Welcome!

Welcome to my blog and get ready for some serious dork overload!  This blog is going to be dedicated to sharing some of the music I listen to.  My taste in music is odd to say the least, but it’s also that obscurity that makes me believe more people should hear it.  I’ve posted songs every now and then on other social networking sites in the past, but decided to bring everything together in this blog.

My music collection overwhelmingly consists of instrumental music.  Lyrical music (songs with people singing) will appeal to me on occasion, but usually for nostalgic reasons – music that played on the radio when I was young, a song that I heard on a particular trip, etc.  Instrumental music is what I truly love – anything from an entertaining little melody to a complex work of art.  Songs without singing require a bit more patience from the listener, being devoid of a vocabulary that we would easily recognize.  They can’t tell you what to feel quite so easily, and often times a piece that is intended to evoke one thing will evoke something entirely different depending on who’s listening.  In that way, instrumental music is more personal and more satisfying for me.

But this blog is, for the most part, not going to be about Bach or Tchaikovsky.  My experience with classical music is probably similar to that of most people my age.  I have occasionally found a classical piece interesting or moving, but I’m mostly disconnected from it.  And that’s where my dorkiness comes in.  My first experiences with instrumental music came in the form of soundtracks to video games.  After first recording some songs directly off of my TV, I soon discovered on that old search engine, Napster, that not just a genre, but an entire industry had been built around game music in that far off country of Japan.  It was video game music that was the gateway drug to otakudom.

The word “otaku”, when used in the U.S. nerd subculture, generally refers to someone who’s into Japanese comic, game and anime culture (in Japan itself, the word can be used more generally to refer to any introverted hobbyist, like the word “geek” in the U.S.) .  Although I don’t fit all of the otaku stereotypes – my experience in anime and Japanese RPGs is definitely lacking – I have explored a great deal of the culture through music.  Game soundtracks led me to soundtracks for anime, monster movies, dorama, and the equally vast world of amateur remixing/doujin.  Parallel to all of this I also became interested in the more conventional word of movie music, which now makes up the second largest category of songs on my iPod.  Throw in some world music and theme park atmosphere (that’s right), and you have over 90% of what I listen to.

It is from these categories that most of my blog entries will arise.  Videogame and movie music, being my favorite, will make up the bulk of the posts.  I’ll certainly be posting lyrical music as well, but more than likely, it will be in a foreign language.  Some would certainly consider the music of videogames or theme parks to be trite, and not worthy of the attention I heap on it.  It’s exactly for that reason that I’d like to post these songs.  It may not win anyone over to the world of otaku, but it might at least give people an idea of why this music appeals to me, and a handful of others.

To begin, I will be posting two songs that both deal with “firsts” in my music-listening experience.  So let’s get started…