When you discover great new music that you really enjoy, do you listen to it constantly or do you try to listen to it sparingly over a long period so you don't grow tired of it?
I never gave much thought to music listening strategies, but around this time last year I discovered Khruangbin and I spent so much time listening to them from March to September that I kind of immunised my brain from enjoying the music. I'm thinking I should change my ways and spread out my listening so I can savour music for longer; maybe listen to a new album with each new day of the week instead of listening to the same album every day.
On a somewhat related note, how do people enjoy streaming services? I tried spotify but I found myself getting really annoyed at how many crap tracks I had to skip. Is this normal or should I learn to be more open and less finicky when it comes to music?
>>12736 There's a thread about spotify here >>12398, but I'd like to know:
Where do people actually buy music these days? If you're not a streaming cunt or a deviant vinylphile where can you actually pick up an honest to god CD to keep and rip from forever that isn't owned by Jeff Bezos? There's Bandcamp but that doesn't seem to have everything yet.
Anyone know if there's a name for the type of music you get on game over screens of the kind of late 90's era? Specifically the floaty, slightly mournful but ultimately optimistic themes as linked here. I'm sure I sound like a moron but I'm sure you'll know what I mean.
This is quite an interesting subject. I hope you'll excuse me dumping a bit of a stream of consciousness here.
I torrented shitloads when I was a younger lad, and I was quite a music fanatic between the ages of around 17-21ish. I could name all sorts of obscure thrash metal bands and discuss the finer points of how their early demos varied from their solitary 1987 full length; I was that kind of nerd. But at some point I think I burned myself out, and when I think about it most of my favourite music is stuff I had already discovered during that period of my life, with very little from the last several years.
At one point I had most of a 4tb drive full of music. Enough to last a lifetime and frankly there was more stuff on it than I ever listened to. Most of it was crap. And that's the thing, most music is crap. The more you listen to music in general, the more you realise how much of it overlaps, how much of it really is just more of the same. Gradually my perspective shifted- There's not much point digging for the most obscure hidden gems, because I already know Sodom had perfected what I want to hear on Persecution Mania. I already know Coroner had found the most precise apex of technicality and listenability in 1990. I already know Carnivore are perhaps the most unique and somehow catchy crossover of metal and punk. I already know Sepulura's Morbid Visions both anticipated and rendered the entire genre of black metal pretty much obsolete before it had even really begun, such is its pioneering quality. I already know Skeletonwitch and Vektor are the two contemporary acts who released the most "fresh" and exciting modern takes on the genre, but that they both went to shit after their first album. And so on and so on...
So at some point it just became very difficult to find new and interesting music. I could write a list of my "favourite albums" and it would still be probably at least fifty or sixty albums long, and that's still more music than most people have knowledge of existing, let alone listen to on a regular basis. Obviously I've tried branching out in to new genres (and I do like a lot more than just metal, honest), it's just that that's so time consuming to try and branch out when you find yourself a total beginner; and the only real guiding path you have is the YouTube (or spotify or whatever) recommendation algorithm. You might stumble upon the Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble one day and think "Hey, this is pretty neat, I wonder if there's more like this", but the rabbit hole it leads you on is invariably just "Yes, there's lots more like this- So much so that you may as well not bother, and just listen to the first one."
I suppose a great deal of the trouble is that as a guitarist and general amateur music person, a lot of my time is spent practising to keep on top of the long list of cover songs I have to know like the back of my hand, as well as playing along to backing tracks to keep my improvisation chops up to scratch, and so on... So I am sort of obliged to spin the same 50-odd tracks at least once or twice a week, as I have been for the better part of the last decade, and it's sort of numbed me to music in general. I wonder if that's unhealthy for my musical repertoire.
I usually play songs to death that I've newly discovered. And then at some point I will just leave them for a few weeks and the come back to them.
Which is why I was a full convert to digital music very early on. I was a weelad/young teenlad in the age when vinyl records and cassette tapes were still the norm and CDs and a CD player were simply outside the budget of twelve year old me. And it was always annoying that vinyl singles I'd bought from my saved up pocket money would wear out pretty quickly on my shit hand-me-down record player.
>At one point I had most of a 4tb drive full of music. Enough to last a lifetime and frankly there was more stuff on it than I ever listened to.
I remember many a house party in my student days where the music was coming from the party host's chock full hard drive, but if you stepped in to take over as DJ for a bit, you had to dig through dozens of obscure, fringe-taste albums worth of MP3s that were almost all unknown to you and everybody else, in order to find anything remotely playable and mass compatible that people at the party would enjoy.
I'm different in that respect. I just looked it up, I currently have 3,771 MP3 files that have been hand picked by me over the last 20 years. I've got a few noteworthy vintage albums in full in there, and the rest are sorted into folders by decade, but also by genres if they weren't pop mainstream songs. Maybe I just have a very mainstream taste in music, but I can guarantee you that with probably more than 75 percent of those songs, you'll at least say "Oh yeah, I remember that one".
>>13020 >most music is crap
Thank you for saying this, and for sharing your journey as a sweaty metalhead hipster. In the same 17-21-year-old bracket, I was absolutely obsessed with making sure I was the biggest mod that ever lived, and had a similar burnout experience. I found myself walking home listening to some obscure Japenese mod revival band that I'd had to scour fucking blogspot pages to find a link to a WinRAR archive with their album in. Unsurprisingly, it was absolute fucking gash, but adolescent me was far too chuffed with himself for almost definitely being the only person in the world listening to it.
>>13020 I was a teen in the early 00's, and growing up with shite internet and a shared family computer I never managed to download as much as I would like so I didn't have that sort of experience. Also although I grew up with private keyboard tutoring from a younger age I never really "got into" music until I was 15 and discovered SOAD and it just opened a whole world for me I didn't know existed.
I'm the type of person who tends to listen to tracks I like over and over to really explore all the details. I also often go back to old favourites. I'd describe my tastes as very wide ranging, mostly centred on prog metal but I listen to general metal, numetal, some classic rock, bits of jazz, frank zappa that type of thing. And recently I've been getting more and more into the really weird and unusual styles of bands like Igorrr, clowncore and that type of thing because it's so complex and deep there's always something new to hear. I very much agree with your sentiment that most music is crap, everything is derivative to some extent but so many times I'm browsing on spotify and so many tracks are just so incredibly generic I can't hold any interest in it.
A big part of it is modern culture has changed the type of people who create music. The blues and Jazz were created by people who had very difficult lives and music was their only outlet, in the 90s so many big bands were born out of people living on the breadline being able to spend all their time creating music as a passion while living on jobseekers. Pretty much all modern music now though is out of necessity coming from people who have to spend more time creating a social media presence to promote their work than they can spend creating music.
One of my favourite artists is Devin Towsend, and I've had his newest album on repeat a lot recently. And it's an interesting project. During the first covid quarantine he started doing jamming sessions over zoom with all his friends and recording everything they played, afterwards he took all those recordings from about 50 different people and arranged them into an album. It's perhaps a long way from what most people would even call "music" at all, but I love it. It's unique, schizophrenic, and complex, but somehow he tied it all together into one piece with a single theme and it works for me.
>>13025 Thanks, but that type of stuff doesn't really do anything for me.
Along sort of similar lines though I do like a lot of what Venetian Snares makes.
>>13027 I heard about Yma Sumac recently. She was a Peruvian opera singer with an amazing vocal range, so I looked up her singing on YouTube, and I found this which is pretty much the maddest shit I have ever heard.
Failing that, I like Laurie Anderson, but you might well know all about Laurie Anderson if you listen to mental shit exclusively.
