U2 - Alex descends into hell for a bottle of milk/Korova 1
But the point is that behind all this, U2 also released a bunch of b-sides including one to The Fly's, an instrumental industrial-inspired and a score to a theatrical production of Stanley Kubrick's clockwork orange. Secretly, this track greatly inspired the industrial side of TQA some 10 years ago, with the track Warchitects off my debut album Unconquered.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Moya
In the mid-late 90s, I had this thing online called open-diary: a journal where you would publicly write your thoughts anonymously via a fictive handle/username (something we totally forgot about with Facebook, yeah?). In my entry, I was talking about how all commercial music and all songs sounded the same and how nothing sounded fresh anymore, that vocals were getting on my nerves and why didn't songs exist more as long forms with cinematic aspects such as in film scores (I probably just discovered Philip Glass' Koyaanisqatsi at that point too). A local friend of a friend (who didn't know I knew who she was, just a detail...) commented that I should check out Godspeed You! Black Emperor who had just opened for Sonic Youth in Montreal. And she was right (thank you 4ever MHS!). On that hunch, I bought Slow Riot EP at HMV's which changed my life for good, opened doors to this realm of free, unconstrained, experimental, creative & emotional music that I was searching for a long time - first through the Constellation catalog: Fly Pan Am, Do Make Say Think, Exhaust, etc. but also by following a GYBE yahoo groups where I discovered, with the help of Soulseek (FU Lars), many great bands such as Mogwai, Tarentel, Slint, Rachels', Sigur Ros, Boards of Canada, Dirty Three, Arab Strap & a lot more. I still listen to all those CDs in my car. And I ended up seeing Godspeed about 22 times to this day, and the whole universe of underground shows with the same type of philosophy had opened up as well. Travelling to New York to see a late show by Mono & Maserati at the defunct Tonic playing in front of less than 10 people or watching Explosions in the Sky play in front of 20 people at Casa Del Popolo in the early 00's seem pretty unreal today. It was also around those early live concert experiences that I had the desire to pick up the guitar and make music, but I'm pretty sure I didn't have this grand master plan for touring the world just yet & making a living by sometimes still playing in front of that many (little) people - it was really just about expressing yourself and undoing this whole myth of having to be extroverted to be creative, to be on a stage and performing in front of people. My first band Destroyalldreamers actually became quite a serious hobby as we released a couple of (some would say) "cult" albums and played many local shows, but it just ended being too dysfunctional to get anywhere further than that. Though no regrets: playing in a band was the best music teacher I could ever find.
lovesliescrushing - baby's breath
Set Fire to Flames' - Steal Compass / Tarentel - Adonai
To an extend, I would even add Slowdive's Rutti & most of Pygmalion in that same category of tracks that influenced early TQA as I wanted it to be a sparse less is more ambient project. Naturally, I slowly got bored of this aesthetic and trying to sound like something that already exist never worked for me. Instead, my emotions took over in the sense that as I would figure things along, I would keep pouring more and more of how my "feelings" into the compositions and went on to use different techniques of composition and live performances which ended up as an over-saturated "more is more" projected intensity of what goes on inside of my mind, that is rather closer to being inspired by Swans, but I digress (I just didn't want to pick a song by Swans).