Some more music listens
Hey, it’s a new year! I’m going to try to keep these posts going for a while, I think. As always, these are just highlights; if you want to see my full listening history you can check out my last.fm profile.
What I’m listening to
I feel like doing these approximately once a week is a pretty nice cadence. So I think I’ll start scheduling these to go up every, say, Saturday. Yes, that sounds good.
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.
Music (re)discoveries
It’s been a week since the last one of these, and I figure I should post some more albums that I’ve listened to recently.
- 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
Concert time polling
Hey y'all, I’m trying to figure out when I should schedule my next VRChat concert for. If you’d be so kind, please head over to this poll and click on the times which work well for you. (Remember to set your timezone as well!)
Thanks!
Independent music on the independent web
As an independent musician who is also a (former-ish) software engineer who is keenly all-too-aware of technology and the development of the web, I would personally love to see a much better ecosystem of independent music distribution and discovery that isn’t reliant on any one company or platform, or even a handful of them.
When discussing some of the alternate paths that people can take, it’s important to know what’s out there and what their strengths and weaknesses are.
Music (re)discoveries
So hey, I’ve been working on improving the tag browser in the releases section, and have it to a point where the browser itself is, I think, really good? All that’s left to do is to tag all of the songs. I have, uh, a lot of tagging left to do. I built some tools to make it a bit easier, at least, but it’s still going to take me quite some time.
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.
On success
Earlier today I was in a conversation with Jeremy about what it means to be successful.
The gist of the conversation is that pretty much everyone, especially those working in music, always have such a relative, subjective idea of what it means to be “successful,” and the overarching constant seems to be that even people who are making a sustainable living at music, and who have a respectful following, and so on, still don’t see themselves as successful.
I think at this point it’s pretty clear that I am not successful as a musician; my releases do not pay for themselves, much less generating any considerable amount of income, it’s been a struggle to get even 150 subscribers on my YouTube channel, and even getting anyone to listen to my music to begin with is a struggle.
So, here are some ideas of what I think it would mean to be successful as a musician. This isn’t all-inclusive, nor does every criterion have to be met.
Bandcamp Friday picks for December 6, 2024
Hello my lovelies! December 6 is the last Bandcamp Friday of the year. On this day, Bandcamp waives their share of the sale price, leaving musicians with a bit more money from their hard work.
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!
Behind the Lyrics: Behind a Mask
Back in 2021 I wrote a song, Behind a Mask, for Song Fight!. I’d like to go into some detail about how the song came to be and what it means.
A whole new site
Hey there! I have a shiny new website, as you can probably see right here.
It’s still a bit of a work in progress. There’s a lot of meta-information I still need to add, and the music section will eventually get a nice tag browser to make it easier to filter through my, uh, 25 years of releases to find what you’re looking for, but adding in the data that’s necessary for that to happen will take some time.