Music discovery and listening

How do you keep up with the latest music releases? More generally, how do you discover new music to listen to? (At least music that’s new to you.)

Are you beholden to whatever Spotify and commercial FM radio stations are paid to promote to you? Do you get recommendations from people whose taste matches your own? Or maybe whose taste doesn’t quite match your own? Do you let your streaming music provider’s algorithm decide?

Or do you just not listen to new music?

Here’s how I do it: every few weeks I switch between music discovery mode and music listening mode.

Screenshot from YouTube Music’s music discovery playlists. There are songs and albums listed under two headings: ‘New releases’ and ‘Mixed for you’.

Music discovery mode

In music discovery mode I listen to lots of songs I haven’t heard before, regardless of whether they’re old or new releases.

I do that by actively seeking out music from a range of sources, like:

  • YouTube Music’s various discovery, new-release, ‘mixed for you’, and auto-play playlists,

  • commercial FM radio stations in Melbourne (only when I’m in the car),

  • David Byrne Radio,

  • recommendations from podcasts (like the Women of Rock Oral History Project),

  • music from the movies and television shows I’m watching, and

  • full album listens based on whatever random song I’ve heard or music-related thought I’ve recently had.

That last one is possibly the most fun, by the way. I love listening to full albums and this lets me listen to both old and new albums, from both current and past artists.

Like recently ‘I’m Not Over’ by Carolina Liar popped into my head, so I went and listened to their whole ‘Coming To Terms’ album. And most recently I listened to Michelle Branch’s new album, ‘The Trouble with Fever’, which I really liked.

Anyway, if I like any of the songs I hear – or I at least want to give them a second listen – I’ll add those songs to my ‘current’ playlist.

Screenshot from the website of musician David Byrne, showing his radio station page – where he compiles and publishes playlists on different topics, mood, and type of music.

Music listening mode

After a period of discovery I’ll move into music listening mode. That’s basically me listening to my ‘current’ playlist, usually on shuffle :)

Eventually, when/if I get tired of a song, I’ll remove it from my playlist. And, if I really liked it, I’ll add it to my YouTube Music ‘library’.

So that’s what works for me.

What system do you use? Did you put much thought into it? How have you tweaked it over the years? And how is all that working for you? I’d love to know.

Musical mash-ups with cats

I love musical mash-ups with cats! Here are some of my recent favourites.

Meredith Bull

The first person I saw making these types of mash-ups was Meredith Bull on TikTok back in 2020. These are my two favourites from her.

Sick of this empty cup

I don’t want to embed the original TikTok video in my blog, so here’s the YouTube version. She’s since released a full-length version of this that’s available from all music streamers.

I don’t wanna be touched

Here’s her initial mash-up (again, not the original TikTok).

This one she first developed into a full song and then just released a music video for!

The Kiffness

The other person who’s been doing fun mash-ups for a while is The Kiffness on YouTube.

Alugalug Cat (International Symphonic Mashup)

His original version of ‘Alugalug Cat’ is nice, but then he collaborated with a bunch of musicians from around the world to create this international symphonic version — which I adore.

Alugalug Cat 2.0 (Please Go Away)

This week he’s back with a follow-up.

Sherzod Ergashev

Finally there’s Sherzod Ergashev, who has done two mash-ups I love.

Barchaga a’lo kayfiyat (good mood for everyone)

This song certainly puts me in a good mood every time :)

Funny Cat cover

I love both The Kiffness and Sherzod’s mash-ups with this cat :)

Let me know if you have any favourite musical cat mash-ups. I’d love to hear them!

Ludovico Einaudi at Sidney Myer Bowl

After a day at the Australian Open tennis, Nadia and I went to the the Sidney Myer Bowl to watch the fantastic Ludovico Einaudi on his Seven Days Walking world tour.

This is ten minutes before the performance started.

A large crowd is seated on a hill overlooking an open air stage area, the front of which is visible to the extreme left of the photo.

And here’s the man himself, along with his accompanying performers on violin and cello.

A stage showing a man playing a grand piano while two performers on the other side of the piano are playing a violin and cello.

My favourite bit of the performance, I think, was when the three musicians improvised what they were playing based on the outline of peaks of three mountain ranges in the Alps (where Einaudi was when he came up with the music for Seven Days Walking).

Three performers are stage on playing a grand piano, violin, and cello. They’re looking at a massive screen behind the stage, across which three coloured lines show the outline of mountain ranges. The musicians are each following one line and are adjusting their music based on what these overlapping coloured lines are doing as they’re drawn across the screen.

Even if you’re not into classical music you should check Einaudi out. If nothing else listen to ‘Night’, which is my favourite track from his 2015 ‘Elements’ album.

