In charismatic churches - in which I’ve got a history - there’s a tendency of talking about “being out in the world” (which is scary) which is kind of an unavoidable but unfortunate mission that requires getting “filled up” with sacralities within the church walls (through prayer, scripture reading and so forth). Clearly put, society is draining you and you need new input to enable output.

Many people involved in electronic music (or music over all, in fact) tend to think along similar lines. You need to listen to music (input) in order to be able to produce music (output). Otherwise questions like “what music do you listen to” in an interview trying to figuring out where someone is coming from with their music, seems pointless and/or maybe merely curious.

Now I’m gonna present my “line”. It’s not necessarily the right one, or the only one, but it’s my one. I try as best I can to listen only to a minimum of music within the electronic fields similar to my own. On the whole, I try to stay away from “bretheren sounds”. I don’t believe that constant input is necessary to ensure output. Not even interesting output, although cases like Michael Jackon and Stevie Wonder indicates that they would’ve maybe benefitted from having their finger at the pulse a bit more in recent years…

Maybe this is in ways a more interesting division today than class for instance (which is a fuzzy term that I’m not always convinced about, given how it came about and what it ment then); input vs output. I’m a person who needs very little amount of input in general in order to sustain a steady amount of musical output. The division of today is not whether you are a working class hero or ruling class villain, but whether you’re a full on producer, or if you’re a consumer. Or as in my case, a prosumer.

/J