Sonic Seducer: The Introduction

Being a Gemini, I shouldn’t be surprised that my fourth book attends to my first love — music. Being a Gemini, I shouldn’t be surprised that this book is filled with both resonance and dissonance.

I thought I would make available the rough draft of the Introduction. For the very specific community that this book is squarely aimed at, the Introduction will be merely a coded affirmation/celebration of it. For the rest, I am hoping enough curiosity is stoked to read on.

And, not a light read by any stretch of the imagination. Over 100 000 words, and playlist that will eventually top 700 songs — each in chronological order, relevant to the personal story of the book.

Without much further ado, let’s do as the Introduction instructs us to do — go.

I started writing this book in August, 2021. I finished it with the Introduction you are about to read. Constructing the opening paragraphs to this book prior to finishing it wasn’t ever going to be a possibility. My relationship with music is just too wild and lustful–permeating every aspect of my life–to not constantly attempt to find new connections to its increasing value in my life.

The potential of those new connections are always in flux, being ripened for the birth of one more life-affirming reason to move music from the periphery of your life to its deserving center.

That’s kind of one purpose of this book: to increase the value of music in your life.

It’s that simple. It’s also that complex. That’s because its a personal story that spans time, the beauty and challenges of life, and all the music that I have come across — my 6th generation iPod once identified I listen to over 50 genres of music.

Beginning with an uneventful youth that miraculously metamorphosed–over six decades–into a gray, slightly bruised butterfly, floating with delirium inside a relatively unknown musical universe. A universe that deserved its story to be told–and at a length that was never going to be negotiated.

The main thing was, that the years in which the book was written, also happened to be the years in which I enjoyed listening to rock music–especially new music–the most in my entire life.

Still can listen to all those genres, but it’s all been whittled down to a few. But it’s in those few that exists one of the world’s largest — and relatively unknown — diamond mine of music.

That’s the other, related purpose of this book: to understand how and why this sexagenarian could make such bold reflection about the current state of music.

The truth of the matter is that I didn’t even fully see that revelation coming. All I knew and listened to until the age of thirty was classic rock and the alternative music of the early 90’s.

And, didn’t all of that die by the end of the century?

So, what the hell have I been listening to for the last thirty years? And, for it to have such an overwhelming impact as to eclipse my teenage and young adult years as easily my most enjoyable time for listening to rock and roll?

Really, Sunil? Did you like fall down some rabbit hole into another dimension that deliriously mines all the classic sounds of rock, metal, and alternative to create sounds that vibrate at a soothing frequency between the familiar and the foreign? A world so massive but yet still so mysterious to the majority of the world.

Short answer: yes. Longer answer is this book.

It’s an exhausting answer that took me on an equally exhausting writing journey. It wasn’t exhausting like being on a gym treadmill. It was exhausting like having the best sex of your life. If that sentence seems like a bit of a stretch, then guess what–this book is for you. If it’s not, then this book is most definitely for you. Without exaggeration get ready for the sonic romps of your life!

You see, being drenched in the figurative sweat of rock’s heaviest moments of just the last few years has left me breathless, making my bliss in this life less sporadic. In that silly, simple grammatical clause is my most nourishing goal in this life. Find as many moments of deep, orgasmic connectedness before you die. Without a hint of coincidence, the heaviest music has consistently delivered the most satisfying oxytocin hits for me. That’s what this book is about–the unapologetic, unvarnished, and untamed sex of rock’s heaviest moments.

All your senses are going to be challenged by the end.

Your heart, soul, and mind will have been fucked with in the most spiritually satisfying ways. If you have an issue with the f-word–it’s used over 200 times in various forms throughout the book–then you’re fucked.

And now that the writing adventure is over, I am not surprised by the conclusion of my soul-searching/soul-crushing audit of rock music. That in the “Fall” years of my life, I found an eternal Spring through the constant and consistent absorption of all things new. New and heavy, to be perfectly correct.

