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.