My Top 5 Most Influential Releases ~ Simon Murphy

If you have ever been in my car, my house or even just seen inside my record bag, there is one thing that is blaringly obvious….. I have a small obsession with music. Well actually, who am I kidding really? I have a full blown, OCD laden, verging on unhealthy, obsession with music and have done so for as long as I can remember. I have hundreds of records, CDs, tapes, DVDs and videos plus hard drives FULL to the brim with every conceivable genre of electronic music from the last 15+ years of collecting. The collection fills any spare bit of shelf, cupboard, car or floor space that I have and then some. Am I concerned? Not at all…. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So what does this have to do with anything? Well, when you have as much music as I do and somebody asks you to come up with 5 albums that have influenced you the most as a DJ it does tend to open up a Pandora’s box. It was my equivalent of someone asking a parent which is their favourite child in that even though deep down I had favourites, I felt bad for the others. It was no mean feat to come up with this list as I could have easily made it 20 or 50 influential albums but through a lot of thought I have managed to narrow it down to my top five.

This list is by no means a definitive list of the best or most defining releases across the whole scene. These are not necessarily the most highly praised releases across the genres that they cover or are they even necessarily the most highly regarded releases by the artists included. This is simply a list that captures where my headspace was musically at different times, where I have drawn inspiration from, and most of all, what has shaped my outlook on music and the tunes that I play. It was hard to prepare this list without sounding conceited or self righteous as I had to try to justify what were extremely tough decisions. Passion can easily be mistaken for arrogant self indulgence so I hope that this comes across as the former as this was my intention. The list naturally formed in chronological order as it follows what I was listening to at different times, a few explanations of the scene at the time (sorry if some were long-winded), my changing tastes in music and how I went from being a music-obsessed party-animal promo-whore to a…. well…. to a music-obsessed  party-animal who feels lucky to have the opportunity to spin the tunes I love (when people let me).

So enough of my rambling (or the start of a whole lot more rambling?) here are my choices……

1. The Prodigy – Music for the jilted generation (1994)

As a teenager in the mid to late 90’s I was, like everyone else, riding the grunge and punk waves. I liked music with a lot of energy but never really liked the more classic ‘rock’ sound per se. I got into dance music when I was pretty young and I’m not going to lie; a lot of the stuff I listened to was horrible stuff. Whilst bouncing around between these almost polar opposites, I found myself unknowingly searching for something that would grab me and shake things up. Enter stage right…. The Prodigy.

The Prodigy turned any preconception that I had of music on its head by merging the ideals of punk with the structures and sounds of electronic music. I blasted this through my walkman like there was no tomorrow. They were the gateway act that got me hooked on the good stuff and made me thirsty for more. With the little money I had from my part time job at KFC I would hit up Dixon’s and buy anything and everything from the ‘dance music’ section. Buying second hand CDs from Dixon’s, armed with minimal knowledge of what I should be looking for, meant my collection included everything from Detroit House to Rotterdam Hardcore, from trance to jungle, from commercial cheese to experimental Goa. Again, a lot of it was horrible, but it opened up my eyes to a whole new world of music that I fully immersed myself in. This exposure to such a wide array of sounds meant that I always kept an open mind about music and this is an ideal I still try to remain true to.

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2. Sasha + Digweed – Northern Exposure : Expeditions (1999)

By 1999 I had a bit more knowledge of the electronic music that was out there and had started to go to club nights and events around Melbourne. My weekend diet consisted of a whole lot of trance and a whole lot of techno. Like most kiddies I liked my music banging so there was a fair bit of hard house and other UK sounds in there too. I was still listening to anything and everything that I could afford and as I slowly got more involved in the scene I read about or got told about more and more acts that I should check out.

As is still true to this day, there aren’t many bigger names than Sasha and John Digweed so it was no surprise that I came across this compilation on my travels (I think I may have actually lashed out and bought this at Sanity Dance Arena). I’m not going to lie, at first listen I really wasn’t that impressed, it sounded like a chill CD and I didn’t get what all the fuss was about. After subsequent listens though, it all started to make sense. This double CD taught me that music didn’t have to be banging to be awesome. The music had so many layers, so many different sounds and the mixes were so long that you almost couldn’t tell where one track stopped and the next track started. Every time I listened I heard something different that I hadn’t noticed before and I loved it. This album is still one of the reasons that I still look for music with lots of layers and textures that can be played around with and used to make long mixes.

