I have been playing music for over thirty years, ten of which were logged in the music industry. I began piano lessons at seven, but quit when I realized that in our culture, piano skills were used by parents as a bourgeois weapon against other parents, sending their children into war like Fur-Elise-playing battle bots to demolish the neighbors’ rally to keep up with the Joneses. It had nothing to do with music-making whatsoever. The first record my dad brought me was The Four Tops: Second Album. I spent hours looking at the cover, wondering how 4 clean cut guys can make such groovy music. But the day I realized you can dance to music was the day I heard You Sexy Thing (Hot Chocolate).

I then picked up the guitar at around 10, hearing bossa nova played on the seaside by a cheery man with his nylon acoustic. It was the instrument I played until my mid twenties, ending with the guitar synthesizer. As any young teen will testify, I too, initially held a fascination for the tongue-in-cheek music of rock and roll, the swagger, the bad boys, all the things moms warned us about when we were playing with stuff animals. Luckily rock and roll has its roots in the blues. My youthful investigations fortunately began on the right path, leading me into the blues and soul of the delta bluesmen, Chicago blues, chain gang worksongs, gospel music, and the many wonderful continua of these traditional American genres.

One evening, on the lower east side of new york city inside the old Ritz (now Webster Hall), at a Ramones concert, two punks with mohawks cuped their hands together and waved with their heads for me to go over and climb on. The moment I did, I felt someone rushing up behind me at a great speed, the three of them worked together in a single action to catapulted me high above and over Joey Ramone’s head. As I was airbourne, watching the three punk slammers’ smiling faces (with missing teeth), and thumbs up, my love affair with the wildly exuberant punk rock music began. I found happiness on the dance floor, in those salad days before ‘moshing’ turned into an afterschool football practice session it is today. Slam dancing, taken collectively was extraordinary chance choreography in the tradition that would have made Merce Cunningham proud. In the midst of this high-spirited, comical, and in-the-moment dance, I discovered my youth.

Back in my early teenage years, curiosity with jazz rock fusion quickly pointed in the direction of modal jazz, which opened the doors to avant-garde, post-bop, and bebop. I have also played the tenor and alto saxophone, flute, indigenous woodwinds, drums, and keyboards. I have a deep love for middle-eastern music. Both the Armenian douduk and the recitations in the Qur’an are among the most beautiful sounds I have heard. My love of vocal music also found nourishment in very old precious Philips recordings of Gregorian chants from the monks at a Luxembourg monastery, as well as rare recordings of the Sisters of St. Cecilia at Isle of Wight. I spent several valuable years in good company under the guidance of composers Dan Goode and Philip Corner. Philip gave me a collection of tapes of his piano compositions, some of which comprised of one chord being repeated on the piano for an extended period of time. Each repetition sounded entirely different, opening vast possibilities in what I perceived to be subtle gradations of overtones. This laid the groundwork that would later become my foundation in understanding the extra, implied voices in fugal pieces. In this period of time, I also created a process of translating spoken interviews with individuals into musical scores, turning the content of their life stories into metaphorical music motifs.

Writing and singing original alternative-pop songs with the Lovesick Cows on the side, while playing saxophone with an old friend’s band, Jehova’s Waitress, I eventually met two musicians in New York City and the band Hooch started. We signed a record contract with the label Futurist with our brand of semi-experimental pop music. After our record was released, the vocalist left to pursue a film-maker and we became another pop entity altogether. At the same time, I remixed some of our original songs into deep house pieces. While I gained proficiency in sequencers, I started admiring the skills of rap and hip hop producers and how their art was, in fact, a logical progression of r&b music. The syncopated hip hop, house and disco rhythms rekindled my love of the dancefloor, which had been dormant since my punk and hardcore heydays. Slowly, in true connect-the-dots fashion, I back-traced my path across hard house, deep and garage house, acid, techno, ambient, bungra, drums and bass, industrial until I reached my original fascination with those adrenaline-filled soundtracks from 70′s blaxploitation and detective car-chase movies. I also got reacquainted with my love of dance music. When I was a child, listening to prim virginal music, the moment I saw drunken foghat fans stomping on records on Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park, I immediately wanted to find out more about the music that made white men take off their shirts and dance around pyres of toxic burning vinyl during baseball games. I ran out and bought Bee Gees, Meco, and Lipps Inc. records. I combined my perceptions of what fashion runway music is with the string overlays in Italian romance movies, and the Pristine Sound was born. On the quiet side, I started rediscovering the piano as well. Now I play the piano exclusively and quite amateurishly, I might add. My love is in the Tudorian pieces of William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons, as well as the fugal music of J.S. Bach.

These days I am making original music that I enjoy listening to. To me artists are always at their best when they create things for themselves first. I dabble in rap mixes but mostly I create electronic music. It’s just my good luck that they also happen to sound like bubbly pop music that has the potential to be highly commercial.

© 1994-2010 All Music and lyrics copyright by Pristine Angie (p) BMI America. Do not link or redistribute without expressed permission from pristineangie@gmail.com