Perhaps they hardly ever see the light of day; their only interaction with nature the petting of a cat, whose name is an obscure Star Wars reference and who features in several YouTube offerings. They may not dress according to the latest fashions and may lack the fluency in social interaction that others take for granted. But as far as music goes, geeks are no less than the next man.
Not just because they have enabled the entire planet to pirate music to no end. Not because they form a specific niche audience for obscure techno and a polka revival. But because they use whatever means at their disposal to create their own kind of cool:
(High resolution version of Big Ideas: Don’t get any available on Vimeo)
Excellent execution of some ideas that have been around for a bit longer (like the unknown artist that created the Star Wars Imperial March played on a floppy disk drive, Sue Harding’s dot matrix printer music or Für Elise executed on a flatbed scanner)
But it’s not just the geek’s instruments that make for a .. special kind of cool. Geeks write material about what they really care about too, emotionally moving other geeks and possibly even provoking some dance-like body movements:
Again, not the first time and probably (hopefully?) not the last time either, that geeks express their inner worlds vocally (Finite Simple Group (of Order Two) and Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements” being typical examples). Rock on!
