Back in
June 2018 there was a sort of chain mail thing circulating on Facebook, where
you pick the ten albums that changed your life, post the covers and nominate
someone else to do the same. I tried doing it; not many people who I nominated
actually did it themselves, but oh well. I still had fun. I figured I’d dig
that up again and expand on it for this blog, covering one album a day for the
next ten days. I might interrupt this if I have something more pressing to
write about. But, I plan on covering music often on this blog, because I
certainly have a lot to say about it, though I’m strictly a fan of music, not
really a musician. Although, if I had enough money to spend on a synthesizer
who knows. Maybe I could start my own Coldwave band. DJ Surenity, haha.
So, in no real order, here are the albums that
changed my life most. These aren’t necessarily my favorite albums ever, but
they did change my life.
Kraftwerk – The Mix
Genre: Electronic
Year: 1991
Year I discovered it: 1998
Most of
these are going to be albums that acted as gateways into new genres of music
for me; this one here is pretty much the one album that got me into German and
electronic music when I was 12, changing the course of my music tastes forever
and impacting me to this very day. From Kraftwerk I moved onto Rammstein, then
Hanzel und Gretyl, Das Ich, Eisbrecher, And One, and so on. A lot of the bands
I listen to are German because of Kraftwerk. A lot of the best metal and industrial
music bands hail from Deutschland. It probably helps that I took German classes
all through High School. As rusty and replaced by Armenian in my brain my
German is now, it’s kept from completely fading into my deep subconscious by
music.
Around 1998 or so my father
rediscovered Kraftwerk, a band he had heard of and seen live in the 1970’s when
he was stationed in Germany in the army. He bought the albums Radioactivity and
Autobahn, and we would listen to it in the car. I really liked it, as it was
different from any sort of music I had heard before up until then. It was the
first time I listened to music that was outside the mainstream. For Christmas
that year, my father got me this album. It’s almost a “Best of” collection,
with the difference being that these are all updated remixes done by the band
themselves. Most of them are even better than the original versions, in my
opinion. It’s definitely the go-to album if you want to introduce someone to
the band that pioneered electronic music. I’ve had to replace it once since
then, as the CD got scratched over time, but I still have a copy after all
these years. In my teens I collected their other albums one by one, and I have
all but the really rare ones now. Luckily Youtube’s a thing now, so I’ve at
least heard all of their music, including their rare and under-rated first
three albums, and the German version of The Mix. It's hard to say which I like better, since I grew up with the English version, but they do sound more natural in German, more in their element. But they're both good, let's just say that. Another interesting thing that happened is that I heard these remade versions of the songs before the original, so The Mix versions seem more like the definitive versions of these songs in my mind.
Kraftwerk’s music is timeless; it’s so ahead of its time that
despite some of their albums being over 40 years old (their early albums are
turning 50 soon!), it still sounds like it’s from the future. I never get tired
of it.
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