Blue Calyx

There are some albums that just turn your musical world upside down. The ones that really challenge your notion of what music is, and what it can be. SAWII was one of those albums for me. I found my way into early "techno" and electronic music via the industrial route (KMFDM, Front242, Skinny Puppy, anything on Wax Trax!). When that scene was dying down in the early 90s, my attention shifted to the new rave and techno stuff coming out of Detroit and England. I was obsessed with anything that had 909 beats, Moog lines and a hoover bass. I had already bought AFX Analogue Bubblebath and SAWI and was really digging them both, so when I chanced upon Selected Ambient Works II in the used CD bin, I snatched it up expecting some sweet techno goodness. I wasn't sure what this "ambient" thing was all about, and on my first listen I was like "WTF?". This hardly seemed like music and I felt ripped off. Me and my teenage angst demeanor were hoping for a soundtrack seemingly more relevant to my life.

I was 18, and the only income I had was from a part time job soldering circuit boards for a local manufacturer. And this was 1994, so the notion of getting free music off from the Internet (let alone the idea of the Internet) hadn't been realized yet. Point being, when I spent what little money I had on music, I listened the hell out of that music. So I listened to that double disc set many times. I did homework to it. I fell asleep to it. I daydreamed to it at work as I churned out thousands of identical solder joints on the assembly line. Before long, I had been re-programmed. SAW II opened me up to the possibility that music could be atonal. Synthetic yet warm. Sublime but also subversive. I hear people talk about Eno's "Music for Airports" in the same way, and I imagine both albums are cut from the same cloth. Not surprisingly, albums like this aren't wildly popular. But for me at least, it was highly influential.

I'd be interesting in hearing other people's picks for albums that expanded their notion of what music is.