If your house was burning down and you only had time to grab five records, which ones would you choose? That's a pretty tough question, but it needs to be asked for this new department to work. Welcome to HIGH ROTATION. For our first installment, we asked the man from the Floda can, Michael Versteeg, to dig through the crates and pull out five albums he just can't live without. ‘While mulling this over,’ said Mike, ‘I found that I could not make this into my “5 Most Influential Albums of All Time” list, and I'm not sure there is a difference, really... Anyway, these were the first five I thought of, which is probably the best way to approach it—just let the five records bubble up from my subconscious.'
Photography: Pierre David
Isis - Oceanic
(2002)
Still my favorite Aaron Turner album. This record singlehandedly took me further away from more melodic, atmospheric curiosities (Mogwai, Godspeed, etc.) and allowed me to fully embrace the heavy. I experienced this at the time as an almost philosophical metal album, and I've been ripping off the riffs in my own writings ever since.
Refused - The Shape of Punk to Come
(1998)
I was 13 years old when somebody gave me this record—my first 'hardcore' album—, and it blew my fucking mind. Refused harness the creativity and artistic side of music and blends it into a genre that can often become boring and predictable. The radical music and the anti-capitalistic rhetoric hit at just the right time in my life to make a permanent impact.
Mars Volta - De-Loused in the Comatorium
(2003)
Still my favorite Mars Volta album. Their first full-length, post At the Drive-In release, and it actually changed what I thought music could be. As a 19- or 20-year-old, I immersed myself pretty heavily in this album, and there are only a few records that take me back like this one.
