discovering new music with intention
there’s effort to discovering new music
A thing about me is that I’m always listening to music, always have been since I was a child and I always will be, if I don’t at least have my headphones in my bag I feel awkward. They’re almost like my safety net and when all is wrong with the world I can put on my headphones and drift away. For me, one of the best moments in life is stumbling across a song or an album, and as I continue to listen to it I can feel it becoming an all-time favourite. I’ll already know what playlists I’ll put it in, I’m on the internet searching up the artist, and next I know it it’s already heavy in my rotation. That’s what I would call a surprise discovery, finding that song or album was just by chance and there was no real intention made to seek out said song or album.
When I started to seriously invest my passion, my time, and my money into music whether it be collecting albums, music subscriptions, or concerts, I realised there was an undisclosed effort in intentionally seeking out new music and expanding my taste. Now when I say ‘new music’ I mean both contemporary and older, I interpret it as if I’ve never heard it before it’s ‘new’ to me. The more music I’ve listened to over the years, especially since my listening is currently at its most diverse, soon I was automatically searching for new music, casting my net further and wider.
I think searching with intention helped me to understand my music taste on a minute level, the more music I explored the greater my understanding of what sounds and genres I gravitated to, artists I enjoyed and ones that I didn’t. I recognised why I liked certain bands or genres, even realising how my environment, external influences and even my own experiences somewhat informed what I was more inclined to listen to — a lesson that should have no end date. So with this piece, I wanted to break down the various ways I go about looking for new music.
When I do enter a record store it’s either Rough Trade East for newer releases and reissues or Flashback Records for second-hand gems, both in East London. Since I don’t visit them too often I will spend hours in either store essentially crate digging, flicking through every section in the store and I mean EVERY section. Any album cover that catches my interest in the slightest. I’m never looking for anything in particular, it’s a case of which album cover can grab my interest. When I get home, or whenever I have time in the week I’ll open up Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube to search for the albums I took pictures of, and between these three I can usually find what I’m looking for regardless of obscurity. For online stores, namely Rough Trade, Stranger Than Paradise and eBay, it’s the same premise and I’ll have screenshots of albums that have grabbed my interest. Once I have my list of albums I’ll usually listen to the first two or three songs of an album, which is enough for me to decide if I like the album enough to continue listening to it than either saving the whole album, sorting my favourite songs into fitting playlists, or both.
My main source of musical discovery on YouTube comes from only a handful of channels along with YouTube’s algorithm throwing out random recommendations. The first of these channels is one called My Analog Journal (MAJ) which is one of my primary sources for discovering music from around the world, and I mean AROUND the world. The DJs they invite always curate the most eclectic sets I’ve ever heard, even if exploring the same genres no two sets sound the same, and amongst the almost 300 videos posted there isn’t one bad set. Then there’s COLORS and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, both of which give a platform to amazing talent from around the world. If you have even the slightest interest in music you’ve probably seen a COLORS or Tiny Desk concert, the minimal set and bold solid colour background of COLORS has been widely recognisable for years. While NPR has been posting Tiny Desk concerts for over ten years, I would say only as recently as 2020 when a spotlight was really given to their cosy and quaint set-up. There is so much diversity in the artists that both channels invite that there will be an artist for everyone to enjoy.
Magical Mystery Mix (MMM) and MAJ go hand in hand for discovering music from across the globe, and while their mixes tend to centre on jazz, hip-hop, fusion and soul no two sets bear any similarities and are incredibly curated. I highly recommend their series on Japanese Jazz, which is what I discovered the channel through. MMM and MAJ have immensely shaped how I curate my playlists, pushing me to make sure my own playlists are as diverse as my musical knowledge allows. Meanwhile, Bobby Nsenga’s channel is a masterclass in how to curate a playlist to explore an emotion, experience, or feeling. Although his mixes mainly centre around R&B and adjacent genres, there’s enough variety in his curation where his sets don’t feel like repetitions and instead complement each other — making them easier to binge listen to.
Lastly for YouTube, I do want to highlight its algorithm which likes to throw out random suggestions of my home page. Since I’ve years upon years listening to music on that website, it’s managed to develop a pretty good understanding of what I listen to (as algorithms do), and as a result has pretty much thrown me down a rabbit hole of great recommendations. I’ve found artists like Haircuts for Men and the subsequent ‘barber beats’ subgenre, the duo DJ Krush & Toshinori Kondo and a band called Liquid and their 1997 album Green. However, it’s from these recommendations which I discovered one of my all-time favourite albums. I’ve been listening to Szymon for close to ten years now, and his album Tigersapp is one that I recommend to everyone I cross paths with. Posthumously released, Tigersapp is a gentle mix of ambient and acoustic folk and is 42 minutes of melodic bliss. Since discovering Szymon Tigersapp has never left my rotation, it’s one of the albums that physically breaks my heart at the fact I don’t own it physically.
In the infamous Spotify vs Apple Music internet debate that happens every so often, I am a Spotify defender. It’s the one I’ve used the longest, and whose interface and personalised playlists I most prefer. Now when it comes to discovering new music there are a multitude of ways to go about it, the first is what I’ve decided to dub the ‘spin the globe’ method. If I’m looking to get into music from a certain country I’ll pick a genre that’s in my heavy rotation at that moment and search what musicians from said country are doing in that genre. For example, when I was delving into 90s rock and 70s folk and wanted to start exploring Japanese artists, I would type ’90s Japanese rock’ and ’70s Japanese folk’ and see what playlists other users have made with that music, look at the Spotify’s mixes, and see what albums are recommended. In doing so I learned about the Visual Kei scene and Japanese bands like Buck-Tick, Luna Sea, and Kuroyume. The same applies to Japanese folk, which I’m still exploring, where I was able to discover the beautiful album that is Love Songs and Lamentations by Itsuroh Shimoda.
The three sections ‘fans also like’, ‘appears on’, and ‘discovered on’ on an artist’s profile are useful for finding something similar to another. The last two are my favourite sections because it’s interesting to see what an artist is doing on someone else’s work or how listeners are sorting said artist into their own playlists, it’s what you might expect and others it’s completely not what you would’ve imagined.
It also helps to just be curious and have an open mind, that’s what I want to emphasise. If I like a band and see one of the members has released solo work, I’ll listen. I’ve been a huge fan of the Red Hot Chili Peppers for literally all my life, it’s a love that has been passed down from my mum, and when I discovered that John Frusciante had released some solo work I put my headphones on straight away. Now his albums To Record Only Water for Ten Days and Shadows Collide with People are some of my favourite albums. I discovered Jeff Buckley through his dad Tim Buckey, found out about the soul band The Family Circle after hearing J. Cole sample them in Wet Dreamz, or listening to the psychedelic soul band Rotary Connection after learning that Minnie Riperton was a member.
So we’ve reached the end of my ‘process’, the main takeaway is to just have with it, at the end of the day this is just me realising how much effort I put into listening to music.
