we have a potato crisp brand called taffel in finland.
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flying potato chip saucers are still psychedelic enough!
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Pilgrims of the Mind.
Settled on that in ~'93, nicked from a bibliography from a book a friend had on his shelf (can’t remember the title).
Context is maybe helpful: early 90s and trippy “ethno techno” was a thing on the West Coast, and lots of weed being smoked and things, so some cheese was in the air… Anyway, sounded better than whatever I’d tried to come up with previously.
I liked that it implied there was more than one person involved, though it was just me.
Never bothered changing it as the music changed over time from ambienty tech, dubby stuff, to house and back and so on.
Plus my output’s always been pretty low, so I wasn’t inclined to use different names for different styles either - that’s no way to get any kind of traction for the unprolific - haha.
Thought my '97 album title “What’s Your Shrine?” was pretty hilarious (still do!).
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my first hendrix like blues rock band was U.F.B. In memory of all our concerts in small bars and the nervousness of our sliderman. Unidentified Flying Bottle
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Used to be Waxfactor but it was a shit pun and I got tired of a) people asking if I knew there was a record shop in Brighton called that (I did! Who knew?) and, b) people thinking I was Wax Doctor (my first 12" arrived in box that even had Wax Doctor written on the side in biro).
Couldn’t change it to my actual name because my cousin is using that (in fairness it was his name first) and he’s infinitely more successful than I am, so I went with Sasqwax because people always called me “wax” from the waxfactor days and I’m big & hairy (or at least I had a big beard at the time) so I figured: who doesn’t love Sasquatch?
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Grååskala is my (current) moniker which means greyscale in swedish.
And while i feel the name is a bit lame, the main idea i had when i took that moniker was based on my take on life and music. Nothing is certain and nothing is definitive, everything exists in a spectrum and so is my musical creativity, sometimes i want to make glitchy IDM, sometimes i want make ambient, sometimes i want to sing, sometimes i dont etc.
i.e labels (genre labels, not record labels) is for schmucks and while they do offer some level of order, we should not live or die by them. we are simply beings living with emotions and traits which exist on a spectrum.
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it’s Robot Riddims.
Which I made up for one EPs worth of stuff which was deliberately lofi/chiptune versions of legendary reggae riddims in a Jahtari kind of style. But then I got carried away, and before I knew it I felt like I was too far into it not to be called that.
I guess it’s OK, although there are like some possible cultural appropriation issues if I had any success (on two counts as I’m not even a robot).
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The Future Thought Tapestries:
After hearing some of my music a friend wrote a short sci fi story.
I asked him if i could use it for my Artist name & he agreed. I really felt in that line/phrase that he’d captured something about the nature of my music & ideas that i’d not been able to articulate or express.
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My artist name is Arsey Rob. I got this nickname from a mate about 25 years ago and it stuck, then when I did my first solo gig a very long time ago I chose this. In hindsight I wish I’d picked something better
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I removed some characters from my birth name ˆEmin Yukselˆ and used ˆMin Yu^ as my artist name.
And I still do actually when I make image based works and exhibitions.
When I switched from image to sound, I changed the name also and started to use ˆpanğyuˆ
You do not pronounce soft g (ğ) in turkish so its actually ˆpan_yuˆ
Pan is just because I feel like it refers to my switch from image to sound and also I like Pan Sonic and it just feels good to say the that word 
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in Australia, it’s known as the Prime Ministers Office
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Although I am not famous or artist enough to have an artist name, when I uploaded something into soundcoud I had to have a name. As I just wanted to do it as a part of my learning process in music production and getting rid of the fear of releasing something I named it “vamos creciendo” which translate into “we keep growing” in Spanish.
The hardcore-crust-metal band where I play the bass is called monotrop. It’s not my name, but I really like its meaning: beschränkte Anpassungsfähigkeit, something like “limited ability of adaptation”
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fun topic… i don’t remember how or why i came up with “rockpapergoat,” but it was during a time of naming things randomly and uniquely, like zip disks and external hard drives. give me a thing, and i’ll spit out a name you may not have heard before. it’s also a conversation starter (or ender). when picturing the phrase in my mind, there’s an element of surprise as nobody expected the third item to be a goat.
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I have a dog, I named her Kiko but I don’t have an artist yet. I’ll probably go down to the SPCA to adopt one.
You too should adopt an artist, don’t let those cute artists suffer alone in a cage.
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Back in the day my band was called Beautiful Happiness. Mainly because we weren’t either.
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I think the earliest name i have stuff out as is Makinoize (making noise… obv) which later turned into the shorter Moize so when recording with my partner Lucia that became Mimosa Moize.
I did start using the name Pokk! back in 2000 for this dubby time shifting project, somewhat inspired by Recon and early Biosphere at the time. Pokk! Is taken from a Daredevil comic Visionaries by Kevin Smith, the sound of his Baton going through a window if I remember correctly. I’ve probably used this one most.
Typeface is inspired from my interest in typography at the time.
Oh i did use Mainline for a techno release recently, which originally was sent to Adam X back in the mid-late 90’s, but he told my mate he was working with him at the time that “your boy has no rhythm” which was funny as I basically took his Mischief EP and made my own take on that sound 
Originally though my mate said i needed a name and i said just use my own name, which he basically changed to Martin the Martian, and told me afterwards. I think we were all into Aliens and the Schwa stickers and t-shirts at the time, if anyone remembers those? I didn’t like that name so was lucky
The first tape i made as a 10 year old kid was under Peace and Noise, each track as a Part 1, 2, 3 etc inspired by Jean-Michel Jarre. I think i had Metroplex (taken from the dictionary) and Neon-K (apparently those kicks glow) as an early teen at school. I remember designing a pyramid logo for Metroplex, again UFO inspired. Neon-K was for rhythmic stuff.
I think all the names helped me understand projects, but in recent years the artist names have gone in favour of collective creativity and the focus is just making music, which feels the best so far.
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Hahahaha
ac·ci·dent — ˈaksədənt
- An event that happens by chance or that is without apparent or deliberate cause.
I like to find rhythm in environmental recordings. “Accidental” rhythm.
I also think of it as the great personifier. Something can only be an accident if it wasn’t the will of another being.
Basically everything is an accident and we are a little too wrapped up in our own incredible humanity.
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I have a long list of band names. Most of them have been used by other musicians in the past. For my electronic music project, I wanted a dystopian name. Being a fan of sci-fi and Russian literature, I decided on “Redrick”. This is the name of the protagonist in the novel “Roadside Picnic” by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. The book became famous because of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film called “Stalker”. Both works inspired me a lot and I can identify with Redrick very well.
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That book is amazing! Much better than the film/games that followed it. Really a mindfuck.
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