Keeping Up With Music

(The following has been adapted from a Patricia Taxxon RYM review I wrote yesterday, she'll be getting her own thread soon)

There's too much good music coming out. Absolutely nobody is keeping on top of it, or coming close to. You can skim every album that places in the RYM top 40 each week, you can do the same for the esoteric chart, you can sort by genre, you can post to forums, you can listen to everything in your Upcoming, you can check out related artists, investigate what friends are reviewing, dive down rabbit-holes, diligently pore through Bandcamp digests, be a truly open-minded maven of all the musics, and you still won't hear everything that you'll like. The music-nerd exhaustiveness model has broken at some point over the last few years; instead of being able to confidently say you like a bit of everything, you can simply chase the asymptote in vain.

2020 has been a brilliant year so far for music I like. I mean, there's no such thing as a bad year, really, but this year so far has seen an outlandish profusion of albums I've heard and immediately loved. A combination of technological ease, smashed genre policing and what feels like an increasing will to create is manifesting in paradisiacal gardens of sound quite literally beyond measure. Permit me to indulge myself and list every album from the first half of 2020 I've given at least 7/10 to:

Adrasteia - Demo II
Victory Over the Sun - A Tessitura of Transfiguration
The Electric Soft Parade - Stages
Poppy - I Disagree
Algiers - There Is No Year
...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead - X: The Godless Void and Other Stories
下山 [Gezan] - 狂 (Klue)
Fortress of the Olden Days - Verlassenheit
Katie Gately - Loom
Lazuli - Le fantastique envol de Dieter Böhm
Psalm Zero - Sparta
ゆるめるモ! [You'll Melt More!] - サプライザー
Machine Girl - U-Void Synthesizer
Slift - Ummon
Lake Ruth - Crying Everyone Else's Tears
Lychgate - Also Sprach Futura
Slum of Legs - Slum of Legs
Stabscotch - Twilight Dawn
Empty Country - Empty Country
Triángulo de Amor Bizarro - Triángulo de Amor Bizarro
Zebra Katz - Less Is Moor
Mamaleek - Come and See
The Chats - High Risk Behaviour
Patricia Taxxon - Rainbow Road
Army of Moths - My Kingdom for a Horse
Azusa - Loop of Yesterdays
The Mountain Goats - Songs for Pierre Chuvin
Black Dresses - Peaceful as Hell
Oranssi Pazuzu - Mestarin kynsi
Salqiu - Orfeu
Elder - Omens
Quelle Chris & Chris Keys - Innocent Country 2
Ulcerate - Stare Into Death and Be Still
Couch Slut - Take a Chance on Rock 'n' Roll
Ka - Descendants of Cain
Biesy - Transsatanizm
Charli XCX - How I'm Feeling Now
Perfume Genius - Set My Heart on Fire Immediately
Girls Rituals - Crap Shit
The 1975 - Notes on a Conditional Form
Owen Pallett - Island
Kavus Torabi - Hip to the Jag
RAY - Pink
Backxwash - God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It
Ada Rook - 2,020 Knives
Run the Jewels - RTJ4
Poppet - The Numinous Voyage
Kate NV - Room for the Moon
Hail Spirit Noir - Eden in Reverse
Hum - Inlet

And you know the thing? This list is totally incomplete. There are SO many more things I've not heard (or have only caught bits of) that I'd undoubtedly love as well. A dedicated program of pan-genre pursuit has left me king of a failed empire. You'd be forgiven for thinking I'm growing tired of the futile drive to ascend. And yet, it doesn't, it keeps accelerating, and I have to balance the giddy thrill of discovery with the disquiet of missing out.

My questions to ILM are: how much are you trying to keep up? Do you think you're hearing everything you need to? Do you think ILM is well-equipped to deal with, as a community, all the music that it should? Are you considering why you listen to some things and not others? Do you trust the filters you or we employ? Do you think that the diversification and increased complexity of music is outpacing you, or ILM, with the result that you or ILM are becoming relatively more conservative, despite clearly having diversified in concrete terms? And when did music get so insanely...much? (I think it may be a very recent (within the last five years, but notably last two) thing that most of even the most dedicated nerd set haven't remotely come to terms with yet...)

i am not keeping up very well at all but just put together a mid-year list myself

reading your list i was like "there's a new couch slut?!??!?!"

Brad, we have a duty and a curse to wade through as much of music as we can, it really is never-ending. Are we doing enough? I hope so

I mostly gave up on 'keeping up' with anything and, when it's not for work, I just listen to whatever seems it would be interesting when I can but largely prioritize spending time with the albums I have spent money on (previously or recently). It does mean that I focus on a few 'genres' that I never come close to getting an authoritative handle on (contemporary classical, modern jazz, classical guitar, American Primitive guitar, avant-ish metal and hard rock) while 15 years I would also try to keep up with major releases in popular genres. I don't keep up much with electronic music or Indian classical music, which are two things I used to follow much more. Playing music > seeing live music > listening to recordings, for the most part. COVID did throw a wrench into the second of those.

I can't keep up. No one can. Every year I tell myself I'll drop the charade, that it's not worth the hassle, that I need to make peace with FOMO, that diminishing returns are bound to prevail, yet I just can't help myself: not hearing at least 3-4 recent releases a day feels ineffably wrong, even as the sounds tend to blur into each other after a while, regardless of their fundamental differences – this morning, for instance, I put on Material Girl's Tangram, Majid Bekkas's Magic Spirit Quartet and Sombre Héritage's Alpha ursae minoris – so I find myself unable to pick out even the 20 'best' LPs of a given year, because how the fuck are you supposed to assess a newly available embarrassment of riches every week? The result is that I have less time for the classics (whether buried or visible) of time past, which was not the case when I embarked on my obsessive quest in the early noughties. Am I even listening to anything anymore? Hearing has almost completely annexed my experience of music.

Well that's a thing too - with every passing year there's more from the archives to catch up with as well! Labour upon labour!

I'm certainly favouring new music over old, with the occasional single-artist retrospective every few weeks

Reminds me of that line from High Fidelity:

"Want to come to the pub for lunch, Dick?" Barry or I ask him a couple of times a week. He looks mournfully at his little stack of cassettes and sighs. "I'd love to, but I've got all these to get through."

I will say, though, that while I have become more of an omnivore over the years, there are still plenty of genres and subgenres I have little to no time for, which is a relief. I don't systematically play album X just because everyone (whatever that means) is talking about it. Going by RYM's current top 40, I have no interest whatsoever in Charli XCX, Mac Miller, Against All Logic, The Strokes, Perfume Genius, The Weeknd, Jeff Rosenstock, The Final Fantasy VII remarks soundtrack, Rina Sawayama, tricot, Dan Deacon, Shabaka and the Ancestors, Dua Lipa and Laura Marling. That's a lot of 'critically acclaimed' music that I'm confident I can miss out on.

Trying to keep up means never giving any album the amount of listens it deserves, and ending up w/ a very shallow relationship to music, imo. Not that I haven't been guilty of this myself - it's receding as I get older - and of course info overload has a charm of its own, but still, in the end, giving a few chosen artists deep listening time is more rewarding.

And then there's all the other art forms too. :(

I don't even try to keep with everything new in my work area, why would I do so for a leisure activity? it sounds stressful.

Oh, I had no idea there was a new Ka album.

I don't really worry about 'keeping up' in a completist sense anymore, even though I'm still as interested in new music as ever. I just make an effort to listen to the new releases in the little sphere of electronic music I'm into (mostly via Twitter and Bandcamp, keeping up with the artists and labels I'm following). And then jazz, which is mostly through ILX I guess?

From an artist standpoint, it is disheartening when I talk to friends who aren't very online, and have no idea about new releases even by artists that they are big fans of.

Yes, this is also a problem for books, films, TV series, video games, and just about everything, really, but it seems to me that music has a special relationship with FOMO insofar as you can 'listen' to it as you go about your daily business, which makes the urge more bearable and unbearable at the same time.

xps

I do listen to some music while I'm working, but not all types of music suit writing well. Really it demands as much attention as work (which for me is creative work, and thus not a drag). But I have no FOMO about anything anymore.

I pretty much ignore acclaimed stuff unless it's already in my view or seems really interesting (the latter is pretty rare). Even if I'm mostly concentrating on underground/weird esoteric stuff my to do list is stupidly huge for 2020, so I've stopped worrying about getting through it quickly and resigned to the fact that I'll struggle through it in my own, even if it means I end up get hyped up on something everyone else did months ago. My tastes have broadened a bit in the last couple of years which makes keeping up even more difficult but at least it means I'm not just weeding through close to a hundred black/death/doom releases per year, which is what my 2014-16 listening activities felt like in hindsight.

That said, this is probably the best year for weirdo extreme metal I've even known, it's exciting times on that front.

Guess I'm lucky that idgaf about films/TV which frees up time

why no interest in Shabaka?

I struggle to get any work done when all is dead silent around me (or rather: music is paradoxically closer to silence in that it drowns out the world's hustle and bustle), which partly explains my addiction, I suppose.

xps

why no interest in Shabaka?

I strongly dislike most vocal jazz, and spoken word is a complete turn off for me. There are exceptions, though, but if I start thinking about that, I'll never conquer my FOMO.

but this dope magic spirit quartet album you just turned me onto is vocal jazz!