The music fed the writing, the writing fed trying to find more music. A perpetual machine of curiosity was born in this most natural union of two of my biggest passions in life. So much so, that many of the new bands mentioned in this book were discovered while writing this book. I found obscure gold in 1970’s Cleveland and a veritable treasure chest of equally hidden gems in present day Greece–a scene that has been evolving for over fifty years. I found that information out in 2024.

My obsession with music did not come overnight. It would take my sixth decade of existence for this manic loop of curiosity and creativity to emerge. In the end, I think I extracted a bolder narrative of rock and roll’s connective tissue–its heaviest moments, and the soul-satisfying consequences of being submerged in them.

. There is also a strong correlation between this “most satisfying” and “heaviest moments” — and how it took me most of my life for those ideas to collide. Simply put, I am listening to bolder and more challenging music now more than I ever did in all my younger years. My body might be getting stiffer, but my musical mind is as elastic as it has ever been.

Yes. I lived through the golden age of FM radio in the 70’s. I listened to Metallica via cassettes in the 80’s. Almost every band of Generation X’s Lollapalooza years I saw not once, but twice–often in dingy bars. But, as the 21st century opened, with many confidently proclaiming rock’s best years were over, I fell down a rabbit hole of unfettered heaviness. More than two decades after tumbling around in this endless world of immensely gratifying sounds, I am ready to tell the story of my sonic seduction.

This wasn’t a marginal experience. This isn’t a marginal story. My very ordinary life has been coloured in with extraordinary musical discoveries and experiences. I lived my teenage years listening to old music. I am living my soon to be senior years listening to new music. That’s the simple story of this book. Like all good stories, however, it is more complicated than that.

So, to correctly communicate the enrapturing detail of these seemingly zillion moments of musical epiphanies, and my relationship with the present state of rock music–much of which will be foreign to some of you–I had to honor the past with fresh deference. Rock music has been a spiraling and sprawling continuum of our wildest and most raw emotions for over half a century. Sonic Seducer is a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual mosh pit for that idea. If this sounds like great sex, that’s because the greatest rock and roll–and its charged intensity of unbridled and uncompromising expression–is communion of the highest pleasurable order. Rock and roll is not an accompaniment to sex. It is sex on its own. Equally wild, and only limited by its own creativity and curiosity.

The book is a deep, lustful plunge into an updated story of rock and roll. It also comes as advertised–heavy. But not any cliche, societal, and industry definition of heavy relating to volume or taxing mood. Fuck that. Heavy is beautiful. Heavy is celebratory. Heavy is love. Heavy is being vigorously alive. Heavy is being wildly curious. Heavy is anything that gets us closer to being freer with our emotions. Heavy is connecting with one another with all of this.

When the book gets musically heavy, it’s unbridled and unapologetic. When the book gets musically light, a different but equally valuable heavy is experienced. It remains also unbridled and unapologetic. Heavy is the abundance of all rock’s expressions and emotions. It’s the entire spectrum of sound, oscillating with frequencies that will soon become wonderfully unpredictable here.

Questions like is my head going to implode with crushing doom or is my heart going to explode with transcending love will dance merrily–not combatively–throughout this book. This will be our more inclusive and intense definition of “heavy”. There will be zero deviation from it as this rock and roll story slowly unfurls its many feathers of many sizes of many colors.

It’s a story that will hopefully leave you breathless, astonished, and grateful about how rock and roll can be a trusted advisor, confidant, and soulmate in our lives–in both the loudest moments and the quietest moments. This only becomes more possible if the story of rock and roll is wider, deeper, and fuller, flirting purposely and amorously with all its boundaries–past and present. It’s a pure passion story that will get examined through a dauntingly large collection of shared, lingering musical moments–through the seconds of our lives. Away we fuckin’ go–because we were fuckin’ born to…

Those who control their passions do so because their passions

are weak enough to be controlled

William Blake