The Artists Were Always There
As I grow more conscious of the media that I consume, I find myself interested in the people that create the things that I love. I like keeping an eye on whatever they have in the works, hearing their creative process, and seeing them talk about the things that their peers create. It serves as a source of inspiration for my own work, and as a way to find new things that I may like. In many cases, this means seeing what groups or communities an artist participates in, which may introduce me to bunch of other creative people with amazing work. I don't need a recommendation algorithm if I already keep my hand on the pulse of the scenes that I care about.
A consequence of this consciousness is that I often discover that the creator of a recent thing was also the creator of something from long ago that I enjoyed. I love these moments because it feels like a closed loop: of me falling in love with something that someone made in the past, only to rediscover them much later and falling in love with their work all over again. The artists were always there, I just hadn't seen them yet.
There is no better example of this than my long journey to discover music that I liked as a kid. This might be weird, but the activity of "listening to music because you like it" wasn't really a thing that my family did growing up, so I never went out of my way to listen to music. The things that would be playing on the car radio or public places never really captured my attention, so as a kid, I just assumed that I didn't really like music and that it wasn’t for me. Video games and the internet helped with this. They gave me access to music in a way that allowed me to explore on my own and discover what I enjoyed, all while shaping my musical tastes. I think that I always had a sense for the music that I liked, but I didn't know it at the time.
There are certain songs that I listened to that helped me get closer and closer to finding music that I liked. They had a way of really sticking with me and eventually popped up again in unexpected ways. One example of this is the musical duo aivi & surrashu's cover of Lonely Rolling Star from the game Katamari Damacy. It kind of scares me that this cover is TWELVE years old because I remember watching this video when it was only like a year old. This cover really stuck out to me because it just sounded like nothing that I had heard before. I had listened to the original song, but the cover expressed it in a way that I really liked. I still wasn't an active music listener, so it somehow didn't occur to me that I could try and see if the artists made other music that I might like, which was kind of an incredible missed opportunity. The Bandcamp link in the description of that video was probably the first time that I had ever heard about Bandcamp.
At roughly the same time, the Cartoon Network show Steven Universe was airing and I watched it. I was essentially exactly the target demographic that the show was written for: a queer youth who didn't realize it yet. I look back fondly on the show, but the thing that I remember the most is the music. Lots of the important musical numbers made a big impression on me, but I especially remember the more incidental music tracks: I loved listening to it and I wanted more of whatever it was. Of course, I'm not mentioning this for no reason: aivi & surasshu composed much of the incidental music heard in the show, and even some of the more prominent tracks in the series (they composed and performed in the show's ending theme, Love Like You). The work of the people that I had seen on my computer screen had made it to my TV, and I didn't even know at the time.
As the years passed, I would grow to understand more about the music that I like through my own exploration, and along the way, I rediscovered aivi & surasshu's music. I had never forgotten about their cover of Lonely Rolling Star, so I immediately recognized it when listening to their album, The Black Box (I really like Here's How!). With that, I discovered their role in the music that I had heard years before, and took the opportunity to see what they were up to in the meantime. Their work led me to Infloresce Records and to the community that surrounds it, which introduced me to the work of so many musicians. More generally, it introduced me to Digital Fusion, a broad musical genre that attempts to put a name to the music that I had been unknowingly looking for this whole time.
(If you want a 4 hour long (!) music sample from many different musicians, I would recommend Snowdrop Festival 2025, which was organized by Infloresce Records)
Me discovering music that I enjoy is inseparably synonymous with me discovering the people that made the music I enjoy. It is how I discovered that there are so many communities of people that love the same music that I do. I simply would have never found the musicians or their music otherwise. This is one of the many, many, many, many, many, many (etc.) reasons why I dislike Spotify, because it often renders entire groups of people invisible in exchange for a personalized, but isolated experience.
This "discovery and rediscovery" is a big inspiration to me. It's nice to know that the people that I admire are still out there creating the things that only they could, and inspires me to do the same.