Intro: Music Saved My Life Part 2

Music Saved My Life - Part 2

Gothic and Industrial Teach me a Few Steps

   Remembering back to a wedding I attended when I was maybe 13, I was awkwardly introduced to a cute girl at the edge of the dance floor. Then the words were said "go dance with her". Apparently this was a bad idea. I was a guitar player - thrashing around with my hair in my face was my specialty. As I walked out with her, with perhaps some inane disco song playing, I couldnt help to think about what I was about to do or how I looked in that ridiculous rental suit. I then proceeded to move about in a disjointed fashion, lifting my feet off beat as if avoiding snakes and overall just wishing it all would end quickly. I figured those 3 minutes were the last I would ever spend on a dance floor.
  Skip ahead another 13 years and I am there- at the edge of a dance floor, this time with my fiance. And I am hard at work studying. Studying the movements of a few darkly clad figures dancing to the alternative mix of 90s electronic, gothic and industrial.

   Somehow, the mutli-layered and syncopated beats of Front 242 and Front Line Assembly spoke to me. Also curious was how the dark ambiance and haunting sounds of Bauhaus felt right at home. It awakened my senses,  I felt alive again. It was sort of like air guitar but in my feet. I Felt the music. It was much like Metal, in the way it made me react. And I wanted to express it so I watched and learned. Because I was pissed off.

   As I discovered, more and more, the 80s underground music was the best in every genre I could imagine. I discovered so much that I blame radio for not introducing me. I knew Depeche Mode in 1986- but as an
imported pop band. I blamed MTV. 120 minutes? There was Front 242. Didnt see it. Didnt hear it. Didnt FEEL it. I didnt know in 1992 that I would still get goose bumps from the intro to "Personal Jesus" 18 years later. Didnt know that the beat to Headhunter would inevitably teach me to dance.
  None of it I knew or heard before. Each time I heard Sisters of Mercy, it was an awakening. Bauhaus? Dark Entries sounded to me taken straight from my early punk days but turned into Edgar Allen Poe. I was becoming a Goth. Still a Metalhead yes but so were many of the Goths that I would end up befriending.

  Some of my favorites like Bigod20 "The Bog" and MCL "New York New York" and so many more - Alice from Sisters of Mercy, Sideshow by The Wake, Adrenaline by Rosetta Stone, and one of my very favorites, Tragedy For You -Front 242. All kept me dancing for years, up to Wolfshiem, Covenant, and SWR,  And One. I danced a lot. My style evolved and I felt alive again. The divorce was messy and difficult but it would've been worse - without the music.
   Slowly though, now 18 years later the quality of the genres both have waned as the years bring about industrial that is more closer to what I call noise industrial or re-categorized as EBM and the newer gothic music seems less and less well, gothic.
 As I felt less and less connected with the rehash of modern rock - the hyrbids of new metal - the loss of true punk rock - the watering down of goth - I decided to look into the internet for new music and new  discoveries, just to vary my collection. What I discovered I can only describe as my Third Love....

Next: Part 3: I got bit by a Symphonic bug