"My musical career started with playing Guitar Hero on the PS3 about 15 years ago. No joke."
Danny Drivr is a school bus driver in the Austrian countryside, and that is his origin story. The good ones in this corpus are rarely the mythic kind. They are specific, slightly embarrassing, and usually involve equipment nobody would choose.
Danny Drivr
Guitar Hero led to recording guitar covers for YouTube, most of them basic because he could not play well yet, some of which caught on. He now makes what he calls Dreamy Psychedelic Lo-fi Indie Bedroom Rock from a sleepy town called Waidhofen an der Ybbs. Songs start as a random riff recorded into phone memos, then get drums, bass and synths. Sunny Side Up was assembled from unfinished songs he decided to finally finish - it is about getting your life together. On promotion he is unsparing: "Promoting is my absolute weak spot. I'm really bad at it."
Magana
"I started playing music on flutophone in the 3rd grade," says Jeni Magaña. "I have recently been made aware that many of you had recorders, but my school had these little white and red plastic clarinet imitators." She loved the flutophone. Wanting to keep playing at school, her mother found an old clarinet. She grew up in Bakersfield playing whatever instruments she could get hold of, and says the obsession made her feel like an outsider in her own family - though her parents kept finding her instruments anyway. She is not sure she had any other hobbies as a child.
Sockpuppet
Sockpuppet's earliest memories are musical and slightly absurd: at three or four, an obsession with a book called Tubby the Tuba, insistent enough that it became a Halloween costume. Piano followed at five, then violin and cello, then guitar, drums and a great deal else. The forthcoming pair of albums includes her earliest Song Fight! material recomposed with twenty-five years of hindsight. Song Fight! runs an annual live show, and she uses it as her own yardstick for how she has developed as a musician; the 2020 to 2023 editions ran online.
Dino DiMuro
The story Dino DiMuro repeats is that he saw Bonnie and Clyde and wanted a banjo because of the Flatt and Scruggs soundtrack. The one he thinks is true is different: hearing a full Mothers of Invention album, We're Only In It For The Money, and realising he could probably make his own. He describes the results as \"Walt Disney on acid\" - the playfulness of a Disney soundtrack, sound effects included, welded to the rock sensibility of the 60s and 70s.
Laser Move Kill
Laser Move Kill came at it from mechanism rather than inspiration. "From the first moment I started listening to music, I was also interested in figuring out how instruments work." That curiosity turned into guitar, bass and eventually the keyboard he now starts from. There is still no plan: he toys around and finds the best things arrive when he is not looking for them. He describes his music as impressionistic, an attempt to show how he perceives the spaces and moments around him. He keeps a deliberately low profile - occasional newsletters, replies to emails, no push.
Olio Flux
Joel Gomer took the long professional route - audio engineering studies, touring crews, managing a music store - before affordable home equipment let him make his own records at his own pace. The name is a description of method: olio, a disorganised assortment of things, plus flux, continuous change. His latest, Dolorous, works through darker material. A Logic Pro failure cost him two weeks, though no music was lost.
Nobody was struck by lightning
What is missing from all six is the conversion narrative. Nobody describes a single decisive moment that made them an artist. They describe a plastic clarinet imitator, a video game, a book about a tuba, and a curiosity about how the instruments worked.
DiMuro is the honest one: he has a story he repeats and a story he believes, and they are not the same. The repeatable version is always tidier than what actually happened.