Indeed. :) But I love Arabic-style singing and am able to appreciate it in any setting.

I know Dua Lipa because my kids like her. That's the stage of not keeping up I've hit.

Re: Shabaka, I wasn't too keen on The Comet Is Coming either, whose repetitions felt a tad sterile to me. I'd be a fan if improvisation played a more significant role in his idiom.

i like the shabaka but it's not one of my top albums of the year so i'm not imploring you to spend time with it i was just curious bc based on what i know of yr taste it does seem up yr alley (i love the marling album, the sawayama too, but not as surprised by you not being interested in either)

Not everything you listen to and enjoy has to be a long-lasting relationship, you can have a fling with an album too. When I go clubbing I hear stuff once that I might never hear again and while I enjoy the music that fleeting ephemerality doesn't bother me. I carry that into my everyday listening habits - a lot of stuff only gets one or two plays but it doesn't mean I don't enjoy it plenty when it is playing.

i understand what lj is talking about itt but it's not an issue for me - i mean i assume i'll miss stuff but i try to hear as much as i can that is somewhat in my wheelhouse of interest. i do still struggle with albums that are interesting enough that i want to spend more time with but aren't immediate "free lunch" albums that i can sort into a best albums playlist (or shuffle away into an archival genre playlist)- so i do sorta get clogged up on an album that i'll even hear 3-5 times and still not be sure what i think of it.

i've been struggling with this question for a while. i've developed a listening process that prioritizes discovery. it works, i hear a lot of new stuff and old stuff that's new to me, filing away the best stuff in various playlists. and i do get a thrill from discovering something that's new (to me) and incredible. but i've been having second thoughts about the whole thing--plowing through new releases in an effort to hear as much as possible limits the type of emotional connection to music that i had when i was a kid and i'd play the same album 20 times in a row.

idk, i don't feel like i'm listening wrong, but i do worry that the way i'm listening fosters widespread awareness, but not deep understanding.

anyway, back to my listening list (30 hours 51min right now, getting longer every day lol)

If you listen above and beyond a certain point you're not absorbing the records properly anyway, it just becomes ticking something off before moving onto the next thing. It's not homework.

I don't remember too much spoken word/vocal on the Shabaka album, maybe just a couple tracks? Mostly what stuck out was his beautiful sound on the ballads, which is not what I normally associate with him.

Alright, alright, I'll check it out.

I don't really try to keep up anymore. I mainly just read sites like ILM which put me in a position to be exposed to things, and then trust in chance or whim to pull me in this or that direction. It's enough to find a few things which reward closer listening.

If you listen above and beyond a certain point you're not absorbing the records properly anyway, it just becomes ticking something off before moving onto the next thing. It's not homework.

― Matt DC, Wednesday, July 1, 2020 11:41 AM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i feel that. this is a process that's gotten a bit more mechanical for me during the pandemic, since i'm home all the time, and that's when i want to listen to new (to me) music. travel/subway time is gone, and so is group/social listening, and therefore the context for all my listening is either "me sitting at my desk" or "me sitting on my couch."

'They Who Must Die' is sounding pretty good so far, the vox don't grate on me at all.

I listen to a minimum of 20 and more like 30 jazz albums a month to come up with 15 to write about for Stereogum, plus I have at least 1 or 2 reviews in each issue of The Wire and maybe 1 or 2 in a couple of other outlets. And I try to write two reviews a week for Burning Ambulance, though I don't always have time.

What all that mostly-jazz listening has done, though, is made listening to other types of music a chore and an imposition. I used to love metal; now I don't listen to it hardly at all. If I'm out for a walk with headphones on, I'll listen to something old that I know I like - Metallica, Eyehategod, Incantation, Black Sabbath, Slayer... I don't really like much of the new metal I hear these days, anyway.

I try and listen to more chamber music and modern composition than I once did but I tend to go down tunnels, for example listening to everything that comes out on Sono Luminus, which leaves little time for any further exploration. I stumbled on an awesome album of harpsichord music recently, though.

I am consciously rejecting a lot of music out of hand, too, though. Pop, including country, is completely off my radar now. I no longer have any FOMO with regard to stuff that's "in the charts" or trending on Twitter or being discussed by my so-called music critic peers, and won't even click on a link to a review if I already know it's something I won't like or care about - something that will not in any way reward me for listening to it, in other words.

What all that mostly-jazz listening has done, though, is made listening to other types of music a chore and an imposition

Substitute classical for jazz and this was my experience for almost 15 years. I'm at a point where I feel like I've mapped out the tradition reasonably well in my head, so an nth recording of Beethoven's Violin Concerto or the complete works for violin and piano of a neglected late 19th century composer who turns out to be as middling as you'd expect don't really excite me all that much. Contemporary classical is a bottomless wellspring, however, and I generally know where to look for new material that's likely to pique my ears, as well as what to avoid (at least 80% of the North American scene, for instance) based on my personal preferences.

I don't really try to keep up anymore. I mainly just read sites like ILM which put me in a position to be exposed to things, and then trust in chance or whim to pull me in this or that direction. It's enough to find a few things which reward closer listening.

This might be a separate question (and I'm sure it's been discussed here many times), but I'm assuming most of you who listen to hundreds of new releases every year mostly stream or play downloads. Does having/not having a physical collection impact your listening habits? I find my physical collection has gravitational pull for listening more lately — the stay-at-home mandate has actually reduced the amount of streaming I've done, and thus I've listened to more relatively neglected items in my collection (of which there are many). So I've investigated little new music. And I tend to only play two or three albums a day.

I do feel the need to "get out more" a bit and plan to listen to a few things mentioned above. I'm glad there are people still getting excited about new music. It gives me hope.

I couldn't care less whether I'm listening to a physical copy or mp3s, as long as the bitrate is good enough (I aim for 320 kbps). In fact, I tend to prefer the latter because managing a CD/tape/vinyl collection is a chore more than anything.

Does having/not having a physical collection impact your listening habits?

I download a shit-ton of promos and Bandcamp purchases, but if I really like something (or if it's not available any other way), I'll buy it on CD. Yesterday, for example, I pulled out a 4CD box by Derek Bailey, Han Bennink and Evan Parker that I bought a year or two ago and then kinda forgot about, and threw on one of the discs, and followed that with a disc from one of several King Crimson live box sets I own. In fact, I've been buying a lot more physical music in the first half of this year than I did last year, probably as a psychological effect of being "stuck at home" (even though I have technically been "stuck at home" - i.e. no office job, working entirely freelance - since 2017).

I find it especially satisfying when an album gets a ton of plays these days, since I basically don't mess with physical media at all anymore. This only happens when 1) it's something my wife is into too, so it makes it into the weekend coffee/evening cooking rotation (see Sault, Moses Sumney, Dirty Projectors). Or 2) it just hits and I keep going back to it, of course.

Keeping my Google doc of releases I've listened to and liked really helps, otherwise it's so easy to forget these days.

I can't be arsed, I basically listen to whatever Spotify tells me to which is a bottomless well of 1970s/80s singer songwriters. I've gotten into contemporary Irish trad music and classic ECM boring bastard jazz like Don cherry and Horace tapscott (without any delusions that I 'get' it). I've also fallen back in love with some of the 'classic' albums from when I was a teenager (transformer, horses) and I care far more about them now than I did then (they seemed like homework at the time, now I could listen to the guitar riff on 'wagon wheel' forever). My primary exposure to contemporary pop music for years came from working in a school but I really came to hate the sound of modern pop music, it's default vocal performance styles, the production clichés that make everything sound like the free music you can use to jazz up your YouTube tutorial. I know this is what everyone says when they lose interest so I'm not claiming that this is any sort of insight into the music itself, just that its receded in my interest into ambient irritation to be ignored.

I've also realised that I consume music at a very slow pace now, so it will take me a long time to notice say that iris dement has released a new song on YouTube and weeks before I remember to listen to it again and start to enjoy it. Sometimes something will jump out at me and cut through, for example a couple of weeks ago I was reminded of a counter tenor I was blown away by when I saw him at the ENO and looked to see if he had released anything, his album came out a couple of years ago and it's Handel and glass lieder. I've never liked glass aside from his solo piano but I love the performances on this of the glass pieces as much as the Handel and I've been listening to it obsessively. I'd recommend it were the world not overstocked with recommendations.

I don't need to see all the trees in the forest, or walk down all of the paths until there are none new left. I don't need to eat all chips in the barm, much less all the barms in the shop.

I will listen to more music this year than I ever have but maybe only a fifth of it will be new.

I am listening to music chronologically, currently up to 1937, I devote December each year to new music. Don't know if this is a good idea TBH, makes me too reliant on end of year lists, which have various issues.

classic ECM boring bastard jazz would be like idk Jan Gabarek or something. not Don Cherry!!

fp'ed plax for dissing Horace Tapscott. Fucking disgraceful posting!

thread was always destined to turn into ignorantly taking a shit on music I'm not inclined to investigate space!

listen to The Dark Tree while kneeling on hard rice on a stone floor as a penance

Does anybody else feel the sudden and enormous profusion of music even compared to a few years ago?

Most certainly. And to answer your original question: there is no way to keep up. Over the past ten years I'd say I've gradually found it harder to keep up, whilst simultaneously seeing that what I would like to keep up with growing exponentially. There really is only one way to somewhat come to terms with this, to not implode or go insane trying to keep up while you know you can't, and that is to stop worrying and love as much music as you can.