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3. Dave Clarke – World Service (2001)

By the time I heard this album I was well and truly hooked on the Melbourne scene. Whilst I was at uni I was promoting around Melbourne so that I could go to all the events that I wouldn’t have been able to afford to attend otherwise. After listening to enough trance, hard house and hardcore to turn anyone sterile I began my techno honeymoon with this double CD being one of the key catalysts. I am pretty sure it must have been in the @mosphere DJ’s contracts to have a copy of this on vinyl as the tunes on here received a fair caning and formed part of the soundtrack to that period of time. As a promoter for @mosphere I met a bunch of the techno faithful and didn’t look back. I was promoting for crews like Hardware, Wetmusik, Melbourne Techno Massive etc and my brain was well and truly rewired to run on techno time. Even though I cross between genres a bit now, techno still forms the basis of the majority of what I play and Dave Clarke still reigns as one of my favourite DJs (Ben Sims still takes the cake as the best DJ I’ve ever seen though – sorry Dave).

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4. Vitalic – OK Cowboy (2005)

It’s blatantly obvious to anyone who has been around more than a couple of years that after years of techno domination, electro hit the Melbourne scene in a BIG way and before it became a taboo word due to commercial oversaturation, there was a thriving scene with some exceptional music. By this stage I’d been heavily involved in promoting, running events, writing reviews & other press, event photography etc and I had always been quite content to let others do the DJing. This was probably due to minimal funds whilst studying full time and working casual jobs but also because I never really felt the need. Heaps of my mates were DJs and I’d go to so many events I could always hear the tunes I wanted to hear. I was happy with this arrangement.

When I finally jumped behind the decks I did much the same as when I started buying CDs, I bought records (a lot which were second hand) that crossed a number of genres. From early on I got hooked on the heavier electro sounds of artists like Anthony Rother, The Hacker, Fischerspooner, Black Strobe and of course Vitalic. Seeing Vitalic smash out his set at Two Tribes in ’04 was a set that resonated in my mind when I was first buying records and when this album came out it was definitely a major influence in the sound I was aiming for. The Melbourne scene had some great electro gigs and DJs which definitely contributed to the sound I was playing. Sometime around this point I went from being a bedroom banger with absolutely no desire to play in public at all, to getting a couple of random gigs around the traps and then BANG…. my vinyl addiction morphed into a burning desire to play gigs.

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5. Trentemoller – The Last Resort (2006)

After electro got destroyed by hideous electro house I was looking for something new (note: before anyone jumps up and down there definitely was/is some very good electro house around, it just got totally paled in comparison to the amount of absolute trash around). I moved back to my techno roots but in a new form; minimal. Much like when electro hit the scene in a big way, minimal threw a net over the scene and I got hooked (again, there was some terrible minimal but there was also some amazing music around at this time). Trentemoller’s music acted as a catalyst for me as his music bridged the gap between my taste for electro/early electro house and minimal.

One of my very early records was a white label of Trentemoller’s Beta Boy. After falling in love with the track, I went on a search to find anything and everything that Trentemoller had anything to do with. His EP’s on Poker Flat plus a long list of remixes were staples in my sets and they never left my record bag. This album was released about a year after I had first gotten into his music. I had loved his previous work but this album definitely struck a chord much in the same way that Northern Exposure: Expeditions had done all those years earlier. This album is a beautiful piece of amazingly structured melancholy techno. It re-taught me the value of quality production, texture and layers in music. This album made me really listen to the music I was playing and is probably partly responsible for the OCD I have now about finding the right tunes for the right set. Since this album I have immersed myself in a lot of down tempo, melodic and often melancholy music that really did changed the way I played my sets.

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So there you have it. There were numerous other releases that I would have loved to include from acts like Daft Punk, Laurent Garnier, Sasha, Gui Boratto, Lamb, Joris Voorn, Shpongle, Booka Shade, Riccardo Villalobos, Protoculture, James Zabiela, Phonique, Trifonic, Lusine and well, the list goes on. Overall, I think that the five releases above are a good cross section to illustrate how I managed to get to the point I am at now. Hearing my sets, after looking at this list, you will hopefully be able to hear and understand where I draw a lot of my inspiration. The elements presented in these releases have all contributed to the ideals that I seek in music. I attempt, with varying degrees of success, to translate these core elements into my mixes and my sets. Add to this the huge amounts of quality local and international DJs I’ve been spoilt enough to catch playing around Melbourne over the last decade and you should also be able to see why I am still addicted to the music after all this time and why I can’t see that changing any time soon.