Music Recommendations
Thought Ticker:
Thought Ticker:
I'm not a music geek in the sense that I know a lot about the bands and artists I like, but I am a music geek in that... uh... I'm a geek and I like music. Yeah? Yeah! Anyway, there are plenty of artists, DJs, Mix-Makers, and Mash-Up Artists out there who are just so good that I have to share. The sections here are not in any particular order other than the order I put them in.
A masterpiece of jazz, electronica, and more by the incomparable Jerry Martin, Marc Russo, Anna Karney, and more. It's a breathtaking album that is hopeful, calming, focusing, meloncholic, enchanting, and offputting all in one. Magic City fills me with awe, wonder, and joy every single time I listen to it; Sim Broadway is brimming with the misguided hope of industrial progress. The album makes for great work music - if you need a backing track to a focus-heavy task, this album is that from start to finish.
How can I include SimCity 3000 but not include SimCity 4? Another absolute masterpiece by Jerry Martin & Co. This time with more tracks by Kirk Casey. SimCity 4 delivers a very different sound from SimCity 3000's optimistic "captains of industry" tone; here, the city is busy, it's messy, noisy, and diverse. There's still some of that early-20th-century orchestral score to grease the wheels, but we get many more types of music here - music representing the bustling crowds on the streets, the roar of nightlife, and the antagonism of a traffic jam just as often as the city planner's office. Rush Hour is an especially iconic track with face-melting saxophone (and you know how much I love that).
Calmed by Nature is a YouTube creator who specializes in relaxing ambience and music mixes, but that's not all. Each of their videos includes a custom-made scene depicting the sort of location the music and ambience are meant to evoke, complete with animations. Even better, their videos include little item-finding games!
Calmed by Nature is committed to using no generative AI (and no ads!), which is wonderful to know since the ambience and jazz mix spaces were one of the first video niches colonized by AI slop. They've even shown some behind-the-scenes work of them wearing a bedsheet in front of a greenscreen to capture the motion for a recent halloween video.
Gotta be honest, I had no idea what cleancore was before I clicked on this video. That's why I clicked it. It didn't really answer my question (I must give thanks to the aesthetics wiki for that), but it did provide me with a really nice hour of ethereal music and sci-fi plumbing noises. Turns out this sort of thing is actually really calming for me. This video is a dreamlike collection of synthesizer notes, bells, dripping pipes, bubbling jets, and noises I can't fully identify that overall make me feel like I'm floating in an echoey bathhouse. The room is too big, or maybe I'm small. There's a tension in the first song, suds; it's the first track, the intro to an hour in this strange, wet place, and yet something about it feels like the end of bath time.
I might give a full album review at some point beyond here, but that's probably best saved for the blog.
Odd Behavior, the artist behind this video, claims that no generative AI is used to make it or any of their other works. I'm a little skeptical, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Isaac Varzim is a Brasilian DJ who is also on the no-ads no-AI train, and in fact makes no money on his YouTube sets whatsoever. He's prolific in creating them purely for the enjoyment of the listener, and boy oh boy are they enjoyable. He mixes funk, house, disco, and more into these really groovey audio journeys that are just as at home as the soundtrack to a house party as they are the soundtrack to an appreciative night next to your lava lamp (I would know). His Cosmic Grooves playlist is my personal favorite, but it's hard to go wrong with any of his stuff.
Takashi Kokubo is a Japanese ambient/environmental musical artist whose albums have this calming, almost hypnotic feel to them. They combine nature sounds like water and birdsong with bells, synths, and other instruments to create this peaceful atmosphere that you can just melt into. Some of the songs have this sense of romance to them that makes them a great backing track for quiet, intimate moments with your partner(s).
If you like a brass section, GO LISTEN TO MOS. This is an all-woman group from Japan that mainly does ska and big-band style music, including both original works and covers of meme songs (Megalovania, various JoJo themes). They seem to be branching out a bit with their latest album (Happiness Is, at time of writing) and it's really good.
Alyzea's album Dream OS is meant to intentionally evoke the feeling of the Frutiger Aero visual aesthetic, but y'know, in music. It's relaxing, it's hopeful, it's fun. The album is nostalgic but not for any specific thing I can put my finger on, like memories of a life I never lived yet still miss. It's also just cute. I mean, look at the cover!
Dream OS has a certain etherealness to it. The twinkling bells and warbling synths give the overall impression that you are floating in, possibly under, water. The use of actual water sounds in some tracks certainly cements the feeling. There's no risk of drowning; the overtly optimistic vibe of the album tells us that we're right where we need to be. Everything will be okay, if it isn't already. Digital chirps and beeps accompany the music to lean into the "OS" part of the title, an unsubtle method of placing you in a memory space when computers felt exciting and full of potential, instead of predatory and addictive. There's a "clean"-ness to the sound, as though combatting the greasy, skeevy feelings of modern computer corporations was entirely intentional.
Anyway, it's good stuff, and if you're into the whole Frutiger Aero aesthetic / subculture you should check it out.
Moron Police's album, A Boat on the Sea, is one of my favorite albums, full stop. The content is something like a Norwegian version of Greenday's American Idiot (Norwegian Moron?) but the style is immaculately weird and off the wall. The opening song evokes church hymns, The Phantom Below feels like a song from a stage musical inspired by anime openings, Dog Song is an ode to manic hedonism and anti-establishment revolution from the point of view of a literal dog (or possibly Diogenes, maybe?), and The Undersea is a powerhouse of vocal skill that is 100% worth belting out in your car or drunkenly with your friends at a karaoke bar. And that's not even half the songs! Their follow-up EP, Waiting for Wastelands, tackles a similar sort of political/existential angst but wrapped up in a rootin'-tootin' American cowboy aesthetic that is fun, philosophical, and absolutely rips.
I'll be honest: I have no idea how to explain Emancipator, but I love their stuff. They're like... audio collage. The oldest album on their bandcamp, soon it will be cold enough, is linked here and remains one of my favorites, but a lot of their stuff is so good.
2mello rips, dude. I was first introduced to them via their Jet Set Radio-inspired Memories of Tokyo-To album, and the follow up Sounds of Tokyo-To Future. They've come out with a bunch of stuff since then, including the soundtrack for the video game Later Alligator and I had no idea that was them until, like, today? Wow. Go listen to them, dude. Just, like, they're great.
Moon Hooch is sick. Originally a New York subway group and now on international tours, Moon Hooch is something like a rock band that uses saxophones instead of guitars. No, not a jazz band. A rock band that uses saxophones instead of guitars. I said what I said. They have some absolutely off-the-wall saxophone solos that one friend of mine described as "like getting on an elevator that I was expecting to take me to the top floor, and instead it took me to space."
