John Siden grew up surrounded by music from a young age. John’s father played guitar and performed in bars prior to John being born, and his mother also loved music. There was always music playing around the house or while driving in the car, mostly Country and Western on all forms, including vinyl, 8-track, and cassette.
John’s first personal interest in music was piqued when he saw an ad for the Monkees TV show, featuring reruns, which as an eight-year-old, he had no idea these episodes were from the ’60s.
This was John’s first musical obsession. Soon after, he was introduced to KISS and became a big fan. After the murder of John Lennon, the Beatles obsession began as John had not really heard much of their music up until then. It led to an education on the Beatles and the 60’s music as a whole. This occupied a lot of John’s teenage years. Following that, John got interested in all music especially Metal in the 80’s an Alternative/College type stuff later.
Collecting records soon became his main hobby. In the ’90s when CDs took over, John still held onto his record collection, but just added a lot of CDs to the music collection, occasionally taking a special trip to record stores like Zulu records in Vancouver, which were hard to find at the time, and getting something special.
John picked up the vinyl collecting bug again around 2013 when vinyl was making a comeback and a lot of bands were offering bundle deals on pre-orders where you would be able to get vinyl, CD, and a download code. Gradually more stores started opening up, and the addiction returned; vinyl collecting became a full-time hobby again for John.
John’s interest in writing has been around for as long as Internet access has been a thing; he had a blog on Tumblr called My Diminishing Returns -John Writes about music, where he expressed his thoughts on music.
Since 2019, John has had a YouTube channel called Surface Noise where he discusses music mostly focused on vinyl. John works in the security industry and also is an avid reader and lover of film. He also plays guitar and sometimes accordion.