One of my first memories regarding to music, come from my brother's bedroom closed door, from here sometimes I could hear the first music that had any meaning or at least began to have meaning at that young age, I remember clearly a band and a song that I use to listen to from my room while he had is door close with music pumping up at a high volume. This song started slow like a soft tropical music never heard before (...reggae and I didnt know at the time)...and a bass....oh man what a bass (from this bassline started the love to this instrument and I love to base most of my tracks nowdays in the basslines)... then like a thunderstorm some superfast rhythm began to develop with rapid vocals an it also had a fun fast rhythm (this was Ska and it was the first time I learned of the name and from a kind of music I will come to love).
The band was Kortatu, from Basque country northern Spain, from a movement that became known as Radical Basque Rock, a mixture of Punk, Reggae, Ska fuelled with some politics due to a social strife within the Basque society and the independentist Basque movement that turned violent with the appearance of the terrorist band ETA ,that fortunately has recently seen its end, ending a period of violence that has lasted well over 40 year.
The song was called 'El ultimo Ska de Manolo Rastaman' 'The last ska of Manolo Rastaman', basically about a dude named Manolo the Rastaman that ended his life by jumping of a building while listening to Ska and screaming his last words 'fuck off everyone this is over'....as you can imagine for such a young mind the whole idea and concept was absorbed like water to a sponge.....Now my brother has grown and listens to a music called reggaeton and mainstream music, he also has almost forgotten his past as a young rebel soul....now I understand the last words of 'Manolo the Rastaman'
When I first started in Steemit and came across dsound and dlive, my first impression is that the quality of music was going to be below average, and how wrong I was... I came to be introduced fully by atomcollectorrecords.com and his ever helpful owner Juxta John, and its ultra helpful music voter (you can find it here if interested in joining a great community and have a nice upvote for your music related posts https://atomcollectorrecords.com/beta/checklist.asp ),
One of the main things that help discover new music and fully understand the power of steemit and dsound, was to listen to other peoples tracks and commenting on them (cause why would you expect people to engage with your music if you have never actually fully engaged with others? ) so I started to see a great potential and sounds around, and make new acquaintances and good, tit for tat exchange of opinions... Of course time is limited and you can only listen to a few a day...
One day as I was going through the list in the discord channel, an album cover drew my attention, it was Hosdroplos by a band called Spawn, I had come across this posts before but as I mentioned sometimes you cant listen to each one of the music that comes across you (sadly....) but this time what it called my attention was the gnomes that it had in its cover...I fucking hate those gnomes for some reason, maybe a trauma from my infancy, or a Freudian fear of elderly looking puppets with punk hair...who knows, however called by these ugly creatures (sorry if they exist and have been offended, I hope I do not find in the morning pins and nails in my shoes as a kind of gnomish vengeance.....) Anyway the cover, kind of stroke because in some way it looked ultra psychedelic and those hated gnomes, were in a way not that frightening and ugly, they kind of fitted in the whole scene, so I decided to play and opened dsound....!
Oh man and what I found was wonderful, the tune itself was called 'Weekend', it started with full brass pumping and powerful bass-line that reminds a bit of some kind of Gypsy travelling band from an Emir Kusturica movie....the Chorus is fun and catchy and the vocals remind me of Robert Smith from the Cure in one of his probably few happy days...but what it stroke me the most, is how professional and compact this band sounds, so I said to myself that I needed to listen to these guys again, even if I had to look into those ugly looking creatures again...
https://open.spotify.com/track/4PYgt2CymZlcJfFlYFZjgz
Of course next couple of weeks as I was uploading my daily track to dsound, and went through my ritual of going through several tracks, I always looked for the Spawn ones, I came to love those gnomes and even found out that one of them was crowdsurfing....(you got to love this little things one can discover and they make up your day).
Another track that came across was from the same album 'Hosdroplos' called Society, and it is a well crafted and intelligent song with some vocal samplers denouncing situation of genocide in 'Rwanda' and Jamaica. The powerful start of the wind instruments mixed with shots and the radio reports makes it a very enjoyable experience and the value of public awareness is a great addition to the whole idea of the track......'There is something wrong in the world today...'...
https://open.spotify.com/track/0vbKINkxVS4zrbB9ezVU2i
Since then on I have come to follow and listen when I can to this fantastic Ska/reggae/ punk band as
if it was one of the greatest, cause they re definitely great and can go hand to hand with other big names of the Ska music world. Thank you for making such great music for us all...
In time I came to contact with Roel,from SPAWN in the comments and in the discord channels and of course shared my love for the music he had created for the joy of all of us Steemian music-hungry freaks and gnomes and so I met a really nice guy that has real passion for the business and he also represents what every other Steemian should look forward to achieve in this platform .
I came to know that Roel, was also running a voter and a curation trail for good art called For the love of bands, just put ftlob in one of your posts and Mr Roel will come to the rescue by giving you an upvote on your music or art post, he will also organize contest such as this one that will in the end benefit of us all, (Cheers Roel this is my thank you to your great efforts on the platform) please check this post and follow For the love of bands :
@ftlob/15-sbd-prize-pool-or-bands-about-bands-s02-e01-or-a-dsound-community-initiativehttps://steemit.com/@ftlob
He also runs a website that helps and reviews many Indie Musicians, you could be the next in his page please go and check it out at :
https://www.fortheloveofbands.com/
Thank you and hoping this article will bring you closer to go out there and discover new bands and engage with them this is what Steemit was built for...wasn't it...yes even if they have ugly looking elderly gnomes in their cover...you may never know what you can find, Forest Gump said it all the time.... Life is like a box of chocolates...you never know if you going to find a SPAWN..... https://musicoin.org/nav/artist/0x05f09267c0fa089b5f55cd3e6591c6e68d20a5b9 (every click will support their music)
and as a bonus track :
