it may be almost pathetic, in context. but, in trying to figure out what i was thinking regarding the synthetic strings, and trying to put it into the context of early 1998, i can't ignore this tea party record. it's really a pretty big, if somewhat muted, background influence through a lot of what i was doing at the time, in terms of integrating blues-based guitar music with electronics. i mean, i tend to point more cleanly to various types of electronic music or various types of guitar-based music. this is because, at the time, the ideas were still broadly disentangled. i guess they still are, but there's at least a bigger pool to draw on, now. there's not really any good reason for this; listen to a late 60s beatles record. but, some kind of taboo developed in the 70s and it took decades to really break it down. the result was that guitars and electronics only really mixed in the fringes of technical music, in a bit of high-end pop and in the realm of industrial music. blues-based musicians universally avoided all electronics.
it really started opening up about 1998. in that sense, the tea party were just a hop ahead of the curve. if they had shown up just a few years later with the energy they started off with, they'd be as big as muse or radiohead. they were really blazing a path just ahead of them, but they got muffled by the glaciers up here or something.
but, canadians, at least, recognized them for the talent they were. and, one could not have been a canadian teenage musician in the 90s without being influenced by them - both in their "morrocan roll" stage and in their truly rather pioneering electro-rock world phase. or, just simply as a guitarist.
(relevant tracks: wish, schizoid, on sexual confusion in adolescence....anything with a guitar, and anything with string arrangements, however primitive)
