What are your favorite genres/themes of music?

I'm big into Rock and Metal genres and more specifically Stoner Metal, Psych Rock, Post Rock, Grunge and things that blend multiple elements in like Prog, Thrash, Electronica or even Jazz and Funk. I've found that I can't go searching for that second set of genres, they just have to be included with one of the first set otherwise I get terrible results.
And for the metal genres I'm not a big fan of all the inaudible growling and cheesy screaming that 90% of metal seems to have. I'd rather have a singer that can mostly be understood or simply just instrumental music. That said, I'm still picky as fuck about singers, for example I loathe AC/DC or the old hair metal styles along with operatic singers.

A top 10 Artists for me would be something like;
Elder - https://beholdtheelder.bandcamp.com/album/lore
We Hunt Buffalo - https://wehuntbuffalo.bandcamp.com/album/living-ghosts
The Smashing Pumpkins - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibAaypsYC48
Boris - https://boris.bandcamp.com/album/noise
Elephant Tree - https://elephanttreeband.bandcamp.com/album/elephant-tree
Mastodon - https://relapsealumni.bandcamp.com/album/remission-remastered
Does it Offend You, Yeah? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygtNdUuC84U
If These Trees Could Talk - https://ifthesetreescouldtalk.bandcamp.com/album/above-the-earth-below-the-sky
Mutoid Man - https://mutoidman.bandcamp.com/album/bleeder
Greenleaf - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJjfZ8hw3GM

I'm a pretty big fan of mixing different genres, especially rock/metal mixed with something else. Some examples:

• Russkaja - Love Revolution: Hard to classify. They call it "Russian Turbo Polka"
• Amaranthe - Maximize: Metal + Dance-Pop
• Hollywood Undead - Day of the Dead: Rock/Metal + Rap and/or electronic music
• Eskimo Callboy - Broadway's Gonna Kill Us: Metal + Dubstep
• Farirn Urlaub Racing Team - Her? Verloren: Rock with an Orchestra, does have some polka vibes to it

Anything progressive metal, towards the black/melodeath end, preferably hifi which is non-standard for black metal.

One of my favorites is Moonsorrow; Finnish 'blackened pagan/folk metal' band with good production and overall just a really good sound.

Moonsorrow - Pimeä

Gonna be the odd one out: I like dubstep. Specifically complextro, glitch hop, and electro house.

For example:

Teminite - Break Free

Teminite - Unstoppable

Teminite - Mutant

Camellia - Arcology On Permafrost

Virtual Riot - Energy Drink

Virtual Riot - Fuck Gravity

Virtual Riot - Earth and Sky

I have been taking a more critical look at my tastes in music recently. I don't care for genre - I think it's a nearly useless label. The music I tend to listen to is mostly from Japanese composers. Video game music is generally pretty high on the list. I listen to domestically-produced music too.

Anyways, after thinking for a while, there are two basic types of music that I love.

1. Complex melodies. Especially if they come in fast phrases in a progressive rock style. Motoi Sakuraba is the master of this, and he goes crazy with them on his live performances, arrangement albums, and his relatively small collection of "original music" (AKA the stuff he composes specifically for albums, not games). This song by Ryu Umemoto is a perfect example because the entire song is made up of these phrases. It doesn't have to be like this, though, and most of Umemoto's music is a good example

2. Layered melodies. Sure, it's a basic part of music theory to layer sounds together to make a more complex arrangement, but I like it when it's pushed to extremes. Here's another Umemoto track to demonstrate: Queen in the Dark Night. Loop the song and try to listen to what each instrument is doing. This song does a lot more than just layering a bunch of strong compositions; just trying to follow the main melody has your mind constantly shifting between the instruments. It feels like if you had each channel separate, you could have two or three different songs, but this song has it all going on at once!

3. Songs in waltz time that are not waltzes. There is nothing I can do to explain why I love them so much. They just make me feel like moving. Sometimes it feels like I'm flying. As a change of pace, here's a Yuki Kajiura song as an example: Storia.

4. Vocal Harmony and simple synthetic instruments (especially with female vocals and FM instruments). They just have a very pleasing texture to them. They aren't quite as common in music as they should be, I feel. The two previous examples in reverse order are excellent examples.

5. Key changes in quick succession. It's best if it's not built entirely around it though. It's a technique I've only seen in some of the most talented composers. The best example is Gotta Knock a Little Harder by Yoko Kanno. The specific part to listen to is at the climax of the song, right before the choir starts repeating the same phrase repeatedly (at "Suddenly it occurs to me"). This is another song you'll have to listen to a number of times to fully understand the effect; the keys change very quickly and parts being played by the individual instruments are deformed to fit these keys creating a familiar but new tune that compliments the key changes. It's like the key changes themselves are a brand new instrument being introduced into the song. When you finally 'get' what's happening, it's like a musical orgasm; it's just an incredible experience.

So, uh, in conclusion my favorite kind of music is "good music." Thank you for listening.

I like a lot of different genres, but I tend to keep returning to artists with very powerful, story-like lyrics eg. Paul Kelly, Nick Cave, Bob Dylan, etc.

I don't really have one, as I consider that to be an error in taste. The only genres I don't like are the ones I don't know enough, and bad pop music.

I'm into:

• stoner rock - Monster Magnet, Truckfighters, The Atomic Bitchwax
• doom metal - Electric Wizard, Ufomammut, Church of Misery
• industrial metal - Nine Inch Nails, Chemlab, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult
• psytrance - Infected Mushroom, Juno Reactor, Shpongle
• big beat - Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, The Crystal Method
• trip hop - Portishead, Massive Attack, Sneaker Pimps

Here is my last.fm: https://www.last.fm/user/PseudoChron

Hip-hop, jazz, and post rock are my favourite genres, though I really haven't explored jazz as much as I need to. Albums like:

• Outkast - ATLiens
• Mac Miller - Faces
• Charles Mingus - Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus
• Talk Talk - Laughing Stock
• Godspeed You! - F♯ A♯ ∞

When laid out like that, the real themes of my taste are desperation (personal or societal) and moodiness.

Well, I would say funk in general for right now. I have a Vulfpeck playlist I have been putting together that is them and their individual music, plus others that sound similar. A sample of this sound:

• Fugue State (Live)
• The Optimist - Cory Wong
• Rocky Racoon - Scary Pockets

I also like upbeat bluegrass songs. I have been listening to this Bela Fleck song since I discovered it 5-6 years ago.

But I have enjoyed indie rock and indie pop in the past. Classic Rock has always been good in the right moment.

Right now I'm mostly learning to play music and not doing all that much listening other than to songs I'm learning, but most recently I was into gypsy jazz.

Also, I dressed up for Halloween as Weird Al so I listening to a lot of his stuff again and started learning to play some of it.

I am a Metalhead through and through. I love all facets of Metal ... with the exception of Power Metal. I just don't enjoy it at all

Honestly I love anything that manages to cross genre lines and just become something entirely unique and original. So mainly that puts around the indie and alt scenes. Especially when bands go into completely new areas that I've never experienced before. That's how I really got into Alt-J, for example. However, I've also been into the whole neo-funk thing that The Internet and Steve Lacy did, as well as how it has interpreted by Anderson.Paak.

I'm weird. I don't like music with lyrics in a language I understand. I'm autistic and have trouble differentiating voices I'm having a conversation with from background noise / other conversation (going to bars and the like sucks; I'm asking people to repeat themselves after every sentence, and I wish I was exaggerating). In addition, I have a strong, constant internal monologue (except sometimes during deep meditation), so lyrical music is so "loud" I literally can't think.

My tastes have evolved around this. These days it's a lot of lo-fi hiphop, neoclassical piano, ambient and electronic. I say "these days" because the genres I favor change over time. What I mean is that sometimes I'm really into jazz, sometimes I'm really into lo-fi, sometimes I'm really into ambient soundscapes.

Some favorites:

• Brian Eno: rightly recognized as the granddaddy of ambient. Ambient One: Music for Airports is a must-listen classic.

• Thom Brennan: master of ambient soundscapes. Just released four new albums this year after not releasing anything for 10 years. Hard to pick a standout album, they all blend together (and I mean that in the best possible way; it's what he sets out to create and it works wonderfully)

• Robert Rich: pioneered the sleep concert with his Somnium mega-album, followed it up with Perpetual. Sixteen hours of ambient sounds, great for putting on quietly while getting some rest or just for background sounds during the day.

• Andy McKee: delightful acoustic guitar. Lots of variety and technical prowess here, focused in a different direction than, say, Buckethead or Joe Satriani, but more emotive. Art of Motion is the standout here.

• Bill Evans: seminal jazz musician. Check out both his work and the Bill Evans Trio. Portrait in Jazz is a good cross-section. Lots of compilation albums available, too.

• Nils Frahm: neoclassical pianist. I hesitate to use "new age" because that's not really what he does (there's no spiritual component to his work). His Ambre (part of the Winetrmusik album) is literally so beautiful it made me cry.

