A Music Niche

Well Well Well… What’s this all about then?

Hi there, who the hell are you?

Greetings internet strangers, my name is Jai, I'm 24 and have recently moved back to London after 6 years of living in Edinburgh - a big change in the pace of life. I have a few friends here but since I live in the ’burbs and am the only one unemployed I have a lot of free time - both a blessing and a curse.

The idea to start a blog had been in my head for about 9 months. I applied for a job recently which asked me to talk about a project I’d worked on recently and realised I couldn’t come up with a good enough answer. So I decided to stop thinking about it and just do it. It was surprisingly easy to write this website taking about 2 hours on a random Wednesday. The hard bit now is to make it look fancy using CSS!

When it came to producing some content, I realised I haven’t written an essay since finishing my History A Level. Writing a focussed post is actually quite difficult. With no real direction in mind, I kept going off topic, on endless tangents and repeating myself. With enough edits I managed to arrive at what I feel is a coherent post. With time all this writing will become easier.

erm… I know you now but I still dont know what all this is about then

Patience young padawans, I am just getting to it.

This blog is going to be music focussed although I am not sure what shape or form that will take. I am a big fan of all aspects of music from new albums, music production, music gear, gigs, festivals etc. so will be talking about it all.

Hopefully this will encourage me to seek out new music. I feel like I have been succumbing to the spotify algorithm too easily recently and need to take a more active role in finding new music.

Wow, that’s incredibly interesting. What music do you listen to then?

The impossible question. Everytime I’m asked, I feel like to accurately answer the question I need a paragraph to contextualise my music tastes so here we go… deep breath in

I wholly have my parents to thank for my taste in music.

Looking back, I've been listening to music since before I could remember. I was 15 when I got my first hifi - a Denon M40 DAB with Q Acoustics 3010i speakers. My parents gave me two crates full of their old CDs and damn, my favourites were songs I'd been listening to for 15 years without knowing it.

My mum and dad had digitised all these CDs and put the songs onto an iPod Classic. All the songs from christmas tunes to paath to Macy Gray were on shuffle throughout my childhood.

Those crates contained music gold dust and formed the core of my music taste: Portishead, Jamiroquai, Incognito, Macy Gray, Sade, Massive Attack, Roy Ayers, Nuyorican Soul, Alice Coltrane. I keep listening to more and more new music but these I always return to.

I first remember actively listening to music at about 10 years old. We were staying at my grandparents house in the winter of 2011, driving 30 minutes to school every morning. On the way we listened to the BBC radio 1 breakfast show hosted by Chris Moyles (Anyone remember celebrity raspberry? I always wanted to win one of those mugs). This introduced me to the world of pop music at the time: Tik Tok by Kesha, Airplanes by B.o.B, Dynamite by Taio Cruz to name some classics.

After that, I absorbed the tastes of my friends at primary school listening to Skrillex and Deadmau5. My mum was not happy with that direction of music listening!

The first major shift happened when I went to high school. I learned to play the Bass guitar, taught by an incredible man called Otis. He gave me homework, not in the form of playing bass, but in the form of listening to music. Everything from The Jam, Cream, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Motown, Tower of Power, Bob Marley, Level 42 (god bless Mark King) and of course Jaco Pastorius.

This exploration showed me the range of genres that existed and cemented music as an integral part of my life forever.

However, I grew up in the UK and so by 16, I was an indie head - Arctic Monkeys, TLSP, the Big Moon, Sunflower Bean, Oasis and the like. How could you not!

My music tastes have continued to evolve combining a bit of everything I grew up listening to and more. I mostly listen to a mix of indie, jazz and soul, wide genres to capture my wide tastes.

What the future has in store

I have set myself the goal of writing a post a week which is definitely attainable. It should be fun trying to come up with some interesting areas of music to write posts on. For a sneak peak, a future post will be about the evolution of music in advertising.

I also want to include an album of the week or a 10 song playlist of the week. For the first week, it seems fitting to do an in-no-particular-order-not-necessarily-the-top 10 songs I adore.

So, now you know what this is all about. Thanks for reading and happy listening!