Keyboard shortcut muscle memory

There’s a lot to be said about muscle memory.

I subscribed to Google Play Music in July 2013 and have been using it almost exclusively to listen to all my music since then. The only time I use a local media player on my laptop is when I want to listen to a bunch of high resolution albums I have in FLAC, which isn’t all that often these days.

So it still surprises me, then, when I find myself using — without a second thought — all the important keyboard shortcuts in Winamp!

WinAmp interface showing the album being played is Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's Chinese New Year concert

One of the highlights of this week was watching the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s (MSO) annual Chinese New Year concert.

This year’s East Meets West show was all about “symphony meets rock ‘n roll” and it featured the MSO and Beijing-based Mongolian rock band Hanggai.

If you haven’t heard Hanggai before, here’s one of their songs they performed (accompanied by the MSO).

New Favourite: Pinguin Radio

I think my new favourite web radio station is ​Pinguin Radio. 

They're an independent radio station that play:

a mix of pop, rock, hiphop, reggae, folk, metal, and singer-songwriters

Their music mix includes "golden oldies but especially new music" and they "specialize in broadcasting and developing new indie or alternative music."

Besides, how could you not like a radio station with the motto:​

No bullshit, great music

​:)

Give 'em a listen. They're well worth it. ​

Great Music Production: 'Mirrors'

Justin Timberlake's latest single, 'Mirrors', is seriously good.

Very few artists and their producers achieve this level of complex simplicity in their music. (In this album the producers were Justin Timberlake, Timbaland, and J-Ro.) The musical layers are lovely and their spatial positioning (in the stereo sound field) is exceptional.

I particularly love the bit in the bridge (from 5:30 to 6:00) in which they layer the "You are / you are / the love / of my life" lyrics. That's at least three, though more likely five (or perhaps six) vocal layers of that lyric alone.

Dude.

Online content & services worth paying for

I get a lot of ‘free’ stuff from the Internet – everything from news and entertainment to email and online storage.

By 'free', of course, I mean ad-supported (in most cases) so while I do technically pay for these services with my time, attention, and user profile data I don't directly pay for them in cash.

There are, however, a bunch of online services that I do explicitly pay for with my own money.

Paid Services

These include services you can't access without a subscription, such as:

I only recently signed up with MOG, by the way, and chose to pay them over their competitors for two main reasons: they stream high quality music (320kbps over WiFi and 4G) and, since they’re a Telstra partner, streaming music from them doesn’t count toward your mobile data bandwidth. Being both an audiophile who values high quality music and a Telstra mobile customer both of these are excellent reasons.

Payment Optional & Freemium Services

The other online services I pay for/contribute to are the kind that you can access for free but can also support financially if you so choose.

These include the news, information, and editorial services like:

With the exception of Wikipedia, to which I donate annually, the rest I support through automatic monthly micropayments.

The freemium services (products, really) that I pay for include:

  • Online information management from Evernote
  • Online photo storage from Flickr

Oh, and depending on how Fairfax rolls things out, I’ll probably subscribe to The Age Online, too, once they set up their paywall. And, speaking of news outlets, I also used to subscribe to the Economist but, much as I loved their content and editorial, I wasn’t getting enough of a return on my investment.

So that’s my list. What online services – content services or products – do you pay for?

Bands I Am Impressed By (Part 2)

In Part 1 I talked about how The Presets, Beyoncé, and The Black Eyed Peas have really impressed me with their latest albums.

Those artists impressed me because their music is unusual, interesting, and, musically simple, powerful, energy filled. The following three artists take a different approach.

Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga is anything but simple, though she’s no less smart, talented, or powerful than the other three.

Unlike artists such as Katy Perry and Ke$ha, who appear to be victims of cookie-cutter, hyper-sexualized American popular music and culture, Lady Gaga is in totally charge of her own destiny.

In fact, her attitude is more like: “I’ll take your cookie-cutter-ness and hyper-sexuality and will raise them to my own bizarre, cliche-breaking, concept-twisting level. Oh, and I’ll make incredibly catchy and insanely successful music while doing so.”

One of the best ways to compare and contrast Katy Perry, Ke$ha, and Lady Gaga is to read their entries on the awesome TV Tropes wiki:

And since it’ll take forever to go through Lady Gaga’s entry here are three quick highlights from those three pages:

Lady Gaga is awesome. Why? Because Lady Gaga is awesome.

Theresa Andersson

Switching genres completely, someone else who is doing things her own way is Theresa Andersson.

Instead of telling you more about this one-woman powerhouse, I recommend you watch these two videos for ‘Na Na Na’ and ‘Birds Fly Away’:

Linkin Park

And now for something completely different: the fabulous Linkin Park.

