"Deceptively simple, enormously catchy modern electro, eschewing
fashionable digital trickery for good old analog skills" XLR8R
I was raised by disco dancing parents (Moroder) and on a steady diet of mainstream rock (Rush). I was attracted to any song with a synthesizer in it - from The Who, to Supertramp to Hot Butter. I was fixated on how those sounds might be made. On a school trip to the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, I saw a demo of a Moog modular and made the connection between "those sounds" and the machines that made them. Synth nerdom followed.
As a teen, I graduated to pretty obvious "new wave" (Depeche Mode, OMD, New Order) followed in a serious way by "industrial/EBM" (Skinny Puppy, Front 242). I grew up listening to a Toronto radio station called CFNY, a legit "alternative" station that exposed me to a lot of great music. I also obsessively listened to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's "Brave New Waves" radio program, which turned me on to good experimental electronic music. Sounds made on synthesizers were the common thread.
Once I started thinking for myself, I was obsessed with early 90"s IDM (Autechre, AFX) and "lots-of-synths-in-one room" techno (Orbital, FSOL, Plastikman). Detroit was just down the road from Toronto, so I heard a lot of Detroit techno (and early electro) in my formative years, and while not a direct influence, exposure to music made on machines was instructive. In the late 90's/early 2000's I became captivated with German (Anthony Rother) and Dutch (I-F) electro which sometimes shows in the music I produce.
I started making music in the early 1990s (it was terrible) and began releasing music as Lowfish in 1996 (less awful). My music is influenced by the sounds I was raised on, a fixation with perfectly timed drums & synthesizer melodies made on old analog machines.
The Lowfish discography on discogs is pretty complete.