Instrumental

Music has always been my escape. It’s been a soundtrack to life, both in good and bad times. It’s helped define for me who I am and what I want to spend my free time within. It was the thing that gave me purpose, and something to help me connect to others when my introverted nature made it hard to connect any other way. Since I was a small child growing up in the Midwest music has been in my ears.

Sure the usual routes like the car radio driving into town with my mom as a little kid. But thanks to parents that had a reasonable vinyl collection from the 70s and early 80s I grew up on a steady diet of scratched up Aerosmith, Beatles, Kiss, Ozzy, The Doors, Ted Nugent, Three Dog Night, Foghat, and Led Zeppelin. Those were the building blocks that made me a music-obsessive. It also helped that three of my uncles were musicians, one of which was in a band called Magi that put a record out in the late 70s. Being around both music and the tools that made the music possible was an integral part of my formative years. I was obsessed with guitars, keyboards, and drums. Those elemental tools that made these amazing and all-encompassing sounds possible. It was hard to conceive that such simple elements could make a song that would haunt you for years.

From being a 5-year old obsessed with The White Album to a 51-year old dad sharing clips of Tame Impala, NIN, and Boards of Canada with my own adult children, music has always been the artistic arena that has allowed me to build relationships and form bonds. As well as being a kind of spiritual salve when I need it in harder times.

There’s been a slow shift for me over the years where I find myself drawn to instrumental albums more than rock and roll. Rock and roll was the Interstate I traveled for decades, and still do take regularly. But getting older and less interested in a message delivered via guitar and voice, I’m finding a lot of comfort and solace in instrumental albums. It started being drawn to jazz. While there is no voice per say, there is melody lines played via sax, trumpet, piano, and guitar that sort of act as the voice of the song. Buying Thelonious Monk’s Monk’s Dream in the mid-90s was the start of my still continuing journey with jazz. I think that was the beginning of my love of instrumental music. Without a voice to grab your attention, you were free to just let your mind wander as the music was this glorious background sound.

And I think that love of instrumental sound began long before that.

The movies and shows I’d watch had amazing scores behind them. I guess maybe John Williams was the catalyst for my adulthood swerve to instrumental music. The trifecta of Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Superman wired my brain to appreciate and love instrumental music. First it was via film, though. Then Vangelis’ Blade Runner score was probably close behind those three films.

As I got older I was obsessed with horror films. The scores of Fabio Frizzi, John Carpenter, Walter Rizzati, Christopher Young, Charles Bernstein, and Brad Fiedel dominated my ears while getting lost in films like Nightmare On Elm Street, The Fog, House By The Cemetery, The Beyond, and The Terminator. The music from those films long lingered past the final scene, with Rizzati’s House By The Cemetery staying in my subconscious years after my first viewing of the movie. I’d buy the score via Death Waltz Recording Co. 20 years later on vinyl before I’d watch the movie again. And The Fog? What more can I say about the music in the film that a million other Carpenter fans haven’t already said? The opening theme is an absolute masterpiece and will live rent-free in my head as long as I’m walking and talking.

In my 40s I discovered the soundtrack reissue world, and in-particular Death Waltz Recording Co. and Mondo. I went in head(and wallet) first, deep diving into these old b-movies, exploitation, slasher, Giallo, and sci fi flick soundtracks for movies that I watched in the 80s, and in many cases they outshined the movies that they were meant to score. In most cases they were as important as the movies themselves. What would Suspiria had been without Goblin? Or Phantasm without Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave? And can you even imagine Nightmare On Elm Street without that main theme by Charles Bernstein? Yeah, me either.

Actual soundtracks led me to imagined soundtracks, which led to labels like Spun Out Of Control, Lunaris, Burning Witches Records, and Library of the Occult Records. Artists like Dream Division, Repeated Viewing, Alone 1980, Burning Tapes, Hunter Complex, Cory Kilduff, Tim Fife(solo and with Victims), and many more made these amazingly lush, complex, and engaging records that felt like scores to classic 70s and 80s films…films that never actually existed. 2018 through 2021 Spun Out Of Control especially gave legitimacy to the imagined soundtrack world and Jonathan Sharp, Rupert Lally, Andy Fosberry, Monochrome Echo, Hawksmoor, The Heartwood Institute, Neil Hale(Correlations, Proto Droids), Antoni Maiovvi, Polypores and many more put out amazing electronic records that felt pulled out of some wormhole connecting our world with some Betamax-humming universe.

Of course it’s not all just synths and eerie nostalgia. El Paraiso Records has been filling my head with next-level instrumental psych and proggy Krautrock-ish jams since 2013. Causa Sui, as well as solo releases from guys like Jonas Munk, Jakob Skøtt and artists like Videodrones, Astral TV, Justin Pinkerton, Edena Gardens, Chicago Odense Ensemble, Futuropaco, Lotus, Papir, Fra Det Onde, London Odense Ensemble, Mythic Sunship have released instrumental music ranging from proggy jazz to full on Komische electronique to tropicalia to heady psych and much more. There’s enough musical gold from that label alone to keep the musicphile satisfied for years.

SFI Recordings established themselves as purveyors of modern new age/ambient. New Frontiers, Steve Moore, Majeure, Jake Schrock, Paul Riedl, Meridian Arc, Phaseshifter and Delta IV are putting out forward-thinking instrumental music that tows the line between prog, private press, and outsider music from the time before the neon age.

So really, since the early 2010s I’ve been on this instrumental music journey. There’s vibes for every mood, and plenty of headspace to mull over life and what it’s bringing my way(like some cosmic cat leaving a dead rat at my feet.) I’m still very much into rock, and all the varieties that come with it. I tend to lean towards heavier stuff when it comes to the stuff with vocals. Post-punk, death metal, doom, and all the fuzzed-out goodness that comes with it. And when I think I’ve filled my limit with the Beatles or the Kinks, I find myself deep-diving once again into Revolver, The White Album, Something Else, or The Village Green Preservation Society.

Whatever music you listen to, just keep listening. And buying. And keeping those artists with money in their pockets so they can keep on doing what they(and you) love which is writing and recording and touring. We want artists paid and at least enough that they can make their passion a living. It’s becoming harder and harder these days for artists to do that, especially when the soulless hacks that run streaming services are putting literally fake AI “bands” on their apps and schmucks listen, follow, and give them an exorbitant amount of cache.

Keep spinning, vocals or not.

Want to dip your toes into the world of instrumental music? Here’s a few albums I’m extremely fond of that might light some kind of fire in your head and heart.

New Frontiers : (of)Inner Dimensions

Steve Moore : Positronic Neural Pathways

Causa Sui : Szabodelico

Victims : Form Hell

Hawksmoor : Methods of Dreaming

Proto Droids : Cybernetic World

Stefen Bachmeier : The Strange Worlds Of Stefen Bachmeier

Omni Gardens : West Coast Escapism

Jake Schrock : Tropical Depression

Billow Observatory : III: Chroma/Contour

36 & zakè : Stasis Sounds For Long-Distance Space Travel

Jonas Munk : Minimum Resistance