Like one individual can't keep up with everything, communties can't either. But a small community like ILM is doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting, covering pretty much all shades of music; whether not always as deep as sub-communities, it does cover nearly all the bases. I don't believe bigger communities do a better job: RYM, or Reddit, or what have you, may be bigger in numbers but that has its own downsides. Of flattening out niches, for one; of having to learn the specific social norms and vagaries.

Music has really gotten much, due to technical advancements, the internet as a place to network, share and collaborate, the demise of the Big Labels etc. These are all very good things. The only way I can cope is acknowledging I'll miss out on stuff, all the time, as there's not enough time to read about, track down, and yes, listen to everything. I'm here for the ride, and treasuring what I can, it's a beautiful ride.

fp'ed plax for dissing Horace Tapscott. Fucking disgraceful posting!

― calzino, Thursday, 2 July 2020 09:41 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Lol I didn't mean this as a diss of tapscott, it was intended more as a mea culpa for wasting these records on my fairly half assed low level engagement.

I appreciate the sentiment of yr post however

I know I can't keep up so I mostly listen to older releases I haven't heard yet by artists I already like or well-known artists/well-regarded albums that I've wanted to check out. I know that a lot of music I would love slips through my grasp with this approach - I basically never listen to new releases unless they are by artists I already love. but I reliably find a lot of great music this way. the past two years I've had more time than usual to listen to music so I have heard a few of the more hyped releases as they come out (like Dua Lipa - very good!)

I would expect at least some drop off in quantity of some kinds of music (i.e. those involving muktiple people rehearsing or recording in small rooms) in the second half of this year.

oh god, they're so gifted!

The future is infinite singer songwriters playing "lockdown" albums live on Zoom to nobody. And chiptunes. Always chiptunes. Until the EMP event anyway.

I feel weirdly guilty having given up almost entirely on new music. I feel like I have to justify it to myself!

According to Discogs, there have been 144,527 ambient albums alone released in the 2010s, with 7437 releases so far in 2020. God knows how many for more popular genres.

1,112,782 rock albums in 2010s.

Ilm is probably the best curator we could hope for. A body with a hundred heads

I've always felt the presence of all the stuff I didn't know and found it energising. as my tastes have broadened, so have the boundaries of my ignorance. it's great!

I also think it's fine to treat 2020 as a hiatus of sorts, because most of the music that's coming out doesn't exist in any societal context out there bar those imposed by lockdowns, which is kind of interesting in its own right but there's a wider question of what new music means when it can't be properly performed, or experienced in the usual ways, when people can't throw parties, when they can't go out and dance.

sorry for Geir but partying and dancing are tbah a very specific and not at all predominant mode of music consumption imo

having Despacito on in the background is hardly listening to music anyway

My takeaway from this thread: there's a new Hail Spirit Noir, and it's probably rad

partying and dancing are tbah a very specific and not at all predominant mode of music consumption imo

^^^

For me, a show is more appealing when it's not tied to an album, when it's "If you don't come down, you'll have missed out." For example, I saw a band at the beginning of this year deliver an awesome show at the Jazz Gallery - three tenor saxophonists (one of whom doubled on soprano, and another on baritone), bass, and drums - and I know they're never going to make an album; they just came together to play that music, two sets a night for two nights, done and gone. If you weren't there, you missed it, period. That's the appeal of in-person music for me now.

partying and dancing are tbah a very specific and not at all predominant mode of music consumption imo

This is absolute nonsense fwiw, if you were to write any kind of serious history of popular music, including jazz, then dancing and social functions would be absolutely central to it. There's the personal, private side as well obviously, but most forms of music are rooted in people being able to congregate together in social situations.

The meaning of what is and isn't social has changed in the last decade or so but the sudden removal of in-person social contact is as profound a contextual change as anything that has happened in the history of pop, even if the sonic results by and large haven't reached our ears yet.

xp I took a class on history of American popular music during my undergrad, and one of our assigned texts was Elijah Wald's excellent How the Beatles Destroyed Rock & Roll, which some people on this board are doubtless familiar with. It does a very good job of highlighting how histories of popular music (jazz, rock) have been distorted by the biases of collectors and critics, who overvalue records and a small subset of 'innovative' artists, and give short shrift to the 'business-as-usual' of the working bands playing crowd-pleasing music in ballrooms, on radio and TV broadcasts, etc.

Over the last couple of years I've definitely developed a decision paralysis due to the insane amount of new music available, and have simultaneously lost a lot of trust in the recommendations of most online publications that are supposed to spotlight the best of it. As a result I haven't kept up with new music very much since maybe 2017 or 2018. I'm mainly spending my time discovering 'new to me' old music, and learning a lot more about the history of pop music in the process. I don't particularly feel like I'm missing out, and I trust that the best stuff will find me eventually.

The time I most enjoy listening to new music is when the end of year polls happen here. There's no place I trust more for directing me towards new music, but I find that ILM throughout the year is a bit of a jumble. There's too many threads to keep up with, and I feel like I need more than just one person to say something is good before I'll invest the time in checking it out.

I made an effort to be up-to-the-minute and right on the cutting edge of music through like maybe 2005 and then slowly relinquished that tendency to the point where I'm lucky at any given point if I've heard more than three albums that were released in the last five years. I've gone deep into the crates wrt the music of the past, tho.

histories of popular music (jazz, rock) have been distorted by the biases of collectors and critics, who overvalue records and a small subset of 'innovative' artists, and give short shrift to the 'business-as-usual' of the working bands playing crowd-pleasing music in ballrooms, on radio and TV broadcasts, etc.

The Wald book is very good; a decent companion piece (for me, and potentially others) is Bob Porter's Soul Jazz, which studies jazz acts that were popular in Harlem and Newark during the 1940s-1970s, as opposed to the (largely white) critic-approved artists who played the Greenwich Village clubs.

The meaning of what is and isn't social has changed in the last decade or so but the sudden removal of in-person social contact is as profound a contextual change as anything that has happened in the history of pop, even if the sonic results by and large haven't reached our ears yet.

Music doesn't magically appear though, it still has to be made. What is heard in a social context might have been made a year ago or more!

And most likely made in isolation just as before. Has creation-time context changed?

Yeah that's true, question is what things sound like in six months to a year. But for now anything involving multiple instrumentalists in a studio is probably out, one person on a computer is a different thing entirely.

popular music in general has been moving away from communal production and towards ppl individually beavering away at computers for a long time, lockdown inevitably fucks up all sorts of logistics but I think it's less disruptive to musicians in 2020 than it would have been at any other year in memory

^^^

i wasn't talking about the loss of live performance, which is a totally different thing (and thread)

Isolation is a social context

I find it particularly difficult as over the years my sensitivity to music has grown an awful lot. I don't find it easy to just have music on in the background, listening takes a lot out of me and I don't have much energy. Having something like a radio show to do focuses me, so that's been really good for me. Very much missing the live scene, though, not so much for the 'going out and seeing people' element, as I have embraced hermit-dom, but for the access to new DIY stuff.

I basically never listen to new releases unless they are by artists I already love.
― Vinnie

This is pretty much the opposite to me, I'm often much more interested in hearing someone new than another record by an artist I've already heard. I'll be super-excited about a second release from an artist, but by the third, unless they've established themselves as an artist whose records will all explore very different sounds, I'm kind of 'been there, done that' about it.

Yeah that's true, question is what things sound like in six months to a year. But for now anything involving multiple instrumentalists in a studio is probably out, one person on a computer is a different thing entirely.

― Matt DC, Thursday, July 2, 2020 8:53 AM (twenty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i've seen a good number of bands isolating together. maybe we'll have a few hundred new trout mask replicas at the end of this thing.

really envious of bands that live together with home studios

Yeah I don't think we really know what kind of music people will want to both make and listen to in a year or so, it would feel bizarre for things to just restart and carry on in more or less the same way, but it might happen.

Still feels like, while there have been plenty of great records released in the last few weeks, there isn't very much happening out there right now so it's as good a time as ever to take the pressure off yourself to stay up to date.

It’s a good time to be a one-man black metal band.

really envious of bands that live together with home studios

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Thursday, July 2, 2020 9:19 AM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah, home studio is definitely not the norm lol. but all these bands have some type of recording equipment and can do a 'songs from a room' type thing.

xp to emil.y I still listen to probably 50% music by new-to-me artists (*checks Spotify queue* almost exactly!) but they just aren't 2020 releases typically. My knowledge of music, even canonical stuff, is pretty limited compared to a lot of ilxors, so there's still lots of very well-known, well-regarded albums I've never heard, and I tend to like a lot of them. Like triggercut, I love the end-of-year polls, especially tracks, because I often love a lot of what places. whereas it's too overwhelming to follow the many music threads here through the year

Have the streaming platforms (or anyone) been setting up venues that allow bands to stream live shows? You'd think that would be a thing but I haven't heard much. The Oranssi Pazuzu show was really well done and that seems like the midland if template that could work.

Fuck. Midland if = kind of.

have the streaming platforms (or anyone) been setting up venues that allow bands to stream live shows?

I've seen a few shows like this on various platforms whose names escape me right now, where you buy a 'ticket' and get a link to a private stream or something.

Of course. I mean physical venues / studios for streaming shows.

