When was the last time you thought 'This is the best thing i've EVER heard'?

Inspired by NI's comment on the Chic thread The Chic organisation - geniuses or what ?
that Dimitri's Lost In Music remix is probably the best thing he's ever heard, i got to thinking that it must be a good decade since i last felt that about an song or an album (Daft Punk's Discovery). I felt it about new records many times as a teen, and must have felt it about older records as a kid without really realising it, but much less so recently. It's certainly not something you hear said very often and you never read it in reviews. Nor on ILM much i'd wager.

When was the last time you said this to yourself or indeed to someone else?
What was the track/album/song?

Yesterday when listening to "The Neverending Story" by Limahl but I was stoned so I don't think it counts.

I had a few moments like that last night when listening to the new Nicolas Jaar. Tbh, I'm kind of scared to listen again and ruin it.

Old music: Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come, last month, as I began to explore jazz.

New music: Four Tet's "Angel Echoes," that godly vocal snippet and the chimes and throbbing bass. Early 2010.

It's been a while...maybe something by Arthur Russell when I was discovering him about five years ago?

Probably four years ago (almost to the day, thank you "Date Added" column) when I heard Pauline Oliveros' Crone Music for the first time.

The following Scooter songs make me feel that:
"I'm Raving"
"How Much is the Fish?"
"Neverending Story"
"Seven Bridges"
"The Sound Above My Hair"
"One (Always Hardcore)"
"Our Happy Hardcore"
"Roll Baby Roll"

"How Much is the Fish?" - is that some sort of Stump cover? *mind boggles*

nope, it's this:

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

literally now cos 'Percolator' just popped up in this mix I'm listening to :D

(OK not a 100% serious answer but close enough for now iirc)

This happens to me quite a lot actually. Only recently discovered Michel Polnareff, Console, Art Department and all seem to have been tailor-made for me to hyperbolically flip out about.

Listening to Dark yesterday? Possibly not but was feeling like, god I leave way too many intervals between listens.

May have even been since that, bits of that Caribou Vibration Ensemble live set knock my socks off.

Think it's been quite frequent to be totally whelmed by music recently. I was ripping some stuff to my computer then listening to it so going through some great music I hadn't heard that frequently before.

Finally heard Sabbath Assembly properly, can't find the right balance on my stereo. But ripped to wav through puter speakers (z4s) it sounded great.

Oh & the Pat Kilroy Light Of Day lp has some awesome bits.
Biggest letdown with music this week has been non-appearance so far of The New Age all around cd

Sleep's Dopesmoker/Jerusalem. Have been listening to it on pretty much a daily basis for about two months now. Holy Mountain is cool, but this is just so epic, gigantic, titanic.... superlative exhausting! Haven't compulsively listened to a single album since maybe a dub album about a decade ago ("Scientist rids the world..."), or maybe a Fela album about 7 years ago ("Best Best..."). When I first heard Massive Attack's "No Protection" I listened to that pretty compulsively, but I am totally into Sleep now and for the foreseeable future.

mbv's - i only said

pretty stock answer admittedly

for me, it's burial, untrue

Maybe Hypnotize by NERD.

probably Ready To Die a few months ago (heard it before but...)

also, pixies - river euphrates. first time i heard it i put it on repeat for at least 17 more times back to back.

I had a personal Alice Coltrane listening party last night. I had never really listened before...

so that, Journey in Satchidananda really hit me hard though.

ooh yeah that is all time great

for me probably hearing Arthur Russell's World Of Echo album in 2004.

"Nobody Knows The Trouble I've Seen" by Sam Cooke. Put it on for my drive home about a week ago, nearly had to pull over.

so this DOES happen a lot then!

Continuing the Arthur love, the first half a dozen songs on 'Another Thought', sometime around the beginning of last year.

"son of a french nobleman" by nikki sudden/dave kunsworth/jacobites

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTV1ADXYrVI

After a very long drought, this blew my mind a few weeks ago.

This whole soundtrack is great btw, if you dig Mario Bros and the sound of 80's tv themes.

Hearing "Resignation Rights" by Warm Ghost a couple of weeks ago. Was on headphones, at dawn, and the most amazing thing I'd ever heard.

Not in a few months - I need to start exploring.

That Warm Ghost song was the first time in quite a long while something had sideswiped me that hard. I couldnt speak for a few minutes afterwards.

