It's constantly shifting and over the past year-ish has shifted drastically. There are multiple facets to the music I make, so it will be segregated. I play guitar and have recently started singing. When I first started playing guitar five years ago I was entirely about classic rock, stuff like Pink Floyd and The Allman Brothers were what I liked a lot. My playing was also styled after John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Everything has since moved on past those artists though. In terms of who influences me, I have recently been immensely influenced by music such as Girls, Pavement, and Kurt Vile. I've recently written a lot of lyrics that I'm working on putting to music, now I just need equipment to record it with. However, if I'm just screwing around on my acoustic guitar I almost inevitably end up ripping off Waxahatchee or something else like that. I also make electronic, chiptune music. I've very influenced by noise music, industrial music, Krautrock, and by fellow chiptune musicians such as Zen Albatross. I currently have 3.5 songs done on an LP that's hopefully going to be out in the Summer, one of which is from the EP I released in November.
Was there a first record you listened to, or a show you went to that lead you to this drastic change in the past year? or is it the sort of thing that's impossible to pin down?
Oh jeez. I've been a huge Pavement fan for a couple of years now, ever since first hearing Gold Soundz. From there I kind of progressed down the lo-fi tunnel, discovering other bands such as Galaxie 500, Dinosaur Jr., The Jesus and Mary Chain, and Black Tambourine, and shoegaze bands like Slowdive, Amusement Parks on Fire, etc. The DIY culture of the early stuff is wonderful, and I love the fuzzed out guitar playing that goes through a simple-ish melody and chord progression. There's something so lackadaisically poetic about it, and it's really what drives me a lot of the time I'm playing music. I have a roommate that is more or less obsessed with Burger Records, which puts out an insane amount of great west coast garage punk and lo-fi music. I've since been exposed to tons of bands like Cosmonauts and Natural Child that I also love. But I'm much influenced by the slightly more refined and subtly somber bands that draw from dream pop and have a "hazy" quality to them. It's music that you can easily get lost in and removed from your surroundings in. The recent stuff has developed into something more meandering, or more aggressive depending on whether your own the Kurt Vile or Thee Oh Sees side of the fence (I'm on both, personally). My delve into that aspect of music probably started with Pavement, as mentioned earlier, and also with the first time that I heard Ariel Pink. From there, working in a radio station allows exposure to a ton of other artists in similar genres. I'm just going to stop there before this turns into something that people will need diagrams for. But I could go on for a long time about it. As for it being the past year, it really accelerated with my increased involvement with the music scene here and an uptake in the amount of music I listen to on a regular basis.