From Andrew Scott Wells Sent Fri, Oct 23rd 1998, 09:05
Heh heh heh, I've been waiting for the right opportunity to respond to this post. I'm fairly certain I've got you ALL beat. First, the theory, as brought to us by one Tony Horner of Brisbane, Australia: > Is there, he suggests jokingly, an inverse proportional relationship > between these two factors? That is, as the lifestyle becomes more > pleasant, does the music around you becomes more crap? You THINK you're joking, but you're not; I submit, as exhibit A, MY current setting, Columbia, Missouri, USA (it's about a four-hour drive south from where Kent "chaircrusher" Williams lives, to give you a non-lurker basis for comparison). Oh, the lifestyle's pleasant enough; there's little crime, low cost-o'-living, etc.; but there is a price to be paid, and that is that you live in a town whose biggest cultural event this year was the fucking PROMISE KEEPERS :P, thus guaranteeing that no one even remotely out of the mainstream will EVER come here again, even though it's a decent-sized college town (apparently, we didn't have enough "art-fags" to drive them out, eh Kent?). You laugh, but take a look at all of the major IDM tour dates in the US that have been posted recently. Look at an atlas and mentally picture all of those stops; you'll notice about a four-hundred-mile radius zone of doom around Columbia into which very few IDM acts dare enter--despite the audiences they could receive in places like Kansas City or even *gasp* St. Louis. Oh, they'll go to little bumfuck college towns _outside_ the zone of doom (Fort Collins gets MMM?! wtf is that? Boulder I can understand, but Fort Collins? What, did Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan cancel at the last minute?) why can't they come to MY little bumfuck college town, dammit? :) There's an audience, here. Really there is! I know this list has (or had at one time) a few people from Columbia on it, and out of only a thousand or so listmembers worldwide, that's not a bad representation! Which brings me to my scant IDM content. What, if anything, IS happening hereabouts IDMwise in the near future (aside from Mix Master Mike in KC)? St. Louis, Kansas City, Lawrence, anywhere within the aforementioned zone of doom would be nice. Thanks! --Andy Wells P.S.: just to put the other people who responded to this thread in their place: *Brisbane's a hell of a lot bigger than Columbia, we're about a thousand miles from the nearest beach, and in OUR summers the humidity is downright oppressive. And we have no local music magazines (at least nothing that doesn't have the word hoe-down in it). *Manchester and Sheffield are also bigger than Columbia and not nearly as remote. I'll bet you could get to London much faster than it would take me to drive to either St. Louis or Kansas City, and when you got there, you wouldn't be shit(e) out of luck as far as IDM goes. So in summation, to everyone else on the list who complained about the hinterlandish qualities of their home town, please... CRY ME A FUCKING RIVER! ;)