Keeping Up With Music

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.

...and i sang barry manilow's i cant smile without you all the way home on my bike home after grocery shopping. They usually play motown.

I feel like almost all music sounds pretty good to me now [...] but also very little blows me away

This is where I'm at too. When I was young and getting into music it felt like I was constantly finding some new amazing thing. I guess that's not really sustainable as at a certain point you've heard enough that it becomes harder to be surprised with something, but I feel like I'm still always chasing that feeling you get when you find something truly special.

I'm like a person with a perfectly good bicycle. Nothing wrong with it. It works for me. If you give me a second bicycle that's a little better, great. Now I have two good bicycles.

A third bicycle, um, okay. Maybe for different kinds of trips or terrain. Fourth bicycle? One can be a backup. Or if I want to ride with a friend. Fifth bicycle? Uh, I'm set, thanks. Nothing wrong with the other three, I'm not tired of them.

Now imagine a bike-loving forum where almost everybody is like "have you seen the new bikes coming out lately? This one is exciting, it's got gears you shift with your thumb! Ooh, what about this one, it's shiny and green." Cool, I'll take a look but I already have plenty.

Then someone else comes along and says "hey I was just out browsing through vintage bike shops and did you know there's this whole vibrant subculture around French bikes from the 1950s; here's a rare DeCloux that I am really salivating over." Cool, I'll take a look but I already have plenty. Including my first bike, which I am still using and getting joy out of.

Collectively the bike enthusiasts would ask if I really do in fact love bikes, if I think four bikes is sufficient and I'm neither keeping up with new bikes nor schooling myself on the classics.

There's plenty of old music I still like, some I haven't explored. Of course if I chance to hear something new to me and exciting, I will dig deeper. But it is not a hunger.

Having grown up in the bike biz, this is all too real. Of course I shirked off my time in the bike shop by sneaking off and exploring local record stores.

Interesting revive. I've also been thinking about the combination of feeling overwhelmed by output and the enjoyment curve flattening. Within the same year I've thought "there is nothing really great coming out anymore" and "there is too much good music to keep up with / pay proper attention to." And I've also started to think that I prefer less digitized/"layered" music, though I worry that has a lot to do with doing the majority of my listening on headphones these days. Very curious how much this tracks with (middle) age/specific generational placement rather than a reaction to the music per se. I also see in myself some lingering effects of the pandemic.

I think we're also so saturated in computer-generated/mediated aesthetic experiences these days, so this might be like getting into perfume or cooking or woodworking or how a random movie from the 80s or 90s can look exquisitely beautiful solely by virtue of it being shot on film, lit with real light, and not digitally coloured. I remember reading about some marxist (iirc) ethnomusicologist who hated recorded music and saw it as a betrayal of music's core social purpose. At the time I heard that I was obsessed with dub and krautrock and dozens of other examples of studio magic so I thought that was insane, but now I wonder if he had a point.

I remember reading about some marxist (iirc) ethnomusicologist who hated recorded music and saw it as a betrayal of music's core social purpose.

I think Sonny Rollins said something along those lines too? Perhaps more to do with wanting the primacy of the moment over documentation. Read it on here I'm pretty sure, it was one of the big jazz legends anyway.

Very curious how much this tracks with (middle) age/specific generational placement rather than a reaction to the music per se.

I find this quite maddening, otoh it's a bit knee jerk and reductive to constantly claim any sense of cultural change is just this but also you can never count it out as a factor.

ha yeah exactly, constantly second-guessing your own responses also starts to feel compulsive & just another layer between you and the experience -- maddening otm

I definitely have enough music already, more than enough, and I'd be lying if I claimed to be able to remotely keep up with things. I do love hearing new music I like but even then it takes a lot to make it really stick. Much respect to all the folks that can keep track of all the metal bands alone, though, you are doing the devil's work.

I remember reading about some marxist (iirc) ethnomusicologist who hated recorded music and saw it as a betrayal of music's core social purpose.

I think Sonny Rollins said something along those lines too? Perhaps more to do with wanting the primacy of the moment over documentation. Read it on here I'm pretty sure, it was one of the big jazz legends anyway.

It was me

Pop vs. Rock = Radio vs. Record collection?

i was wrong about radio though, all it takes is a spin of the dial to be brought somewhere very different and unexpected

Whenever I'm listening to the radio and a classic Timbaland- or Neptunes-produced (or influenced) jam pops up I think, OK, that was peak listening to the radio and it's been downhill ever since. I don't think it's my age, either, just so much strange and novel and entertaining stuff. Can't think of the last time I turned on the radio and heard something new that wasn't relatively safe, familiar and/or dull, though I'm always hopeful!

