Keeping Up With Music

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.