This should really be on a "communal music in the time of plague" thread, I realise.

Ah I see, yeah I havent heard about any venues setting that up on their own. Although maybe some will start to once they realize that opening back up at 20% capacity wont be sustainable.

Re:the thread question, I used to spend a lot of time haunting RYM & slsk chatrooms & stuff trying to keep up with new music in a systematic/comprehensive way. I gave up on it when I realized it was resulting in me spending a lot of time listening to music that I didn't like (and often didn't expect to like), and it seemed like a perverse situation that was worsening the problem it was supposed to solve. Now I take the organic approach, follow my own tastes and interests completely, and don't stress about it. Good music that's new to me still manages to cross my path, probably at the same rate as before tbh, but I also spend 100% less time listening to stuff I'm not interested in out of some feeling of obligation or FOMO. (Also getting out of writing about music & film has done wonders for my abilities to enjoy both of those things.)

Being OK with ignoring music is a v liberating feeling, my only regret is feeling like I may have wasted some good listening years slogging through shit I didn't care about.

Being OK with ignoring music is a v liberating feeling, my only regret is feeling like I may have wasted some good listening years slogging through shit I didn't care about.

Feeling very seen rn.

I havent heard about any venues setting that up on their own. Although maybe some will start to once they realize that opening back up at 20% capacity wont be sustainable.

The Village Vanguard, Smalls, and the Jazz Gallery in NYC are all doing this to some degree, and on the "new music"/modern composition side, so is National Sawdust. The Vanguard charges $7 to watch a show; I don't know what the others are charging.

xpost When I stopped regularly writing about music the first thing that fell off was keeping up with new stuff. On one hand, it's weird to look at lists of new releases or a year-end thing and not recognize anything. On the other, I figure if it's good enough it will get to me one way or the other. And regardless, the bazilions of albums I've listened to and loved all my life I don't listen to or love any less.

But if you don't keep up with all the new stuff you'd like, isn't there the risk you'll fall into lazy habits, find yourself easy prey to hype, and mostly just listen to what the Pitchfork-industrial complex wants you to?

ime it felt like the opposite - obsessively trying to stay on top of everything felt like being prey to hype after a while. its always good to challenge your ears and listen outside your comfort zones, but for me after a certain point it jsut felt like i was always doubting my taste, which wasnt fun. trying to be an omnivore made me enjoy less. I still explore, but I try to let my taste intuitively lead down whichever rabbit holes it wanders to rather than making it feel task-based

my boring answer to this is always: i keep up because it's sort of my job, but also because i have a legitimate interest in keeping up with artists i love and investigating what's resonating with others. i do not put any pressure on myself to actually keep up though because... why. (i have not knowingly experienced fomo since quitting twitter five years ago)

i've never not had confidence in my taste but i've found i get the most pleasure out of listening when i'm challenging an aesthetic opinion i've settled on. i also find siloing yourself off with genres and artists you already enjoy... silly, bc music is this enormous web where pretty much every style you can think of touches in some way, but whatever

the only time i've ever felt fatigued, like i was forcing myself to get through something, was when i decided to listen to every record pfork rated 8.0 and above in 2004. it was a worse website then. i had the epiphany in like the middle of an architecture in helsinki record, like why am i doing this

btw matt dc thoroughly otm, the social is essential to popular music as we know it. social functions create genres even, cf. correct me if i'm wrong but that's why dancehall exists

i listen to a lot. i always want to listen to more. I've learned to forgive myself! I do okay.

National Sawdust's (NB: I may very well be working for them) concerts are free and they've got a helluva lineup going for both new shows and archival footage that they're making newly available: Tyondai Braxton, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Emily Wells, Madame Gandhi, Julian Lage, Meredith Monk, Rafiq Bhatia... and those are just the pitchfork friendly names. All the artists recording new pieces get paid 1k and get free camera/audio to keep. It's a pretty great program; I don't think anybody else in the US (and possibly this hemisphere) is doing anywhere near this much paid programming with full professional post-production work on the sound/visuals. Give it a peek:
https://live.nationalsawdust.org/digital-discovery-festival
https://live.nationalsawdust.org/archives

and also it's why house exists

and on and on xp

i have LOTS of thoughts about how venues are going to try to pivot to streaming (and mostly fail) but i'll pass for the moment

For another thread - what I was imagining (or rather, expecting them to see an opportunity) is the streaming platforms hiring out studio spaces (which they already have) to bands or promoters. It's a bigger job for live venues to get set up with cameras and video mixing etc., and the space won't otherwise be paying for itself, so to speak.

weeeeeeeell the thing is that basically every venue (in NYC at least) already has a camera/audio setup and streaming to a website/facebook isn't rocket science. The issue is that you can't realistically sell enough "tickets" at even 25% of normal pricing to maintain a staff and pay the artists at the same level unless you have a big enough name. it's the equivalent of opening up a restaurant and losing half your income; it's probably not worth doing it until/unless you can get a grant or a bailout (the latter of which is, sadly, particularly unlikely).

This wackadoo thing that isbell is doing gives you a sense of how people are scrabbling at the sides of this thing, trying to figure out what will work.
https://www.registercitizen.com/entertainment/article/Jason-Isbell-Will-Watch-You-Watching-Him-in-New-15376468.php

i imagine most venues will have to juggle streaming/live shows for most of 2021. It's a dire moment.

I don't feel as overwhelmed as I used to in trying to keep up with new music, I don't know if I've lost interest a bit but I do think my listening has become more scattershot, liking lots of individual releases rather than getting deeply into a particular artist/label/scene or whatever. If I'm honest I'm not finding as many GREAT new albums these days but on the other hand, I keep running Spotify playlists of all the singles I like in a year and the one for 2019 ended up with twice as many tracks as the one for 2010.

ILM is very much still central to me hearing new things - the grime/UK rap and Afropop/Afrodance rolling threads especially. I don't think the board is becoming more conservative, the EOY polls might distort things sometimes maybe?

xpost

Exactly - YouTube or Twitch hiring out spaces directly to bands seems to be more viable. And I don't know what sort of video setups traditional venues have but a single camera pointing at a whole stage isn't really engaging enough to cut it as a substitute.

But if you don't keep up with all the new stuff you'd like, isn't there the risk you'll fall into lazy habits, find yourself easy prey to hype, and mostly just listen to what the Pitchfork-industrial complex wants you to?

During my protracted 85-90% classical phase, I would just wade through a dozen EOY lists in December then cram titles that caught my ear over January and February. I stopped doing that because even a solid cross-section of lists that happen to be most in tune with my preferences represents only about 25-30% (granted, I'm speculating here) of my personal EOY pantheon when I force myself to broaden out and dig deeper at the same time. There's probably a felicitous balance to be struck here, but I've yet to achieve it.

absolutely given up with new music. the 20th century has enough music I haven't heard yet tbh, and it's easier for me to navigate/find what I like because it's all already happened/been documented at length. my favourite new - to me - album this year is Bob Dylan's "slow train coming"

I don't doubt that there is way more around now but there was too much music (for me) to keep abreast of even in the limited general area of 'electronic' music in the early 2000s when I'd visit boutique shops to listen to new releases on vinyl, or look through the reviews section in The Wire and know there was tons I'd never hear, or likely never find a copy of. Not that any of that caused me much anxiety.

I have enough music I've already heard and know I'll enjoy hearing again to keep me satisfied until I die, even with listening all workday long plus some evenings. Anything new I discover is gravy. Yet it still gives me a thrill to find something. "Ooh the collection [of stuff I know I can turn to when I don't know what I want to listen to] has increased!". I'm sure there's lots of great stuff I'm missing out on, but who cares. There's also tons of great food, movies, people, places I'll never get to enjoy . C'est la vie.

I can't quite work out who here "writes for a living" (or similar), anymore. I used to recognise some people. As someone who used to, over a decade ago, I can get a need to have a knowledge about music either generally (that is, being aware of the "latest big thing") or quite specifically (within a genre). I used to listen to music for 16-ish hours a day - that left room to listen to stuff I didn't want to, particularly. In a different job, I get to hear less than half that.

That said, I'd hate to get to the end of the year and think I've only bought this year's Bonnie Prince Billy, Tindersticks, Richard Skelton (and fifteen other names) ...

I should say that I still love hearing new music, especially music that I, well, love. But I do sort of ask myself when I'm listening to new records, will I listen to this and love this the same way I love albums from 20 years ago? Dunno. For example, the new Phoebe Bridgers. I think it's fine but I know for a fact I doubt I would reach for it again in a year, let alone 20 years from now. I don't know if that is me, or it. Then again, I don't think I would have listened to it at all if people weren't singing its praises. On the other hand, one does risk get getting caught in a loop of "best album of the year" hype or whatever. Like when the end of the year comes around and I see these lists of top 50, or top 100 records? I used to make more of an effort to keep up with all the titles, but a long time ago I came to the conclusion that just because they're on a year-end list doesn't make them must hear albums. They're almost just random albums that people put in some random order.

will I listen to this and love this the same way I love albums from 20 years ago?

imo don't care

be free

i've listened to dogleg about 80 times so far this year and i'm looking forward to seeing if i can hit 200

xpost I mean, if I do, it will happen organically! But has broad as my taste may sometimes be, there are so many albums I listen to where I can just tell off the bat, nah, not that into it. But if I spend a lot of time listening to that record, maybe it would rise in my estimation, I don't know. Ironically, I always found trying to keep up with things meant giving things less time than they deserved, because there's so much stuff constantly getting released.