Agreed that this is an interesting revive. I think that there is a ton of great music coming out all the time, but like others here, if something doesn’t grab me on first or second listen, I don’t return to it. I have even started deleting stuff, whereas I used to keep it in the collection “just in case.” Case in point: the HAAi album and Hotline TNT album from this year— they’re just not interesting or captivating enough to make me want to listen again.

It does remind me, tho, that sometimes I would buy a CD or record without hearing much of it, and then it would languish because I didn’t really like it much!!

I must admit that I was playing my "end of year" compilation and had a vague sense of ... I've not kept up.

xp lol yes it's easy to romanticize the 'authentic and intimate' relationship one has with music on physical media, versus the reality of owning albums you've heard 1-4 times and will never play again.

yeah, looking at my CD collection I'm sure there are some (not that many, but probably between 5 and 10) that I have owned for 20+ years and still haven't listened to all the way through. I'll get around to them eventually.

There's also definitely a not insignificant portion that I have listened to 3 times or less.

My wife pulled something from our stacks today — this Airto Moreira/Flora Purim compilation — that I bought two years ago and immediately shelved. We listened to the first disc at lunchtime. It's really good!

My arbitrary filter for checking out new records is mostly: “is the cover art good or interesting”

I have a visceral negative reaction to most new singers :/

I stopped streaming this year but years of it definitely sort of distilled my taste into easy listening

Completely agree with boxed about how cool it is to just be able listen to something once and that being enough, like I have no need to listen to that Sublime Frequencies snakehandler album again but sure did “enjoy” the one listen.

2022 was the first year in awhile where I discovered loads of new tracks I absolutely loved.

I used to occasionally buy a CD that didn’t really grab me at first, but rather than file it away I would force myself to listen to it over and over, if nothing else than to get my money’s worth. Eventually I would come to like the CD, and ultimately I started to love it. Like, really love it. And it makes me wonder if it just took me some time to figure out what the artist was going for, or did I simply Stockholm myself into liking it? I guess they could both be correct.

Every year around this time I start to think about how out of touch I am with new music, but then I usually spend time exploring year-end lists and find there were some things I liked this year after all. Maybe the year will come when even that ritual yields diminishing returns, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Participating in the ILM EOY poll has made me realize that 25 albums / tracks is almost exactly what I can realistically and meaningfully digest in over 12 months. Even if I listen to 50-100 albums, there is little chance that more than 25 will stay with me, and it could also be much less. The polls encourages me to relisten and think about what exactly I'm appreciating. That's my boring quality over quantity contribution here.

I keep trying to locate a YouTube playlist that would functionally serve as an MTV replacement for me. I didn't get all of my new music from music videos when I was growing up, but it played a substantial role in wiring my brain. Nowadays, I mostly only end up watching videos of bands that I already know through other sources.

I feel like someone out there must be curating a 120 Minutes-eque playlist of new music videos. I've only done a little searching, but the results I've found haven't been promising.

I used to occasionally buy a CD that didn’t really grab me at first, but rather than file it away I would force myself to listen to it over and over, if nothing else than to get my money’s worth. Eventually I would come to like the CD, and ultimately I started to love it. Like, really love it. And it makes me wonder if it just took me some time to figure out what the artist was going for, or did I simply Stockholm myself into liking it? I guess they could both be correct.

I did this too. I don't think I ended up straight up loving those records but I absolutely learned that with enough time you can develop appreciation and fondness for almost any album, which is partially what has landed me in "most stuff sounds fine" world now. But also getting there can be hard work, and as the idea of making music journalism my profession receded ever further I got to a point where I couldn't really be bothered and started being a bit more hedonistic in my listening. I do still think learning to love something you initially didn't enjoy can be very rewarding, but doing too much of that can also suck the joy out of it.

Yes, this lesson is what I learned with the new Patrick Wolf record. I love his voice, and the arrangements are lovely, but of both the new record and across his career, I can say: I don’t like his lyrics . The only exception is The Night Safari record. Otherwise, I just can’t take the lyrics at all— and I only realized that this was the problem after listening to the new record more than a dozen times, as well as returning to the older records, too.

there's also catching up with the entirity of the recorded history of worldwide music, which is a fomo i prefer to whoever the fuck is wearing skinny trousers and motorcycle jackets this week

Keeping up vs. Catching up. I prefer the latter