Linkin Park are actually why I started writing these blog posts. A couple of nights ago I listened to their latest single, ‘Waiting for the End’, on YouTube and loved it. And since I also loved their previous album, Minutes to Midnight, I went straight to their website and bought A Thousand Suns (DRM-free 320kbps MP3s!).

I started listening to this once it finished downloading and, frankly, I couldn’t put it down. Why? Because it’s been quite a while since someone’s put together a really good rock concept album.

(I’m not a big enough fan of Green Day to have liked 21st Century Breakdown all that much and Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero was released in 2007. Oh, and U2’s No Line on The Horizon was more of an experimental album than a proper concept album.)

To reinforce the fact that this is, indeed, a concept album that should be listened to from start to finish at least once, when you download the album you also get an MP3 called ‘A Thousand Suns – The Full Experience’ which is the entire 47:56 minute album as a single track :)

What’s cooler is that this album fits really well with the kind of music I’m listening to and the kinds of books I’m reading these days: Hans Zimmer’s soundtracks to ‘The Dark Knight’ and ‘Inception’ and China Miéville’s ‘The City and the City’. So songs and stories about war, dystopia, human struggle, and human perseverance, not only seem to be the order of the day – thanks to our global political and economic climate – they’re also what I’m into right now.

The best part is that, like any good concept album (or, indeed, great soundtrack), this one contains excellent music and is really well textured, structured, and paced.

Also, it sounds like a mixture of Linkin Park, Nine Inch Nails, U2, and, in one song, Public Enemy. How could you not love that combination? :)  My current favourite song from the album, by the way, is ‘Blackout’.

 

So there you have it: six bands (well, technically, ‘artists’ since that’s the more accurate and more all-encompassing term) that have impressed me most over the last couple of years. I hope you enjoy their music, too.

Bands I Am Impressed By (Part 1)

There are three things you should know about me:

  1. First, I like and enjoy listening to most kinds of music. Tune me into a rock, top 40, 80s, easy listening, alternative, classical, or dance radio station and I’ll be happy. That said, the the stuff I listen to most comes from the rock, pop, alternative, and electronica genres (in their broadest definitions).
  2. Second, I am a musician (mainly drums and backing vocals) and music producer so, compared to most other people, when I listen to music I hear and pick up on more than they do. This is because I have trained my ear to do so.
  3. Third, while I do consider myself to be an audiophile, I do not consider myself to be a music critic/journalist (in the best possible use of that term) or a music snob (in the worst possible use of that term).

These things are important to know because, while I listen to a great deal of music – a lot of which I enjoy – there aren’t that many artists who make me stop and say, “wow…now that’s impressive.”

The few who have made me say that – that is, the artists I have been most impressed by – over the last two years are as follows.

The Presets

The Presets really kick ass. The musicality, energy, and raw-but-brilliantly-produced music whacks you across the face and makes you want to…well, get up and stomp.

My favourite songs off their 2008 album Apocalypso are ‘This Boy’s in Love’ and ‘My People’.

Beyoncé

Beyoncé blew me away with some of the songs from her 2008 album, I Am…Sasha Fierce.

The powerful simplicity, strong groove, and highly-charged emptiness in her music are fantastic. With so many musicians trying to squeeze more and more into each of their songs it was great to see a powerful musician like her going the other way. Of course, she couldn’t have done this if she wasn’t as talented or as capable.

And, being who she is, Beyoncé took this up a notch and made two fabulous videos that were as simple and powerful as the songs they were based on (i.e. ‘Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)’ and ‘Sweet Dreams’).

The Black Eyed Peas

The Black Eyed Peas have their own version of simple, groovy, and powerful music (though they do say their latest album was partly influenced by The Presets).

In fact, they’ve done stuff on their their 2009 album, The E.N.D., that I don’t think anyone else in the music industry would dare to do.

For starters, they really stripped down what they put into their songs. Like Beyoncé, they added more space and more silence. This, in turn, made the rest of their music much more powerful. Quality over quantity. Take, for example, their hugely popular song ‘I Gotta Feeling’ which is quite empty musically but it still highly enjoyable and danceable. (It even got its own flash mob live video version thanks to Oprah.)

Importantly, though, in their desire to make a futurist album, they did all sorts of fun things with their music and vocals. For example, they raised the pitch of Fergie vocals on ‘Rock That Body’ so she sounds like a chipmunk and they lowered the pitch of apl.de.ap vocals on ‘Meet Me Halfway’ so he sounds like…er, a deep-voiced robot or something.

