I wrote about the Touched Music Full Spectrum compilation before it came out and I want to return to it now that it has been in the world for a few months, because the experience of having that release out there has been different from what I expected.
What I expected was pride. What I got was something quieter and more complicated than pride.
808 State were one of the first electronic music acts that genuinely stopped me in my tracks as a teenager. Pacific State in 1989, when I was fifteen years old, was one of the first piece of electronic music I remember hearing on mainstream radio that had the same quality I was finding in the underground records I was beginning to discover. It was simultaneously accessible and strange. It belonged to the pop world and to something else entirely.
Future Sound of London were another revelation, a few years later. Accelerator and then Lifeforms: music that felt like it existed in a different dimension from everything else being made at the time. The scale of the ambition, the complete indifference to genre convention, the sense that the music was trying to do something that hadn’t been done before. These records shaped how I think about what electronic music can aspire to.
Being on the same compilation as these artists does not make me their peer. I want to say that clearly because I think honesty about where you stand in the history of the music you love is important. What it does is place my work in a lineage, however modestly, that I have enormous respect for.
That’s not pride. That’s gratitude. And gratitude is the right response.