Giving a song/album a chance to grow on me made sense when I paid money for each album. With streaming, it's the opposite: I'm paying for the entire library of music so spending time on 1 thing hoping my opinion of it will improve comes at the expense of giving other music a chance to immediately wow me.

xps to plax

soz pal, I was probably a bit harsh on you earlier, but can't help feeling there would be a slightly middling to average jizz fest on ilm if say The Necks released an album as brilliant as the criminally neglected Tapscott's The Dark Tree and i am an ageing, angry old kneejerk prick!

xp I still try to give any music three listens - music simply doesn't click with me fast enough. I'm even suspicious of music that clicks with me on the first listen! A lot of the time the stuff that clicks that quickly doesn't maintain my interest after a couple listens

Sure, if it feels like too much of a slog, one or two listens is enough, but that's pretty rare now and usually only happens when I challenge my usual tastes. There are still times when the third listen is the one that does it for me, so I feel good about my process

my version of keeping up probably involves listening to way less stuff than a lot of people on here, but still I feel like my new music consumption has been greatly reduced this year, and I don't think there's any record out of the 20 or so new ones in my regular rotation that I am truly super excited about. I've spent way more time digging into and enjoying the 70s ECM catalog. I know there is very likely new music out there that I would really like, but going through all the stuff that is merely ok or worse just feels like too much. I wish it were easier for me to cut through all the noise and find new things that I connect with.

Besides new music there’s also a lot of easily accessible old music. Like hey here’s every record joe Walsh made ever, let’s spend some time with each one

Giving a song/album a chance to grow on me made sense when I paid money for each album. With streaming, it's the opposite: I'm paying for the entire library of music so spending time on 1 thing hoping my opinion of it will improve comes at the expense of giving other music a chance to immediately wow me.

Yeah, I feel this. I'm probably better in tune with my own tastes and inclinations these days as a result. If something doesn't move me in some way on the first listen, I probably won't bother with it again unless I see a few people writing or talking about what moved them about it in a convincing way. Even then, my initial impression rarely budges very much. I laboured through so much average music in my 20s, trying to find something to like about it because smart and cool people said they liked it. I don't really have that time or energy any more.

xxpost In some ways that's part of the problem, or the gift: even if there is good new stuff you might enjoy, you could probably spend a lifetime digesting ECM's '70s output alone! No one can listen to everything all the time, and even the most omnivorous listeners will have blindspots, willful or otherwise. Like the great ILM thread "last classic album you'd never heard before that blew your mind" or whatever. For some reason, I'd never heard Isaac Hayes' "Hot Buttered Soul." Why? Absolutely no idea. I knew it was on all sorts of lists, and I knew Isaac Hayes and his history, but I just never got around to it until, I honestly want to say, maybe after reading Whiney's Public Enemy book and learning how many samples from that album are on "Nation of Millions." Now it's one of my favorite albums. I could listen to it every day. I'm sure there are other albums like that.

I've listened to more new music this year than at any time in the past decade thanks to working from home but I don't know if I'm getting more out of it tbh. sometimes I look through my old ILM poll ballots and think... why did I vote for this again? I must have liked it a lot at the time but I don't even remember what it sounds like? and I have no interest in looking up what they're up to now. 

that's the thing with trying to keep up with too much imo, like there's a lot of music that you might objectively like or find good but true connection is rarer than you might expect. You may like (even love!) a song/album for a few months, but idk if it's worth it if it's not something you'll remember or can be bothered seeking out again five years down the road. 

re imago's original question on whether ILM covers all that it should: I do think that we're getting out of touch with a lot of what younger people are listening to now just because there aren't any zoomers on here lol. I hear what my teenager is listening to on the rare occasions she deigns to leave her bedroom door open and some of it is really cool! most likely made by a youtuber or tiktok-er and they probably don't even have a full EP or album, just a few random tracks here and there. or it's some obscure lo-fi indie dude whose song from 2013 is big among kids cause it was used on a popular fancam edit. 

I also think it's interesting that ILM doesn't even have threads on some major current artists e.g. BTS. I know most of the kpop thread regulars including myself have traditionally not been huge fans of BTS even before they broke through in the US but we're def showing our age imo, in the sense that we're not even trying to discuss this group who is creating, and will continue to have, a massive impact on an entire generation. can't tell if it's a language issue, snobbery, racism, or just none of us being in the right demographic to appreciate them properly. (and of course the gender thing - ILM-ers have always been more appreciative of female popstars and girl groups and take boybands less seriously.) 

I don’t understand how TikTok works as a music discovery platform. The clips are 15 seconds long? How can you get into something via a 15-sec. snippet? Is the idea to check out the full song on YouTube or something?

15 seconds is more than enough to get hooked on a piece of music, even 5 seconds could be

But where are kids hearing the full songs? They must go off to Spotify or someplace, right?

yeah spotify or youtube or bandcamp or soundcloud or wherever else people get their music. eye catching dancing/visuals + an ear wormy hook or chorus in under a minute is usually enough to get kids to search out the songs (and sadly also a method that’s much faster and more convincing than reading a two minute positive review).

Xxxp I alternate between extremes of going wide and going deep. I go through phases of collecting and listening back to lots of different stuff sort of ravenously. Basically just sampling everything for months or even years at a time without getting into any of it too deeply. Then i'll go back and pick a few things out of that, and I'll listen to the same 3-5 records almost exclusively for months (at least).

I don't really ever worry about missing out on what I haven't heard. What scares me a lot more is that i might not hear something again, or that I'll only hear it so many more times.

There are no artists I follow, really. A crate digger friend remarked that I'm "extremely album-oriented" and that's accurate. Like, most people have artists they love, and want to investigate those discographies and I... don't. I mean there are artists who have made albums that are all time favorites, that i love more than life itself... and i have never even borhtered listening to any of their other work even once. I don't feel I need it for whatever reason. I don't know why. When inwas a kid and could only afford a handful of albums a year, maybe a dozen or a bit more if I was very lucky, I only bought albums by artists I'd never heard before. With very, very few exceptions. It felt, like, wastefully extravagant to have more than one album by the same people back then. I had friends who would buy every Pavement album before checking out someone else and I was actually... disgusted by that!

Now i am properly ranting sorry. So, yeah, i go through these phases, and it really has nothing to do with keeping pace with all the amazing things coming out, I'm completley disengaged from that.

I don't force myself to like anything either. If i hear something once, and it doesn't either a. make me want to play it again straight away or b. Leave a funny linering aftertase or something that sticks with me and makes me want to play it again EVENTUALLY. that's it. A lot of my favorite records are the latter kind tho.

youtube comments on music videos are now as full of tiktok-related comments as they are of "(x) sent me here" or "who's listening to this in 2020?" or "this is when music was great, not like now"

No BTS thread is surprising! They derserve a thread

My method of music discovery has been the same since I was 13 - I mainly read a lot about music, old and new, and if it looks interesting, in the pre-digital age I'd rent LPs/CDs in the libary and tape/CDR them, and for the past 22 years I'd download and dunk it into my library. Plex or iTunes will then feed it to me when I play random albums, filter by genre & then shuffle, etc. Keeping up for me just means keep reading about new music and listening to it.

Re: boy bands, I don't think ILM has ever really engaged with the phenomenon. Maybe I'm wrong but I don't remember much serious talk about the musical merits of Take That, Hanson or Westlife in the "ILM golden age".

Take That and Westlife were irredeemable shit, dunno enough about Hanson to judge, Backstreet/NSYNC might be a better comparison as they had a few decent pop hits.

I don't get BTS to be honest, think it's probably just not for me.

eye catching dancing/visuals + an ear wormy hook or chorus in under a minute is usually enough to get kids to search out the songs

When was this ever not enough?

my response was to morrisp on tiktok as a music discovery platform.

Re: boy bands, I don't think ILM has ever really engaged with the phenomenon. Maybe I'm wrong but I don't remember much serious talk about the musical merits of Take That, Hanson or Westlife in the "ILM golden age".

yes and i've always wondered why that was. even for kpop, there are tons of great boy group songs posted on the rolling threads every year but the ones that crossover onto wider ILM and make it onto the EOY 77 have almost all been by girl groups (2ne1, f(x), red velvet, blackpink, loona. lone male exception: G-Dragon).

I am not a huge fan of BTS but their songs are better than 95% of boyband songs from the 90s/00s, and a lot of it sounds, well, like a lot of other pop music that ILM usually likes. so yes, it's surprising they don't have a thread yet. anyway, my main point was that even on a forum as expansive and diverse as ILM, there are massive blindspots, and i'm sure there's lots of other genres/subgenres that we're ignoring.

start a thread, Roz. I would be happy to listen to BTS, just nothing has grabbed me in any of the songs I've heard so far.

i just said i wasn't a fan or else i would have started one already lol. my fave is prob Dope.

But if you don't keep up with all the new stuff you'd like, isn't there the risk you'll fall into lazy habits, find yourself easy prey to hype, and mostly just listen to what the Pitchfork-industrial complex wants you to?

There is no such thing as 'keeping up'. In any given month the amount of music you or anyone else listens to is absolutely dwarved by what you don't listen to. There are vast amounts of music being released, plenty of it great, that never gets talked about or shared here or anywhere else.

So "keeping up" is entirely illusory. And even the most self-consciously wide-ranging of listeners are limited by their routes of discovery, whether that's ILM or Pitchfork or streaming services or crate digging or anything else. Some of the people who make the least effort to "keep up" in the traditional sense have the most interesting and often the most rewarding music habits, people can spend entire years down the rabbit hole of one genre.

Phrased as gauchely provocative as I could muster tbh, but the formation of canons is definitely part of this discussion. I rather admire those who specialise deeply in a more restricted area (and then stay in that lane) but I can't imagine doing that myself

BTS for the most part are pretty bland by kpop standards so it's not surprising no one here is really that into them and despite their breakthrough in the west it seems like it's really more of an insular thing with a gigantic cult fanbase than something that's become a more integrated part of the us pop mainstream so i'd imagine if you don't seek them out they're still quite easy to have completely avoided? i did really love their gqom track "idol" though, that felt exciting. if there wasn't the kpop thread to absorb the "they actually broke through" discussion etc. i'm sure someone would have made one then, and that's the most interesting thing about them - that they managed to break through in the west in a way no other kpop group has really come close to.

There is no such thing as 'keeping up'. In any given month the amount of music you or anyone else listens to is absolutely dwarved by what you don't listen to. There are vast amounts of music being released, plenty of it great, that never gets talked about or shared here or anywhere else.

So "keeping up" is entirely illusory. And even the most self-consciously wide-ranging of listeners are limited by their routes of discovery, whether that's ILM or Pitchfork or streaming services or crate digging or anything else. Some of the people who make the least effort to "keep up" in the traditional sense have the most interesting and often the most rewarding music habits, people can spend entire years down the rabbit hole of one genre.

This is all true but I think a lot of music (and movies and literature and etc.) enthusiasts engage in some suspension of disbelief about it - that old Lester Bangs story about dreaming of a bunker with every album ever released.

xpost all true. my main point again was about ILM and what gets discussed or covered - BTS was really just an example. there's plenty of bland music that gets attention around here, like there's multiple ed sheeran threads and not all of them are dunking on him lol.

It's virtually impossible to ignore Ed Sheeran in fairness, he gets everywhere.

In 2011 I spent the year listening to as much new music as I possibly could, didn't know about ILM at the time so went between music blogs / review sites, hypemachine and release lists, in the end came out with a list which had some crossover with EOY lists, but had loads more weird electronic music of various sorts.

Re: boy bands, I don't think ILM has ever really engaged with the phenomenon.

― Siegbran, Friday, July 3, 2020 10:39 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Have you guys seen the 1975 thread?!

*ducks*

xp Like this was in my top 5 out of the 20,000 or so tracks I listened to and it never got so much as a mention on ILM as far as I can tell from searching, and not sure why.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZlzIsfE--g

xpost speaking of bland

*ducks too*

:D

*ducks*

that old Lester Bangs story about dreaming of a bunker with every album ever released.

Lol right now we're all essentially living in bunkers with every album ever released! Though sadly I think I've been listening to music *less* the last few months, because my entire family is at home and I prefer the stereo to headphones. There is some stuff they'll tolerate but I know there's a ton of stuff they'd gong after a minute. They did all seem to like the Jessie Ware when I had it on at dinner the other night, Pet Shop Boys on random last night was well received. But there was something accessible/popular I can't remember I had on where one of them came in right at an uncharacteristically loud part and told me to turn it off or way down, and rather than remind them it was something they liked I just turned it off.

Oh, and re: Tik Tok, I refuse to engage with something that cuts attention spans even shorter, but my daughter was driving with me and I think Coldplay's "Clocks" came on the radio, and I said, oh, this is a nice song, and she said she was a fan. I asked her how she knew it and she said people do Tik Tok's to the intro. Actually, even funnier, the next day she was trying to remember what song it was, and we had both forgotten (I literally just remembered right now), so she was racking her brain for what she heard and kept running down the litany of wrong-path classic rock acts. "Was it Led Zeppelin? Was it the Eagles"? Etc. (None of which she likes unless it was covered on "Glee" or appeared in a movie or something, some other context.)

You may like (even love!) a song/album for a few months, but idk if it's worth it if it's not something you'll remember or can be bothered seeking out again five years down the road.

If it gave you enjoyment for any amount of time, it's worth it imo. It's preferable that it give you endless enjoyment but let's not get greedy.

Same thing with movies innit. There's some movies I enjoyed watching but don't ever want to see again, forgot what happened in them, etc. Totally worth seeing tho. Then there's the personal pantheon that I know I'll watch many times again.

my main point was that even on a forum as expansive and diverse as ILM, there are massive blindspots, and i'm sure there's lots of other genres/subgenres that we're ignoring.

― Roz

Absolutely, there is way to much music out there to even attempt to discuss all of it among a fairly small group of ILM regulars. There's no discussions on aggrotech, calypso or Turkish chartpop. I don't really dislike K-pop, or pop from anywhere else for that matter, but I'm not sure if I have much useful to say about it - I mean the last cheap-and-cheerful throwaway pop music I really loved was italo disco.

It's virtually impossible to ignore Ed Sheeran in fairness, he gets everywhere.

It's really not. I have never heard a whole Ed Sheeran song. (I have never heard a whole Beyoncé song.)

I have no idea what Ed Sheeran sounds like.

I would be up for a calypso thread (though I know it's basically heritage music now)

Ed Sheeran doesn't sound at all distinctive, you have probably heard him and not realised.

BTS was really just an example. there's plenty of bland music that gets attention around here, like there's multiple ed sheeran threads and not all of them are dunking on him lol.

We also have a 1D thread. I think all of the examples Siegbran gave were pre-ILx so not sure how we would have had contemporary threads on them...

I don't mind BTS but don't find them that exciting, and definitely have a tendency to fall into the 'girl groups or GTFO' k-pop bracket. Big exception would have been when EXO went epic ('Mama', 'Wolf' etc), but that's soooooo long ago now.

do we have a "newly released albums i'm listening to this week" thread? just speaking pragmatically as someone who does like to keep up (probably have heard ~300 new albums so far this year) it's a pain to check a dozen different places online to find out what's out and an active thread where ilxors just post the brand new releases they're checking out would be useful for this purpose.

just smoothly blend a "whatever new music you are listening to" post into one of the politics threads imo

do we have a "newly released albums i'm listening to this week" thread?

Not quite the same thing, but we do have a Rolling Favorite Tracks + Albums 2020 thread, and it doesn't get bumped as often as it should imo (I, too, am guilty of this).

that thread is super useful, yes, shout out to ulysses for putting in some work there in 2020

another "never heard Ed Sheeran" person here btw

I *think* I've heard one song by him. Certainly only one song that I'd recognize by name.

I went from buying 400+ non-current-release albums a year and maybe 10 current-release albums from 2000-2015, to by now buying 200-300+ current release albums per year the last few, and honestly, it's wonderful to be overwhelmed by how much excellent new music there is. For me, most of that excellent music is being made by Black artists (mostly) pushing the boundaries of or completely obliterating genre. Obviously even buying hundreds of records a year, you'll "miss" tons of great music--but so what? That's what the rest of your life is for, to "discover" it later. I'm just trying to enjoy the pleasure of getting to hear all this happen in more or less real time, and it's a deeply necessary antidote to the hope-sucking nature of so much of the current era, outside of realms of human creativity.

The pan/sans/anti-genre music made by Black artists the last half decade should be revered, like mid-80s "house," 78-82 "post-punk," 80s-90s "golden age" hip-hop...

But perversely, it'll probably take a catch-all term for geeks to latch on...https://t.co/BjUjExA7jp pic.twitter.com/uVAWILskoz

— Musicophilia (@musicophiliamix) July 3, 2020

On 7/3 all $ spent at @Bandcamp goes to artists/labels, and @MikeSchpitz and I will buy you (2) digital albums by of your choice by Black artists!

Just retweet w/ a link to a favorite album by a Black artist.

Goal is 78 albums! 6/5+6/19, we bought 132 albums--keep it going! pic.twitter.com/FxNrWj7DYu

— Musicophilia (@musicophiliamix) July 2, 2020

this is the only ed sheeran song you really need to know imo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yN1JBYTtF8

and thanks for the love.

here's my ongoing 2020 keepers playlist; not everything I hear is on spotify but most of it is: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0kXJmmQP3udiqToIDPQvZp

https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/the-41-most-anticipated-albums-of-fall-2020-cardi-b-sufjan-phoenix-2-chainz-and-more/

41!

I don't think I've ever listened to 41 albums released in a single year (let alone a single season) within that calendar year. Maybe in 1998 when I lived with a guy who would compulsively buy music, like weekly trips to the record store, coming back with a stack of 10.

I don't think I've ever listened to 41 albums released in a single year

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/030/710/dd0.png

all that but no Arch Garrison or Hen Ogledd

Actress, Autechre, Deftones and Pallbearer are the only ones I care about.

counted 20 that i will likely play through at least once, maybe 10 that i'm genuinely looking forward to

(actress, autechre, black thought, blackpink, cardi, G garzon-Montano, Juicy, Kylie, Lattimore, Mountain Goats, yg)

pom, I don't understand that image

I think the Tim Heidecker album might be kinda good

I read the Quietus and Resident Advisor and follow labels and groups on bandcamp, and everyone around me thinks I'm incredibly well-informed about music. A little perplexing to me that anyone feels pressure to keep up in this day and age rather than just follow their impulse and ears, but I also don't write about this stuff professionally any longer.

Oh sorry, rob, it's a dumb meme:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/awkward-look-monkey-puppet

What I meant by it is that I'm ashamed of the ridiculous amounts of new music I listen to in a given year so reading that sentence was kind of awkward on my end, i.e. 'best to pretend this isn't me'.

I will also say that I just don't give a shit about much pop music, it's just not where my head nor heart have been at for years.

I don't think I've ever listened to 41 albums released in a single year (let alone a single season) within that calendar year.

Professional obligation forces me to listen to ~25 new albums a month. 90% of those (at a minimum) are jazz titles, though. Re the Pitchfork list, I will listen to Autechre and maybe Deftones and maybe Pallbearer but none of the rest of that stuff has any relevance to my life. Which doesn't make it good or bad, just Not For Me.

xp
ah got it, and no need to feel shame--I probably do listen to more than 41 album's worth (~50 min.) of music in a year, but not all in album form (and when I had an office job I listened to way more than that, but that was when I was a lot less invested in current music).

anyway, I was more just struck by how the number was both arbitrary and high, like I wonder if their analytics show that 41 brings in more clicks than a round number

They could have removed the PE album (is anyone really anticipating that?), and made it an even 40.

both the new PE singles are very good!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQvDRe79F8k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNUl8bAKdi4

Where’s the upcoming Afropop list ? and the reggaeton one? Not that I am up to date on what has come out already this year.

Wizkid is perpetually upcoming

^ that was me being sarcastic/bitter/frustrated: Wizkid has been dangling his Made In Lagos project in front of us for at least three years now. I suspect he has several discarded finished versions in his vault. I’m secretly hoping (still!) for Oct 1, Nigeria’s Independence Day.

To further answer (part of) your question:
On the Nigerian side of things, there have been recent releases by Burna Boy, Tiwa Savage, Fireboy DML, Adekunle Gold, Patoranking and Kizz Daniel. Niniola will have an album out soon (that’s something to be excited about!), and so might Davido.

As for South Africa, Sun-El Musician has promised a new album in (Southern Hemisphere) “spring”, and Kabza De Small will undoubtedly drop (yet) another album, with or without DJ Maphorisa. I’m also looking forward to De Mthuda’s new album.

But there will be much more than just these obviously.

This is absolutely the first year I can remember where not only did I struggle to keep up with music, but I totally forgot about albums I liked from bands that I love. For example, I totally forgot that X released a good record this year. Or, the Dua/Jessie/Roisin glossy nu-disco trio, for example, all albums I really enjoyed and enjoy listening to yet keep forgetting to play. Or Fiona Apple and Kathleen Edwards, two artists I love that released great new comebacks that I love that I just keep forgetting to play. Looking over year-end lists, there is just so much I haven't heard or even heard of, and of the stuff I have heard it's just downright impossible for me to keep straight in my brain, let alone fore of mind. So much music!

Weirdly, I wonder if this has been inadvertently pandemic related. My family is around all the time, but I'm a speaker guy, not a headphone guy, and just haven't been free to blast stuff on the stereo when the mood strikes. Hmm ...

i've struggled a bit too tbh. combination of (1) leaving my desk job means i spent far less time sitting in front of a computer and reading reviews and mailing list emails and ilx or whatever when i should've been working, (2) being at home means i'm more inclined to listen to the records and cds i already own rather than scouting for new stuff on spotify or bandcamp, and (3) too much other crazy shit going on to worry about it all that much

I binged even more than usual on new releases this year and I kind of regret it. I should probably stop trying to understand what the fuss is all about when it comes to genres I *know* I don't care for at least 95% of the time. I think part of the reason I do that is because just having so much as a vague sense of what other people are into makes me feel less alienated (except it also has the exact opposite effect, concomitantly).

Took me 9 months to realize I could secretly listen to music on zoom calls

— vijay iyer (@vijayiyer) December 15, 2020

After a gap from 2004-2009 I managed to keep up with music from 2010-2019.
This year I can think of about five tracks which have been released.

as long as you're aware of "wap"

WAP is one of the five, yes.

Actually if Minecraft and Among Us parody songs count, real total is maybe 20 or 30.

'WAP' is pretty good, as are the ensuing Ben Shapiro self-owns.

I think I was arguing to deej elsewhere that the predominance" of "WAP" in 2020 feels almost like it has less to do with the song itself and more that it's maybe the only song this year that inspired both a massive tiktok dance craze and lots of political memes (via laughing at Ben Shapiro et. al) (though my favourite WAP meme was one about the despondence of the writers of KidzBop versions when they first heard it). So it feels like it sums up 2020 in that it captures a lot of the changing context in which music is situated now.

that's as good an explanation as any for why such a gleefully ridiculous sex jam will be the first song that people remember from the roughest year of American life since the depression

lol, i mean it will also be remembered for being a gleefully ridiculous sex jam, but I'm not sure that an equivalent song in say 2009 (which was also a pretty rough year for many) would have gotten equivalent critical traction.

the way I listen to music has changed - I live in a small flat with my boyfriend and it's harder to listen to stuff that he wouldn't want to because we are both always indoors now. When I'm physically going into work, I take a bus that's approx 40 mins each way and that's my time to listen to new music on my headphones.

We have listened to a lot of ambient and new-age adjacent stuff this year, more than any other. I don't think we'd have managed without Gigi Masin and Jonny Nash.

xpost should have qualified "predominance" as "critical predominance" in the first post (i.e. being p4k's song of the year)

lol I'm pretty sure I still haven't heard WAP but honestly haven't particularly connected to anything I've heard from Cardi B. *or* Megan Thee Stallion yet. Haven't even given the new Dylan the time and attention it deserves!

I consciously decided at the beginning of the year that I wasn't going to actively try keeping up with new music this year.

What that really meant was that I wasn't going to put in all the work that I usually do for the sake of creating a long best-of-the-year playlist: scanning Album of the Year for new albums every week, dragging them into an "new albums" playlist, listening to them repeatedly until I have a favorite track (or else I've decided the album isn't for me), scanning unperson's monthly jazz column to see if there are any albums I've missed, occasionally scanning The Singles Jukebox for songs with high scores and maintaining a playlist of those songs, aggregating songs that show up on major publications' year-end lists into yet another playlist and finding more favorites, etc. etc.

I've still heard a bit of new music this year, when I've happened to notice that an artist I like has put something out. But I haven't been systematic about it at all, so a lot has slipped through the cracks.

To be honest, it's been kind of relaxing. I've ended up just listening to a lot of old stuff. At one point I worked on a 1999 playlist. But as the best-of-2020 lists have been coming out, I've found myself wanting to...get a handle on all of it. So I'm not sure yet whether this year is a permanent break from Keeping Up or just a temporary one.

xp The first time I heard WAP was the other day, when I listened to Pitchfork's top songs of 2020 list!

lack of commute has killed my primary listening mode - has been tough to replace it tbh. podcasts have suffered this year too for me.

around the house i put on stuff i already know - too distracting to listen 'actively'

This is absolutely the first year I can remember where not only did I struggle to keep up with music, but I totally forgot about albums I liked from bands that I love. For example, I totally forgot that X released a good record this year. Or, the Dua/Jessie/Roisin glossy nu-disco trio, for example, all albums I really enjoyed and enjoy listening to yet keep forgetting to play. Or Fiona Apple and Kathleen Edwards, two artists I love that released great new comebacks that I love that I just keep forgetting to play. Looking over year-end lists, there is just so much I haven't heard or even heard of, and of the stuff I have heard it's just downright impossible for me to keep straight in my brain, let alone fore of mind. So much music!

Weirdly, I wonder if this has been inadvertently pandemic related. My family is around all the time, but I'm a speaker guy, not a headphone guy, and just haven't been free to blast stuff on the stereo when the mood strikes. Hmm ...

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, 15 December 2020 21:59 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I feel this post. I was reminded yesterday of the existence of the Eddie Chacon album, which I loved when I first heard it and then promptly forgot about. Dylan too!

I think this year I have listened to as much new music as ever, but in the same way that I struggle a bit to keep track of what happened in which month this year (like, all the jokes that currently it's the 247th of March or whatever), almost all experiences of music have felt more transient, and less amenable to ordering and recollection.

one of the reasons i think tiktok has struck such a nerve and created so many big hits this year is that it helps people create those associations with songs that they aren't having in IRL

Right!

Including that we can't dance to these songs at a club but we can perform/watch tiktok dances.

Dancing at bars, albeit in small numbers, is starting to be allowed again in Australia for the first time since mid-March, and it's amusing to see teh-gays in particular express this sense of pent-up release at finally being able to dance in public to the broadly-recognised gay anthems of 2020 ("Physical", "Rain on Me", "WAP"), almost as if the very existence of these songs and their impact was somehow quasi-spectral until it could be properly acknowledged in that way.

my real name rhymes with and has the exact same number of syllables as "a savage" and the fact I haven't been able to do a karaoke performance of Megan & Beyoncè with my personal spin on it is killing me

xp great post, Tim

this year, probably more than any other, i've listened to the same 10-12 new or new-to-me albums hundreds of times. they were all very good at giving me what i needed in particular moments, and i kept coming back to them. i just didn't feel the need to adopt more, though i did scan through a few new releases here and there. my music listening experience is more and more becoming this reader response thing where every time i listen to the same thing my experience is a little different but no less rich. but the thing has to have sort of passed a few tests for it to get there, lol.