Despite all this, their music is fantastic though, admittedly, their lyrics won’t win any literary awards :)

 

[Continued in Part 2]

I Bought Myself a Cowon S9 MP3 Player

So, after much research and analysis I bought myself a Cowon S9 mp3 player which arrived in the mail yesterday:

Cowon S9

[Source: Trusted Reviews]

Why a new MP3 Player?


I’ve been wanting to buy myself a new MP3 player for a while now. The iriver E100 that I have is decent enough, but it does have a few problems.

For example, its UI is rather clunky and I didn’t want to deal with slow menus, slow scrolling, and the inability to quickly forward through an audio track or podcast any more.

I was also feeling limited by its 2GB storage space and lack of good quality video playback (though the latter was more of a secondary concern).

Research Mode


So, last week I went into research mode and started to build a shortlist of players that met my needs.

My needs, by the way, were:

  • Excellent quality sound

  • Podcast support

  • Audible support

  • Small and light (so, most likely, a Flash memory based player and not a hard disk based one)

  • Plenty of storage space (at least 8GB)

  • A good UI

  • Ideally, good quality video


My early first choice was the Microsoft Zune HD but that’s still not available in Australia so it dropped out of the running pretty early on.

Most of the Sony and Samsung players dropped out, too. They had good quality sound but were lacking in one aspect or the other. The ones that fit the bill were out of my price range. I considered briefly the thought of getting an iPod – either the Nano or the Touch – but the iPods have always far to limited for my liking.

FYI: If you’re interested in this kind of thing, check out Pocketable’s ‘Apple iPod touch 2G vs. Cowon S9 vs. Samsung P3’ comparison.

Shortlist, then a Selection


So I ended up with a shortlist of three players:

All three met my needs but the S9, though it cost more than the other two, gave me more than what I wanted while remaining within my price range.

Specifically, the S9 had excellent quality audio while the other two had merely ‘very good’ quality audio.

It also had excellent quality video on a fabulous widescreen display, which was a big bonus. The Fuze’s video quality, meanwhile, was terrible while the X-Fi’s was good, though not widescreen.

And, while the S9 didn’t have the additional features the X-Fi had, I really didn’t want or need all those additional features.

So that was that. I ordered the S9 from Eljo Media last Sunday and it arrived in the mail yesterday. I also bought for it a leather carrying case and a mains charger.

I have since spent the day exploring it, updating its firmware, and copying my media onto it.

My early thoughts: it’s awesome :)

Good Quality Headphones to Match


To round off my move into ‘excellent’ quality audio, by the way, I also wanted to buy a pair of quality earphones.

I ended up getting the HiFiMan RE0 In-ear Earphones Headphones (i.e. canalphones) from Headphonics:

2008Nov17220821re0-4_334_241

[Source: HiFiMan]

FYI: If you’re interested in quality headphones, by the way, check out Headphonic’s Top Picks in headphones.

These haven’t arrived yet because I ordered them a day after I ordered the S9 but I trust they’ll be awesome, too.

UPDATE: The headphones arrived this morning and they are, indeed, awesome. First off, they're made of lightweight metal and not plastic, which is brilliant. They also have five different eartips of different lengths (i.e. both single and double flange) and diameters. Finally, they come with a detachable clip (to clip the cord to your shirt) and five pairs of fabric mesh filters (i.e. covers) for the micro-speaker bit of the earbud. For much more on these these earphones, check out this awesome review by ClieOS.

Post Script: Being an Audiophile


So, now that I have excellent quality music equipment (and most of my music is encoded in high bit-rate MP3 format), I can go back to being an active audiophile.

I’ve actually been an audiophile – though not of the insufferable variety – since I co-produced an album for the band I used to be in back in 2004. During that period I trained my ear to listen to music much more deeply and I haven’t looked back since. So much so that badly produced, over-produced, or over-mastered music now really irritates me.

So, while I’ve had this love of quality music for a while, I haven’t always had the equipment to enjoy my music to the fullest. Well, with the Cowon S9 and the HiFiMan RE0, my situation has changed: I’m back :)

FYI: If you’re interested, here are some articles for your inner audiophile (with a focus on MP3 compression, modern music mastering techniques, and the loudness was):

Moby, Live in Melbourne

So earlier this month I was fortunate enough to see one of my favourite musicians, Moby, live in concert (with opening acts Kelli Scarr and Tim & Jean) at the Palace Theatre in Melbourne.

This was probably the best concert I have ever attended. Yes, it was even better than watching The Police live at the MCG on Australia Day a couple of years ago. I guess it helps that I own almost every Moby album and that I knew all of the songs he played :)

Instead of writing much about it, I’m just going to share some of the photos and video snippets that I took.

