Why does the music you make sound like it sounds?

and my previous post implies that selling shedloads of records and 'artistic truth' are somehow mutually exclusive, which is of course total bollocks, but i think it applies in the majority of cases IMO.

just wanted to clear that up...

I'm not sure what's meant by artistic truth - I guess my take on it is just being happy with a song, knowing that *at this point in time there's nothing you would change about it, and you're proud of it & you want it to be heard.

*of course that doesn't stop you wishing you'd done it differently later on, that unfortunate side-effect of getting better as a band/artist!

yeah 'artistic truth' was full of shit - that's australian shiraz for you.

i think your definition is good to go doctor...

We've talked a lot about how the WAY that your music is made influences how it sounds, but something else that interests me is ...why do you make the *genre* (for want of a better word) of music that you make. (I know we all like to think that we're smashing through genre barriers, but you know...BROADLY i.e indie-rock, death-metal, glitch etc etc.)

Obvious answer is 'cos I like it' but lets go a bit deeper. Way upthread n/a said *The band I'm in now was consciously created as a "pop band," as kind of a reaction to a more experimental band I was in before*. That struck me as interesting because I've never really made a big flip like this. Why did you do it? What was hard about it? What came naturally?

Also nabsico said 'back when I was making indie-rock songs with guitars'.

My own answer is that I play pop-punk and Factory/Fall-ish stuff for various reasons, mainly that this stuff mobilized me as a musician in the first place and I still feel at home with it over 25 yrs on. Maybe the feeling was so strong that I've never moved on. I might listen to King Tubby, Chic and Northern Soul as much as Joy Division and The Sex Pistols, but when I pick up a guitar, it just *comes out like that*. Also it's easy to sound good, and we're not great musicians. Competent enough maybe, but I can't do a good Nile Rodgers! Also, I'm not bothered about doing anything *new*, other than in the sense that I want to write the great songs within the parameters I've chosen. I'm not making much sense. Another factor is that I'm interested in live performance first, recorded work second. I'm afraid I'm not making a lot of sense, so I'll press pause for a while...

The genre of most bands I've ever been in has been a reaction against the kind of music I was playing before, albeit within the wide range of my tastes.

I joined a sample-based kraut hop band in the mid 90s because I wanted to do something more technologically aware after spending the early 90s in garage bands. I then started a girly power-pop band as a reaction to that. Post the girlband I started recording classical symphonies as a way of doing something totally different to anything else I'd done before.

Now I'm trying quite hard not to pay attention to genres when I write, except as a stylistic shorthand to a mood. I think it's better that way.