Dancing at bars, albeit in small numbers, is starting to be allowed again in Australia for the first time since mid-March, and it's amusing to see teh-gays in particular express this sense of pent-up release at finally being able to dance in public to the broadly-recognised gay anthems of 2020 ("Physical", "Rain on Me", "WAP"), almost as if the very existence of these songs and their impact was somehow quasi-spectral until it could be properly acknowledged in that way.

very jealous, i miss hearing music in a room with friends. some music just needs to be embodied and shared in social, physical space.

one of the reasons i think tiktok has struck such a nerve and created so many big hits this year is that it helps people create those associations with songs that they aren't having in IRL

Possibly the first thing I've read that's helped me understand tik tok!

there IS too much music out there, it's too readily accessible, and as a consequence it is devalued. I find that to ring true for me personally, one of the ILX champions of crate digging, Google, Soulseek, Discogs, whatever

― the absence of bikes (f. hazel), Thursday, 11 July 2024 16:05 (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

discuss

(i strongly disagree)

when was our crate digging championship exactly?

lil message for all you bedroom pop wannabes: don't release that ep you've been piecing together all these months. you'll merely be devaluing the real musicians

i just don’t have time to keep up. i literally missed almost every Bandcamp Friday earlier this year because I was just too busy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Maybe this is just me being an old man but I strongly feel that the social context around producing and consuming music has gotten very stale and shitty, partially through the technological changes in music production which mean that most music can be done on headphones by yourself, something that of course accelerated during lockdown, and partially because the styles of music that this sort of production has resulted in don't really lend themselves to live performance very well, so the modes of consumption are very individual and isolated, which of course COVID also accelerated, so in both cases you just don't get very much of the serendipitous clanging together of personalities and styles and informal moments in which great things flourish that you might otherwise get if three different bands are all sharing the same backstage after a show, impromptu jams, shared confidences. I absolutely love Charli XCX but the revelation that she actually can't sing in the way most of us think of singing eg hitting notes kind of drove that home for me recently. Her way of making music only works when somebody is twiddling a knob to get her on pitch. Which is fine of course but could she ever 'jam' with someone else? It would be hard. When I think about the studios at Radio 1, and the musicians who come through, is there ever a moment of chilling out or just fizzing off each other, in the interstices between the interviews and the next press thing? No there is not. I think music needs to get looser, more collaborative, more live. But then again I'm an old man - the next great direction music takes will probably be quite different from what worked in the past!

I just listen to what boxedjoy and one or two other ilxors tell me is good, system works for me

Lol this is true

COVID = not going to the gym = stopped listening to metal/pop/rap and when I started going back I found I just didn't want that music as much anymore. I listened to almost all vinyl during the pandemic and jazz became a much larger percentage of my listening. I also started smoking more pot and wanting music with an indefinable grove.

I am slowly delving back in to metal at the gym, but mostly classics instead of new stuff.

The ILX EOY polls used to be my main source of connecting to new music. Every year I would get at least 3-5 albums and a handful of tracks that would stick with me and become evergreen gym favorites. I have found the last few polls just haven't stuck with me for more than a month or so.

I still love to discover things I haven't heard before, but in most cases these are old things, not new things.

I also turned 50 during the pandemic although I am sure this had nothing to do with this, haha.

grove = groove

Am I even listening to anything anymore? Hearing has almost completely annexed my experience of music.
― pomenitul, Wednesday, July 1, 2020 5:41 PM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Resonates strongly with me, although I feel like I've resolved that by being absolutely ruthless with things that don't immediately excite me and generally letting things rise up to the surface. Even so, I still do not come back to everything I put in my top at the end of the year.
Anything else is like dipping your toe in a meaningless flux - there's no keeping up, only drowning.

It's a sobering and even terrifying feeling to look back at your AOTY lists from just a few years ago and read the names of albums and even artists you don't even recognize

Maybe this is just me being an old man but I strongly feel that the social context around producing and consuming music has gotten very stale and shitty, partially through the technological changes in music production which mean that most music can be done on headphones by yourself, something that of course accelerated during lockdown, and partially because the styles of music that this sort of production has resulted in don't really lend themselves to live performance very well, so the modes of consumption are very individual and isolated, which of course COVID also accelerated, so in both cases you just don't get very much of the serendipitous clanging together of personalities and styles and informal moments in which great things flourish that you might otherwise get if three different bands are all sharing the same backstage after a show, impromptu jams, shared confidences. I absolutely love Charli XCX but the revelation that she actually can't sing in the way most of us think of singing eg hitting notes kind of drove that home for me recently. Her way of making music only works when somebody is twiddling a knob to get her on pitch. Which is fine of course but could she ever 'jam' with someone else? It would be hard. When I think about the studios at Radio 1, and the musicians who come through, is there ever a moment of chilling out or just fizzing off each other, in the interstices between the interviews and the next press thing? No there is not. I think music needs to get looser, more collaborative, more live. But then again I'm an old man - the next great direction music takes will probably be quite different from what worked in the past!

It strikes me that the situation you describe is just the culmination of the way music has been headed since at least the 80's?

I know obv you're not a "it's not REAL instruments" rockist but it feels to me like as soon as you get into the electronic music era things like jam sessions and live concerts (as opposed to club settings) become less important.

Yeah i think you're right. I don't just mean jamming though.. I'm thinking about a kind of informal creative serendipity that the industry structures of earlier eras could facilitate - recording studios, rehearsal spaces, and radio studios as crossroads and nexuses of different sounds and talents who would end up liking each other, having sex with each other, doing drugs together, maybe even making music together. But there are others on this board who can speak accurately about what it's like in this spaces now, and what the opportunities are for this sort of thing these days, and I may be off base.

all of that still very much exists and is actually quite active, it's just not popular music anymore

all of that still very much exists and is actually quite active, it's just not popular music anymore

once more, with feeling

thinking locally, labels like international anthem and drag city have stables of artists that they support on their own releases and also pair/group together to record and then they release the recordings. it's not like stadium music or anything but it is definitely happening and, some might say, popping.

Yeah I was going to mention the London jazz scene as well as a place where young artists often collaborate.

I agree there do seem to be a ton of scenes like that it's just really hard to hear about them

I also object to the inclusion of sex/drugs into the formula. There’s hopefully more professionalism these days??!!!

Forms of popular music gradually becoming folkified in the sense of being local, outside of business models, played for (self) entertainment by friends

Basically my ideal music culture is the union camp jam session in Matewan

Not a lot of sex and drugs on offer there, probably for the best

I guess you haven't seen the director's cut

For me the important distinction isn’t electronic instruments vs acoustic instruments, it’s whether music is performed by a group of people together in real time or if it is assembled after the fact by layering asynchronous tracks. After the fact layering can be done with acoustic recordings and real time collaboration can be done with electronic instruments.

Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand) at 8:35 17 Jul 24

Yeah i think you're right. I don't just mean jamming though.. I'm thinking about a kind of informal creative serendipity that the industry structures of earlier eras could facilitate - recording studios, rehearsal spaces, and radio studios as crossroads and nexuses of different sounds and talents who would end up liking each other, having sex with each other, doing drugs together, maybe even making music together. But there are others on this board who can speak accurately about what it's like in this spaces now, and what the opportunities are for this sort of thing these days, and I may be off base.

yeah I still participate and feel generally a part of a scene like this, they evolve and change over time but honestly I've been sustained musically on a local level since I joined my first "real" band in 1999

like here's something that happened this weekend, big benefit for a woman who sadly has ALS

https://www.instagram.com/p/C9aE5zzJJVX/?igsh=MTh3bm51dXExMDU1aA==

Very cool!

lil message for all you bedroom pop wannabes: don't release that ep you've been piecing together all these months. you'll merely be devaluing the real musicians

― imago

lj what you or anybody else on ilx says doesn't influence my creative process

i don't make music, i write, but in fact i don't write personally, because, well, i don't have an audience. if you want to know why i write novels here, it's because i don't write at length anywhere else. does it _benefit me_ to write the words to a sermon that no-one will hear? yeah, absolutely. am i inclined to put in all that fucking work? no, i'm not. creating things is hard. i'd rather just listen to the sound of the rain.

which is to say that i don't read f. hazel's statement as prescriptive, but descriptive. i mean i've mostly stopped listening to music. i'm too busy. i have too much else going on. i certainly don't have time to keep up with it all. on top of that, i don't even use spotify, so, like, the main source the people i know find music from is something i deliberately don't participate in.

I just listen to what boxedjoy and one or two other ilxors tell me is good, system works for me

but I just listen to what ILM tells me is good!

system still works, obv

I did just dl a bunch of stuff from soulseek based on the Quietus' mid-year list and most of it is pretty good, will get to the ILM mid-year list in the coming weeks.

i haven't bothered to "keep up" as such for a whole gang o' years but i mostly manage to hear a few things i never heard before every day (real easy to do these days obv)

(things i never heard before might not = actually new things of course)

I just hit the 7 charity shops within bus distance and buy whatever is newer than 2004 and looks listenable

Ok 2002