Photos

Opening number:

Opening number

Joy Malcolm and Moby:

Joy Malcom and Moby

Kelli Scarr and Moby:

Kelli Scarr and Moby

The whole band at the end of a song:

The whole band at the end of a song

Joy Malcom and crowd participation:

Joy Malcom and crown partcipation

Videos

‘Bodyrock’

 

‘Porcelain’

 

‘Disco Lies’

 

‘Feeling so Real’ and concert end

 

It was awesome.

Recent Life Recap

My blogging has been sporadic of late (I’ve been very busy at work) so here’s a quick catch-up on all the exciting things that have been happening in my life recently. This works quickest as a Q&A.

Q: How’s life?

A: It’s going well:

  • We’ve moved apartments so we’re closer to the city. Nadia can now walk to university and my daily commute to work is shorter by 20 minutes each way.
  • We now have high speed, large bandwidth broadband Internet (ADSL2+) at home thanks to awesome iiNet. This also means we have a land line telephone, which is nice.
  • We have a bigger TV (inherited from my sister) and Foxtel have added new channels to their line-up. I’m particularly enjoying SciFi+2 (which is the SciFi Channel time-shifted by two hours) because I can now watch shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Star Trek: The Next Generation at more convenient times. I’m also watching a lot of Inside the Actor’s Studio, which I’m really enjoying.
  • Work is going really well. Melbourne Water is an awesome place to work and I love my job (I’m the Websites Manager there). Importantly, I’m having lots of fun.
  • Over the last six months I’ve had much dental work done from the excellent dentists at East Melbourne Dental. And, though this had hit my wallet quite hard, it has made me a much more pain-free (and, therefore, a much happier!) person.

Q: What have you been up to?

A: Plenty!

Last month Nadia and I visited the Gold Coast for the first time.

Beach at Surfers Paradise

We stayed at the excellent Watermark Hotel & Spa in Surfers Paradise and, though were only there for three days, we had lots of fun. Our trip to Sea World was particularly enjoyable.

Polar bear at Sea World Underwater life at Sea World

 

I’ll upload a photo gallery from that trip to my PicasaWeb account some time soon. We hope to go back for a longer trip in the future.

Right after the Gold Coast trip we attended the Australian Skeptics National Convention in Brisbane (hosted by the Queensland Skeptics) which was both exciting and hugely inspiring. More on this in a later blog post.

We also saw the fabulous Tim Minchin (official site) perform at the Palais Theatre in St Kilda. In a few days’ time (3 Jan), I’ll be going to see Moby (official site) perform at the Palace Theatre on Bourke Street! :)

Q: What else is happening in your life?

A: Well, starting with the geeky side of life, I’ve made a few excellent purchases.

For backup and media storage, I bought Western Digital’s My Book World Edition external hard drive:

WD MyBook World Edition Home NAS

This gives us 1TB of storage and lets us do daily backups over the network. It’s a fantastic network attached storage solution for the home.

I bought a 7” digital photo frame (via the brilliant Catch of the Day website) which we’ve placed in our living room.

I downloaded and installed Amazon’s Kindle for PC software, though I’ve only bought one book for it so far (‘Groundswell’ by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li). I’ll probably buy more once I get myself an actual Kindle device (which I hope to do some time in the near future).

Finally, I went ahead and bought two pieces of software I’ve been meaning to get for a long time: WinAmp Professional (my favourite media player) and Webcam Saver (my favourite screen saver).

On the music side of life, I joined the Melbourne Water Choir (which was lots of fun) and I bought myself a drum kit. That drum kit is the really basic Roland HD-1 V-Drums Lite:

Roland HD-1 V-Drums Lite

I bought an electronic kit because an acoustic one, no matter how muffled, would be too loud for the apartment. I bought this particular one because it’s the quietest, most acoustic-like in its price range. It’s also one of the cheapest electronic kits available :)

I have discovered since that not playing the drums for about a year makes you a little rusty!

Q: What else?

A: That’s about it, I think (though I will probably remember more later). Well, other than the fact that we’ve been watching lots of movies, listening to lots of music, hanging out with lots of friends (including one who was here from overseas), and generally doing stuff we enjoy.

All in all, life is really busy (mostly because of work) but it’s going well and we’re having fun.

Song of the Year: ‘Aik Alif’ by Saieen Zahoor & Noori

There are very few songs that affect me deeply in an emotional (and almost physical) way.

Saieen Zahoor and Noori performing a modern rendition of Bulleh Shah’s ‘Aik Alif’ at Coke Studio earlier this year is certainly one of them. This is my song of the year, if not song of the decade:

 

For more on this song: