Here’s some musical-listening highlights since the last one:

• two months of moments by glaciaere: some really nice heartfelt FM synthy stuff that spans a bunch of different genres
• Six Foot Moon by Distractor: 80s nu-wave for the modern era
• Full Of It by Summer Cannibals: Some great female-led power punk rock, I’m totally here for it
• Black Box of Jazz: This is an amazing compilation of some of the best music that jazz has had to offer. I happened upon this collection when I was visiting Hong Kong back in 2000, and it’s an essential for anyone who has any interest in the genre.
• The Great Concert of Charles Mingus: Speaking of jazz, this one is also particularly amazing, although it probably helps to be familiar with a bunch of jazz already to fully appreciate some of the musical humor in it. Mingus is one of the jazz greats.
• Pivot by Amoeba (one of the many projects of Robert Rich): I’m not sure how to describe this as anything other than “experimental rock.” There’s some great grooves in this accompanying some great noises. I’m not sure how I ended up with this in my collection (way back in 2019 if my file timestamps are to be believed) but I’m glad I did.
• Duo de Bois: Six Sonatas for Flute and Violin: It’s a shame Magnatune has ceased operations because they had some really excellent classical music on offer. This is an excellent recording of a great classical work. I can only seem to find it for sale on Apple Music these days but it’s licensed CC by-nc-sa so it should be possible to obtain freely. If only there were a way.
• Drum Machine Dreams by Stevia Sphere: Nice lush ambient music to fill your ears to
• Expert in a Dying Field by The Beths: This album was the big hotness when it first came out a couple years ago, and it’s well-deserved.
• FREQUENCY gift by glitched puppet: Really awesome lo-fi abstract ambient chillwave groove things.

My scrobbles don’t reflect all of this, unfortunately, as I have upgraded my office computer and the last.fm scrobbler wasn’t properly autostarting. I’ve (hopefully) fixed it going forward, at least.

• little fires by miscellaneous owl: Lots of great earnest indie music in various genres
• Heartbreak on Vinyl by Blake Lewis: The sophmore album of my favorite American Idol finalist, with some pretty nice lush electropop/dance vibes on this one
• Fly! by The Flashbulb
• Rock!!!!! by The Violent Femmes
• Verve//Unmixed vol. 3: Some really great jazz classics on this one (and on the whole Verve//Remixed and Verve//Unmixed series, for that matter)
• Song Fight!: Her: This is one of those fights from the era when a lot of folks were bringing their A-game, and there’s some great songs in this one

Anyway, while tagging music, I’ve been spending some quality time just listening to other peoples' music. Here’s a few things that I’ve enjoyed recently.

• Programmable Love Songs, Volume One by FlexE (Benn Jordan): I got this in Benn Jordan’s recent-ish complete discography drop, and I rather enjoyed it. I’ve been watching his YouTube channel for a while but only recently have started to actually listen to his music. Some of it’s pretty good! Maybe even most of it.
• Trippin' Out, by Chris McDermott & His Wild Combo: This is a CD I bought back in CDBaby’s old “online record store” salad days, before the entire music industry switched purely to digital distribution. It doesn’t seem to be on any of the indie purchase services these days and as far as I can tell the band is no longer active, but this album is some pretty fun, frenetic blues jamming. My favorite song on the album is “Polkadot.”
• Song Fight!: Tyson’s Corner: This is a fight from 2015 (gosh, has it been 9.5 years already?!) and I don’t think I ever got around to listening to it before. There’s some great songs in this one, and this was from a time period when Song Fight! generally had a decent level of overall quality in most fights.
• Let It Be, by The Beatles: I used to be a huge Beatles fan and their music still holds up for the most part. Some of the songs on this particular album are a bit self-indulgent but oh well, it’s called “classic” rock for a reason.
• Determinance: Original Soundtrack by nervous_testpilot: some pretty great 90s acid techno-style stuff that sounds like it’d be totally at home on any given Playstation 1 racing game. I have no idea how it fits with the actual game it’s from. Maybe I should play it someday.

I of course have my latest album, Transitions, and quite a few other albums available, including with a deep discount if you opt to buy my entire discography all at once.

There are also a lot of other artists that I think you should consider supporting!

Here are the things I’m planning on buying this month:

• The Recollection by 46bliss

  46bliss is one of those bands that I learned about in the early days of CDBaby, and I loved their original album, “Pistachio Home.” They’re a band I lost track of after that release, and I’m surprised to learn they’re still around! Several of the songs on The Recollection are remixes or remasters of songs from Pistachio Home but there’s also a lot of new-to-me songs on it as well.

  They have a bunch of other albums that have come out in the interim but they don’t appear to be available anywhere at the moment.

• err:Rawr’s latest releases

  He has released a bunch of stuff since the last time I updated my collection of his work. He’s a good bean and a fellow member of the Red Means Recording Patreon Discord.

• Astronomy Nights by Whispering Cosmos

  I don’t know a lot about this artist and I’m not sure how it ended up on my list, but that’s fine. I could always use more chill ambient music in my life.

• reflections by lowercase t

  This artist is a friend of mine who is always the first to support others, and they are, again, a good bean. Their music is also great, with these fun lush soundscapes that are also full of delicious dissonance and weird processed vocals that give it an uncanny feeling of being music from another universe.

• Novembeat 2024 by BackspinZX

  Another good bean, who I also know from the Red Means Recording community. I always especially love supporting people who produce music for Novembeat, especially when it’s as high-quality as this.

• Novembeat 2024 by Harder Wins

  This is aggressively minimal beat-based music, and it’s also Novembeat, one of only two submissions this year.

• moult’s discography

  Hey look, it’s another furry musician who refuses to stick to a single genre. I especially like Cupples.

I also have plenty of other recommendations from months past (I will eventually backfill them onto this site), and for even more independent music, you could just look at my Bandcamp collection. Which is, uh, quite large.