Kaputt - Destroyer. Pretty much my wet dream in terms of the sound/production

definitely "the girl and the robot" by royksopp/robyn -- had it on repeat for hours a few days ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3a2qoyONVA

I always kinda hated screechy hardcore-ish stuff but about a year I heard "Set Fire to the Face On Fire" by the Blood Brothers and got extremely excited about it and listened to it a couple of times a day for a while. Before that it was probably Mingus' "Better Get It In Your Soul".

And even though I've heard it hundreds of times in the last 24 years, I needed to hear the Misfits' "Horror Business" for some reason and it was the best thing I'd listened to in ages.

last week, though it wasn't the 1st time i'd heard it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEM7mNjw_k8&feature=related

When i heard "The Creator has a Master Plan" for the first time last year

I'm not sure I ever experienced this. Unless it was The Sugarcubes' "Birthday" or something when I was a child. :)

A child!? How old are you?

questions that should not be asked because they make us all feel old exhibit one

sayin ;_;

LOL. Well I guess I was prepubescent at the time, though not a babe in arms by any means.

Demdike Stare for me, specifically "Eurydice" and "Regolith".

Discovering Genesis around 1994-ish.....

In terms of thinking that thing about something quite recent it must have been sometimes in the mid 80s...

Bonnie Prince B's "Lie Down in the Light" was making me feel this yesterday but let's be honest only an idiot would think this thing unless you're 12

I just re-listened to "Lets Just See" by Engineers and oh me oh my.

When i heard "The Creator has a Master Plan" for the first time last year

― Number None, Wednesday, February 23, 2011 2:26 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark

aside from a dry patch in the late 1990s, this has been an almost daily occurrence since about 1989 – whether it's hearing something new and amazing for the first time, or hearing new facets and details in something familiar. it's nigh-impossible to arrive at dispassionate historical ranking in the heat of the moment.

sir victor owaifo track is wonderful

Not quite the same thought but the last time I thought "damn, man, these guys have fed my record collection into their alien robot brains and produced this track scientifically designed to push all my YES!-buttons" was this week when I listened to my first song by the Psychic Paramount.

Then I listened to my second through sixth songs by the Psychic Paramount and determined that the album was in fact created by alien robots determined to provide the most frustrating listening experience for me personally, as the band are so fucking great when they hit a groove, but clearly hitting a groove is not what they want to do at all: all grooves after the first track are rapidly terminated within 10 seconds of entry.

(PS everyone else on the ILM thread I stole the recommendation from loves them, so, you know, this is just my personal story - doubtless someone will read this post and think that a free-noodly band that repeatedly almost coalesces into immense krauty juggernaut and then goes "ehh, just kidding" is exactly what they want, but I just wanted the immense krauty juggernaut myself)

When I got Deluxe by Harmonia last summer/autumn.

^^^ Excellent answer.

My problem with this question is that BEST means towering over literally everything else you've ever heard, and while I have had revelatory experiences concerning the genius of particular pieces of music, it's not often that I immediately decide that it renders all else redundant.

So, with that in mind, the last time I was struck so hard by a piece of music that I knew immediately it would be a favourite for all time, nestling firmly within the pantheon of much-beloved music, was Roberto Cacciapaglia/Ann Steel - The Ann Steel Album.

Really?
I know so many people who love that Ann Steel record, and as much as I <3 the backstory, and the "punk's so dull" sentiment, I've never felt as enthusiastic.

Los Campesinos!'s 'Straight In At 101' had me like this last year and now I just don't think anything will ever top it.

Really?
I know so many people who love that Ann Steel record, and as much as I <3 the backstory, and the "punk's so dull" sentiment, I've never felt as enthusiastic.

Oh man, I think it's so great. Maybe I should qualify it a little, I guess, as some of the other album tracks aren't as strong, but both 'Find Your Way' and 'My Time' are killer for always.

