About The Voltage Control

This is a simply music culture and music technology blog. It began as a kind of nostalgia. Having come back to Australia after most of a decade spent working in the tech industry abroad, I began to think about the prior decade's youthful adventures in and around the music industry. A time where I'd written and performed and toured music, attended a small engineering school and a large music college, as well as plenty of small gigs and large festivals to match, and poured with words and photos as a part of a collection of Australian creatives pulled into the adjacent media in the era of print publications. But then the pandemic happened.

Like a lot of active technical creatives with global story arcs suddenly cut to the shape of a hoembound apartment during a pandemic lockdown, my thoughts turned inwards, backwards, and even down into the depths of a storage shed which contained the studio that I'd mothballed. Digging through the studio and live gear, still covered in the gig notes and scratches from Segue and Superfluid and D-KO and Silent Shadow and a bunch of other musical adventures, I started to think about how this scene would be repeating around the world.

A generation of artists and creatives who stumbled into this life in their teenage years, created and strived and explored and shared with youthful energy, and then swept away into other life adventures. It can seem trivial - who cares what our bands were or what art we created - but it's also profound. Our individual participations (even just admiring a piece of music or seeing a show as a kid on a night out) are incredibly personal and contextual and nuanced and real and, as we are learning with the booming nostalgia genres like Synthwave going on to to underpin chart topping albums from the likes of The Weeknd and Dua Lipa, culturally (and financially) significant.

The Voltage Control is an outlet for exploring my own passion for the gear and albums and artists and events that contributed in some way to the wider electronic music culture, but also to my own experience of it. In writing about them, I'm focusing my attention, and looking to add either new insights, collect some previously disparate resources, or add a personal experience to nudge the collective knowledge just a little by addition.