• Georg Philipp Telemann: heading back in time, Telemann is my favorite composer. No one was as prolific, no one (in my opinion) had such mastery over the strings. His Tafelmusik (table music) is a great place to start, but don't miss his recorder (yes, recorder!) concertos.

• Not a composer, but an orchestra. The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields (especially as directed by Sir Neville Marriner) produce beautiful music that I recommend to anyone.

Whatever my ear happens to fancy is what I'm into, which spans many genres.

But, if I had to point toward a genre that I feel somewhat alone in enjoying, it'd be contemporary classical/art/academic/whatever-you-call-it music. And "contemporary" would be kinda generous, as I'm referring to stuff 20th+ century (like 1900s and later). It actually annoys me that the biggest classical music station here (and maybe in the nation?) still plays common practice stuff for the majority of their programming. Literally 1 hour on Saturday nights is reserved for anything somewhat modern. And they'll lament that their listening base is dying out (maybe quite literally..). Play some living composers, dammit! ...or, at least, composers that have died in the past 50 years.

Anyhow, The Rite of Spring was the punch to my face that got me into more modern orchestra timbres. Then comes the 12-tone stuff like Schoenberg and Berg and minimalists (which are relatively easy listening) and Cage, who should be known for more than just his meme piece... and also stuff that kind of straddles the lines of art/pop to true academic snobs, like Bang on a Can and their "house composers", Julia Wolfe, David Lang, and Michael Gordon.

Oh, and one of my favorites, Mingus experimenting with long-form composition.

Well, anyway...

I kept meaning to comment, but put if off because I can't explain it briefly.

I find I wind up in the "progressive" wing of most genres for some reason (progressive house, bluegrass, rock, whatever). I "listen to everyting," but find most popular music to be painfully boring. The main thing that keeps me listening to a track/artist is if they can make the back of my head tingle consistently, which is a weird metric, but that usually tells me to explore an artist further and hasn't failed me yet.

I'll get specific, I guess:

I like dense hip-hop with odd beats and rappers with deep vocabularies. I like when they play with language heavily and explore different themes. Dudes like Busdriver, Open Mike Eagle, Billy Woods, JPEGMAFIA, and Aesop Rock are on my regular rotation because they hit one or more of these. A lot of what I will say about electronic music applies because of the cross-over between the two these days.

For electronic, I listen to a lot of IDM-style stuff, Autechre, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, u-ziq. Drum and Bass, mostly Phace, Paradox (and his collaborators/pseudonyms), some techno (Juan Atkins, Gerald Donald lately), and Deadmau5 (he gets his own category, apparently). The stuff I go to has really thick, crunch synth sounds, wide chords, or is generally oppressive or impressive (Autechre's exai album, Deadmau5 when he's at his most self-indulgent on a 8-minute track, Juan Atkins and Moritz von Oswald's "Borderlands", anything Legowelt has done in the past decade or so).

I'll generalize electro-acoustic music (Rock, folk, etc) because in this arena I'm generally attracted to the same themes and they operate similarly enough I can compare them. I like when artists make music that is heavily oriented around space, whether it's the claustrophobic sound of Meshuggah on "The Violent Sleep of Reason", or the near-ambient Punch Brothers on "The Phosphorescent Blues." There's a lot of space in between these artists, obviously, but I like them for many of the same reasons. I fell into Mastodon because they had an odd approach to music (Brann follows the guitar line, their earlier work was aggressive but intriguing). Sunn 0))) is crushing without being offensive, and occasionally uplifting (Kannon II).

Trance, house, progressive

Honestly I'm not too picky when it comes to electronic music. About the only kinds of electronic I don't like are those which are too repetitive. It's rare for me to like trap or heavy dub for this reason, but there are trap and heavy dub songs which aren't repetitive so it's not exactly a hard and fast rule.

I am mostly into rock, more specifically into alt and indie rock, most of which is kind of emo adjacent. The World is a Beautiful Place, The Hotelier, Tiny Moving Parts, Brave Little Abacus (best band that ever existed) and stuff like that. Of course everything I listen to isn't just emo rock. I also like more popular stuff like Sufjan Stevens, Radiohead, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Modest Mouse, Nightwish, Dragonforce and so on. Recently I also listened to some microtonal music, it's interesting that there's some actually interesting music being made this way. For example check out the song Gleam by Sevish. Sometimes I also like some ambient music, some more classical music and you know, a bit of everything, like everyone else.