This has never happened to me.

it's been a while. probably boredoms, vision creation newsun around when it came out in the US. that was a gamechanger.

and what's the backstory for ann steel? xpost

i get this all the time when i hear a new song i really like its all i want to listen to - i can listen to the same track like ten, twenty times in a day. i mean im nvr like oh all music pales in comparison but for sum reason that particular song is just it 4 me right then, its all i want 2 hear

Have a history of this sort of thing
Gil Scott Heron - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Camden Market @ 1985
Stevie Wonder - If You Really Love Me, Williamson Park, Lancaster, early 00s
More recently, probably the Back to Black album

This afternoon. Benjamin Britten's one-act mystery opera CURLEW RIVER. Not the first time I've listened to it, but today it just somehow ~revealed itself~ and I am in fucking awe.

bits of Fish on the Clean Anthology about 5 minutes ago. Quite transcendent.

Probably when I got Oneida's Rated O, for a while. That fulfilled my need for the immense krauty juggernaut.

Previous to that, rolling for the first time and my inaugural listen to Music for 18 Musicians. Changed the whole way I thought/felt about music.

Backstory re: Ann Steel, as recalled, was that Cacciapaglia decided he wanted an American singer and contacted a Sears-or-equivalent catalogue model, who came up with alarmingly transgressive lyrics. Not an expert, can somebody else elaborate?

Last night when I was listening to the guitar solo on The Royal Scam

Monoton - 'Ein Wort', off 'Monotonprodukt 02'.. a few months back. Listening to it in the street, time slowing down, the surprising vocal halfway through.

Last week or so, when "Garden" by The Fall finally clicked 100%.

Yesterday morning, 'The Visitors," ABBA. I think it was the loud volume this time that pushed me over the edge.

When I purchased the compilation "You'll Never Play in this Town Again" and heard Harry Pussy for the first time.

i'm loving how Dr X O'Skeleton also added *where* and *when* it was that this happened. more of this!

i was thinking of Simon Reynolds' book Retromania and the attendant piece in The Guardian where he says
"The book is not a lament for a loss of quality music but it registers alarm about the disappearance of a certain quality in music: the "never heard this before" sensation of ecstatic disorientation caused by music that seems to come out of nowhere and point to a bright, or at least strange, future."

i think some of the choices upthread support the idea that this quality in music is still evident and causing the 'ecstatic disorientation' with some regularity.

Finally got around to diving into Faust, picking up IV the other day. I was listening to it while driving back from Michigan and when the drums kicked in seven minutes into "Krautrock", I had the biggest HOLY FUCK moment I've had in a loooong time.

i was a shuttle driver for a hotel, probably ten years ago. acre thrills by us maple. played it repeatedly while driving the van around town. it's only like a thirty minute album. i sat parked in a lot one summer afternoon.. listening, marveling at it. thought it was the most brilliant shit ever.

bending my head with the new andy stott record on a sunny train platform at 9am. It was aided by a load of feathers being blown everywhere making it look like i was underwater(potentially from a chicken hit at high speed or something), thought i was having an acid flashback

I discovered Robert Ashley in the last week and it has got me uttering superlatives. Individual tracks "The Park," "The Backyard," "the Bar," and "Isolde (Marie Isolde)" from Perfect Lives (Private Parts): Music Word Fire And I Would Do It Again (Coo Coo) are all sort of vying for "the is best thing ever."

Spiegel Im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt.

Any time I hear "Into the Void" or "Supernaut"

Just five minutes ago listening to this:

http://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=yLarjqylvaU

Or this rather:

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

I like "Lonely Planet Boy"

"Forbidden Colors" by Ryuchi & Davy

ctrl+f "smang"

The last time I can say it happened with absolute certainty was the first time I heard the demos for what would become School Of Seven Bells. I just thought "Holy shit, so many strands of things I really really love are meeting in this, this is going to be one of my favourite bands of all time."

I'm sure it's happened more recently, though, but probably with passing musical crushes - like every time someone posts something like "Carousel" on ILM and my ears just go up at the sound of it and I have to hear it 20 times in a row. I'm not sure that's the same as knowing "I will love this forever" the first time you hear something.

i only just heard stay with me by lorraine ellison the other day. the world opened up.

meads of asphodel the murder of jesus the jew. i still can't believe this album exists and isn't a figment of my imagination

that album is so crazy!

Possibly the Spoek Mathambo album from last year.

joy division when i seriously got into them. about ten years ago. i suppose they will stay the best thing i have ever heard until the end of my life. for a while talk talk came pretty close.

xxxp the Faust one - at the end of "No Harm" where it goes YEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!

depends on the quality of the weed.

sometime last week, probably.