First love on emu

denver

When I first discovered eMusic it produced a revolution in my listening. Like many people my age I had become stuck on a fetish of certain big acts of the '60s. Eventually I added Bruce to that pantheon, but that's about as far as I went. In time I got tired of them, though, and I largely quit listening to current music, turning instead to lots of classical, jazz and nueva cancion. When I found eMusic, back in the truly unlimited days, there was all this music to listen to, but no Dylan, Beatles, Stones, VU, Love, etc. If I was going to use it for anything besides more jazz and classical (and it was more limited in those then than it is now), I had to expand my tastes. It helped that there was a community to point me to more recent music I could love. Suddenly a whole new world--new to me anyway--opened up for me. I could still listen to those oldies, and they actually sounded better to me because I didn't feel stuck with them, but I had many more choices.

I got to thinking this morning about those days when I posted on the What are you listening to right now? thread about a release from one of the artists I discovered in those days. Several of those albums continue to sound good to me. I think it's a combination of their quality and the "first love" infatuation I felt then. Did you have a similar experience? What were your first new favorites? Here are some of mine.

thomnottom

I'll have to think about more, but "The World Won't End" was definitely one of the firsts for me. "Working Girls" was a song I fell in love with from some Internet radio station but I could never actually find any Pernice Brothers albums. I'm pretty sure I bought it my first month on eMu. Since then I've picked up every one of their albums and Joe Pernice's solo work. But that album is still the best.

Bad Thoughts

Pernice Brothers were almost a local band in the Pioneer Valley: their predecessor, Scud Mountain Boys, formed in Northampton. They had a lot of buzz behind them, and I bought Overcome by happiness almost as soon as it came out. The Pernice less as an internet band than as alt-country: it was still years before I would download anything.

greg

I'm assuming you mean Northampton, US, BT, not my local town in the UK! I know what you mean Denver, the same applies to me. I originally joined emusic so, as I thought, I could get some of the music I had on LPs in a digital format. That didn't last long, as there were (still are) not many available here in the UK. One of the earlier things I downloaded from emusic that I still play a lot is Youssou N'Dour's Immigres. I'll investigate more on this...

Germanprof

I find myself a bit unsure of exactly when in my music history I joined emusic. I think Bridge Across Forever by Transatlantic was an early find, and an excellent one.



I am pretty sure that in my early days on emusic the combination of the credit system and the lack of album pricing helped propel me into a phase of downloading a lot of progressive rock and even more post-rock, due to the appeal of getting albums like the one just mentioned or gybe!'s Lift Your Skinny Fists for four credits. It certainly nudged me into genres I had not been buying on CD.

After a while on emusic an important chain started from the free daily download. The free track was Tane from Yolo by Tetsu Inoue, and I downloaded it only because it was free. It was not a genre I was listening to, and I listened once and did not get around to deleting it. Then I found it again and listened more and became captivated, and got the album. Then the follow-up album, Inland, which I then had to buy on CD later and still is one of my all-time favorite albums in any genre (and the first album I test new headphones with). That was the gateway into ambient music.

Bad Thoughts

I'm assuming you mean Northampton, US, BT, not my local town in the UK!

Actually, their are several Northamptons and North Hamptons in the US. The one to which I am referring is in Massachusetts, being known as the home of J Mascis and former indy power couple Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore. It also has a large lebian population: it's motto is "where the coffee is strong and the women are stronger."

greg

That is the one I had assumed you meant BT. 10 years ago when we were on holiday in New England we were about to go past Northampton, so stopped off for a couple of hours as it had the same name as the town we then lived in (now living about 4 miles away). An interesting place...

Plong42

Several "first impressions" of eMu back in the day....Neko Case, the Fox Confessor; The Decemberists, Crane Wife; Joe Strummer and the Mescalaros. Luck Kaplansky was another artist I did not know until I dloaded all her albums from eMu. Sadly, I cannot imagine any of these artists getting much from eMusic my purchases.

choiceweb0pen0

Love this idea. There are so many artists I learned about or explored through eMu. Cut Copy is one, as is Neko Case, Josh Ritter, Haushka, and lots of classical, jazz, and electronic music.

Brighternow

According to the Beta version of my DLH, my first download was:
Kammerflimmer Kollektief - Hysteria:


- Still as lovely as it was way back when . . .

Nereffid

The one that immediately springs to mind, from the unlimited days (I was there 2001-02 and left for a few years), is



And I got to plug this one on MiG recently:

Lowlife

The band I discovered on E Music that I grew to love was Hammock, the fine post rock band. Chasing after Shadows is still one of my favourite albums but all the others are really good. Another was Celer, they were always good when you has only a couple of tracks left. I remember when you could research one and two tracks on the site and afer buying a couple of their albums came to love them.

It all come down to be able to research what was good and new on the site, sadly missing now.

choiceweb0pen0

@Lowlife Will have to check out Hammock. Always ready to try a another post-rock band.