to use it for music but then high school started, with the university admission stress, so it went to hell for a couple of years. then when i got into university and after briefly trying to become popular and failing, i got into electronic music and djing. that's when i really started using the computer for music. another big change, another musicmaking method. i also got decks, bought records etc. i drifted away from the hip-hop scene and the group i was in, because it seemed to me that the whole scene had started going stale. the electronic music scene seemed more innovative and more fun.

next change in music tools was after graduating. due to increasing amount of computer work, i didn't like going back to my laptop for music as well. i started buying hardware and noodling with that. however that wasn't a real period, because work had already started messing up my music activities. although it was in this period that i reached a more or less definite decision about what i want to do with my music and had the means to do it, my output slowly but steadily reached zero. although i considered quiting, that turned out to be a non-viable option: it aches to not make music. it's just that with electronic music there's this whole paraphernalia that comes along with the musicmaking process itself that tired me. i decided to close a chapter here, do something completely different music-wise and come back to beats and synths later on for one final orgy before calling it a life. and guess what: this decision also came after a big life change.

so, that's where i'm now. the completely different thing i mentioned above is the flute. it feels great and although it is demanding, i feel much more motivated to try and learn it, than to make sounds in any manner that involves current flowing through circuits. however, there's an electronic music album living inside me. i just don't have the time and the willpower to give birth to it now. some day though...