My nephew Josh sent me a great list of musical recommendations this week (thanks, Josh!), and I’ve been working my way through them. A few are ambient/minimalist artists, which is a genre I’ve only recently become interested in. I’ve read it described as music that doesn’t require you to pay attention to it, but it also rewards whatever attention you give it.

Bing & Ruth is an ambient ensemble that can include piano, clarinet, bass, cello, and a tape-delay operator (for creating echo effects using analog tape). The group centers around pianist David Moore, and I really enjoyed this performance:

A few months ago, my piano teacher told me about a piece called Spiegel im Spiegel, by minimalist composer Arvo Pärt. Thinking that “minimalist” = “ambient,” I brought it up on YouTube to listen to while I worked. Then, I got absolutely nothing done for the 8 minutes until it was over.

It’s very slow, but it completely captured my attention. I just stared at the wall and existed. Your mileage may vary, but for me, this was a very powerful peice of art.

I’d like to learn more about Pärt. He was born in 1935 in Estonia, is a devout Russian Orthodox Catholic, and, according to this article, “Thom Yorke, PJ Harvey, Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave, and Keith Jarrett all claim him as a major influence.”

Finally, I doodled this, which may be a scene from my own future:

A couple of weeks ago, while listening to a playlist on Spotify, I suddenly got that wonderful feeling of needing to know what song I was listening to. The song was Distant Past, by the band Everything Everything, and I’ve been listening to their album Get To Heaven quite a bit since then.

You can’t miss the influence of Radiohead in their music. Reviewers use phrases like “complex instrumentation,” “mathematical grooves,” and “a slightly more animated Thom Yorke” when describing them. One also aptly described their sound as “a riot in a melody factory.”

Set against the catchy melodies are sci-fi lyrics from a dystopian future (or present? past?). These are sometimes sung very quickly, so there’s a lot to unpack. From Wikipedia:

The lyrics were inspired when the Manchester band took a year off from touring, and [vocalist Jonathan] Higgs started watching rolling news on a loop”. Higgs said, “After we’d finished the record, I read the lyrics back and I realised I’d written a horror bible.

I noticed another theme among reviews. Critics nearly always find a way to mention that the band’s music is kind of weird: “quirky vocals,” “weirdo,” “nerdy,” “cerebral,” “eccentric.” I guess it is kind of unusual, but I just thought of it as “good.” Which is, you know, unusual.

How did I find this band?

When I decided to write this post, I quickly realized that I didn’t really know how I had discovered the band. It’s really hard to keep track of this. You listen to a lot of duds when trying to find new songs that you like, so it doesn’t make sense to write down where you found everything as you go. You don’t always know immediately how much you like something, either.

With a little browser history forensics, I was able to piece it together:

• I started by searching on Spotify for Belle and Sebastian.
• I scrolled down to their Artist Playlists.
• Distant Past is in their home listening playlist.

December is a great time to be getting back into music, since there are so many “The Best Albums of 2017” lists, so I’ve been reading through some of these and listening along in Spotify. For example, I listened to at least part of every album on Stephen Thompson’s Best Albums of 2017, and I can tell I need to spend more time with some of these (especially Big Thief and Phoebe Bridgers).

Sylvan Esso

His pick for #1 album of 2017 was What Now, by Sylvan Esso. I happened to watch this band’s Tiny Desk concert on Youtube a few months ago, and I loved how much they seemed to be enjoying themselves. They are two people, Nick Sanborn (beats & electronics) and Amelia Meath (vocals & dancing around in moon boots). I haven’t heard much from What Now yet, but a few months ago they recorded an EP of a few of their songs with a full band. These are called the Echo Mountain Sessions, and I really like that version of their song, The Glow:

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

A friend introduced me to this recently, and I’ll definitely be listening to the album The Nashville Sound more. Right now, the songs that stick out to me are both songs about marriage:

• Molotov, about how he abandoned old promises to himself when making new ones to his wife
• If We Were Vampires, about how his marriage will ultimately end when he or his wife (who sings and plays the violin with him) dies

These are some heavy themes, but the band also jokes around and has a lot of fun together in their Tiny Desk concert.

Other stuff

• Bon Iver - I Can’t Make You Love Me” (cover of the Bonnie Raitt song)
• Youth Lagoon - 17 (found while stumbling around Spotify)
• Vetiver - Houses (I bought this CD for $1 at Half Price Books. This song is a cover; here’s the original)
• Mount Eerie - Real Death “When real death enters the room, all poetry is dumb.”
• This is the Kit - Bulletproof Kate Stables plays a “zither banjo” in this song. The 5th (drone) string is tunneled through the fretboard so the tuning knob is on the head along with the knobs for the other strings.

Welcome to Cowpunk. I’m 37, I used to listen to new music all the time, and now I hardly recognize a single artist when I browse iTunes or Spotify. I think this is somewhat normal: Your peak years for experimenting with different artists are in high school and college, but after that, you’ve imprinted on the artists and styles you like, so anything new just doesn’t seem as good as the old stuff.

It seems like the only music I know I like came out between 1990 and 2006 or so. To test this theory, I just went through the music collection on my computer and made a list of albums that I could, at one point in my life at least, sing along with almost all the way through. Note the years on these:

• Belle and Sebastian - If You’re Feeling Sinister (1996)
• Ben Folds - Rockin’ the Suburbs (2001)
• Black Eyed Sceva - Way Before the Flood (1995)
• Braid - Frame & Canvas (1998)
• Built to Spill - Keep It Like a Secret (1999)
• Counting Crows - August and Everything After (1993)
• Counting Crows - Recovering the Satellites (1996)
• D.J. Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince - And In This Corner… (1989)
• Fountains of Wayne - Utopia Parkway (1999)
• Guided By Voices - Bee Thousand (1994)
• Guster - Goldfly (1997)
• Guster - Lost and Gone Forever (1999)
• James Iha - Let It Come Down (1998)
• Jets to Brazil - Orange Rhyming Dictionary (1998)
• Kishi Bashi - Lighght (2014)
• Mary Lou Lord - Got No Shadow (1998)
• Midnight Oil - Earth and Sun and Moon (1993)
• Modest Mouse - Building Nothing Out of Something (1999)
• Modest Moust - The Moon and Antarctica (2000)
• Paul Simon - Negotiations and Love Songs (1988)
• Poor Old Lu - Sin (1995)
• Radiohead - O.K. Computer (1997)
• Saves the Day - I’m Sorry I’m Leaving (1999)
• Soul Coughing - El Oso (1998)
• Sufjan Stevens - Come On Feel the Illinoise! (2005)
• They Might Be Giants - Flood (1990)

There’s nothing there earlier than 1989. Aside from a 2014 outlier, the latest release is from 2005. I’ve certainly listened to some music published more recently (and some published longer ago), but not so fervently.

(While creating this list, I put that James Iha album on in the background. After a few minutes, I realized I was singing along without thinking about it. I have not listened to that one in probably 15 years! But it holds up.)

So, as I discover artists, albums, or songs that I like, I’ll share them here. I will also be learning about newer music discovery methods, and I’ll share what I learn about those as well. My goal for 2018 is to end the year with some new additions to this list.