There was a time, faraway from now when electronic music hits me but it actually was because of computers and electronics. As a kid and maybe til these days I enjoy opening any type of electrical, electronic, mechanical, mechatronics devices. Ideally with the right tools to open it but ultimately using brute force if necessary. I really don’t care about like reconstruction of the device, it’s not for repairing nor fixing anything; it’s about knowledge.
How things are made? The physics, the engineering, the design of things. But the most interesting for me of course was digital electronic hardware, like chips and circuits boards and stuff.
You know, by my 8 and after opening an staggering amount of devices from toys, to radios, to tvs, to video recorders, to videogame consoles and so on, I clearly understand the mechanics, how they move inside but it was like magic how the “digital” circuits can make a lot of things without moving parts, that keeps driving my curiosity.
Anyways, one of the type of devices most amazing to me was the electronic synthesizers like toy keywords. When you play a musical instruments, some mechanisms are in charge of generate the sound that is based on the physical dimensions, materials, shapes and processes to make a specific and tuned notes, so you have guitars, pianos, flutes and most instruments only generates one kind of sound. But those toys, packed from something like eight to hundreds of sounds in the same instrument, endless possibilities. But regardless I was a good music learner since kid, I was more interested in the electronics of those toys.
I basically was looking to magazines and news to anything related to electronics, videogames, CPUs, RAM, etc. Videogames became a thing quickly so its music, it actually was electronic music but it was like “videogame music” not electronic music.
I do not remember the exact event when this concept came to me for the first time but it was an event in my mind that definitely change my life forever.
Two worlds that I was following, learning and exploring separately suddenly fusion together and it wasn’t a disappointment.
Around 11, I was in a family vacation trip to the beach and on a stop in the highway, inside a shop was a kiosk with cassettes, mostly hits and popular music but one stands out to my eyes with something like “greatest electronic music hits”, so I made my parents buy me that cassette.
I really don’t remember the songs but I remember to be amazed by the sounds: wasn’t guitars, pianos nor anything I knew at all. Also it wasn’t the regular rhythms nor melodies nor genres.
it was electronic music.