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My brother buys everything by the Rolling Stones.
My musical education started with obsessively listening to two radioshows when I was 18: "Domino" on BRT 2 with Luc Janssen and "Frontlijn" on VPRO Radio with Gerard J. Walhof and when I moved to Antwerp, to Radio Centraal. En vogue at the time were bands like Sonic Youth, Big Black, Nick Cave, Foetus and Coil, all of which sounded very exotic and dangerous to me, but I also remember Luc Janssen playing the first acid house records in the late eighties, along with Pierre Elitair on Radio Centraal. In an "Oor" (Dutch music magazine) I found an article on house, acid house and techno.
At the same time, I started to visit the Mediatheek in Brussels, a huge government funded cd-library where I discovered people like The Temptations, Funkadelic, Parliament, Lee Perry and King Tubby. These were my first steps in the black music realm.
In 1993, at Metrophone records in Antwerp, I bought Mastercuts' Classic Jazz Funk vol.1 and a little bit later Classic Salsoul in the same series. A last one I should mention is "Deep Beats'" Essential Disco vol. 1. This is the period when I discovered Larry Levan and also the beginning of the internet.
In 1996, I found a list of records that had inspired techno artists via the 313 mailing list. Doing a search (this was pre-Google) for these records I found this list. This was also the reason for me to start a page on the internet: The internet archive still holds a copy of my site dd. 1999: http://web.archive.org/web/19991004110303/http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/1392/
From then on, I researched disco, house, djs and club life in general via the internet and via vinyl (searching for seventies and early eighties twelve inches mixed by Larry Levan and his contemporaries which eventually led me to MAW, Roy Ayers, Fela Kuti.
Music writing: Finding David Toop's Ocean of Sound at Brussels' WH Smith (now Waterstone's) was a definite influence. On the internet, discovering Simon Reynolds was equally important.
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