What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

Choose one album
that you love
that you think deserves more love

Tell us what it is, and why.

Previous posts in series

Additional Details

Good morning ~ This is a thread to discuss new album releases arriving at our doorsteps today (and until next week). Feel free to share albums and EPs that have caught your eye and interest!

A big week this week!

Discussion Points

What are you looking forward to listen to?
Have you listened to any of these releases?
What are your thoughts?
What have you enjoyed from these artists in the past?

Why Friday?

Most (but not all) new LPs release on a Friday, as labels want to give the release a full week of sales before entering the charts.

~~ Feedback on the format welcome!

I grew up an angsty rural white kid in the 2000s, and as such listened to my fair share of post-grunge/nu-metal/emo bands. Stuff like Seether, Staind, Korn, MCR, Nine inch Nails, Disturbed or Breaking Benjamin Sometime around 14 my musical taste shifted away from that and towards alt/indie/folk (not so coincidentally around the same time I got my first girlfriend and a solid group of friends). From there I've expanded to listening to pretty much every major genre, but the one subsection of music I've never been able to get back into is the aforementioned stuff. Whenever I listen to it I feel like it takes me back to my early tween/teen years and just puts me in a very bad mood. I know I used to really enjoy all of that but I feel like the period of time when I listened to it has been like permanently fused with the music itself and I can't enjoy it any more because of that.

Which is also weird because I had a very bad few years circa 2015-2019 and I was listening to the mopiest sad boy albums and post rock stuff but I've been able to come back around and enjoy them again without feeling like they're tainted by when I predominantly found and liked them, which was objectively a "worse" period of my life.

I think this album might be a unicorn, but I'm gonna put this out there anyway. Please suggest more prog/avant black metal that is this good. I've done a few cursory google searches, but the only thing I've found that even comes close is The Sham Mirrors by Arcturus. Maybe Beneath the Lights by Enslaved too.

IS is just such a masterpiece. I love the keyboards, the clear but muddy sound, the guitar work. It's just so god damned good. Please give me some more good albums to check out in the same general space.

What are your favourite songs to play while doing work?
Personally I mostly like songs with no lyrics that have calmer instrumentals or ambient video game soundtracks. I made this Spotify playlist with some friends and I'm curious what resonated with other people :)

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

Hi folks. I am searching for songs that, for lack of a better word, build up via "layers" as the song progresses. For example, Beethoven's 7th Symphony, Second Movement, The Boxer Rebellion's "Soviets", or Dave Matthew's Band's "Dancing Nancies". Do you have any recommendations? Perhaps a musician would be able to tell me what this type of music/structure is called?

EDIT: Thank you so much to everyone who responded. There are some GREAT suggestions! I have a lot of listening to do!

Hey people :)

Friendly reminder to look again at your songs in your Soundhund, Shazam, etc! I don't even seem to have half of them in my favorites playlist but that's definitely not intended.

I'm listening to my recognized songs in random order right now and it's just song after song and whoa after whoa. Well, that's no surprise, these songs are "curated" by me precisely because they grabbed my attention when I was out and about enough that I felt the need to try and recognize them !!

I hope you also find a couple golden tracks as I've done today :)

I started the monumental task of tagging all my music for the purpose of organising but also autoplaylist generation. I decided to tag only by genre because it suits my listening behaviour (e.g. I feel like reggae, so I pull up my reggae category and scan through album art till I find something that fits my mood).

I've started tagging and retagging a few times now. I haven't quite figured out a method that works. I started off too specific (many subgenres with few artists in each), then too broad (hundreds of artists per genre). The sweet spot is elusive. I've been doing this work manually, but I've also had the idea of scrapping RYM because I've found this source to be fairly similar to my own judgment. The idea of automated tagging is appealing so I can "let the gods decide" and reduce the mental tax.

Anyways, please share your methods! Im sure someone has "solved" this delimma. TIA

Good morning ~ This is a thread to discuss new album releases arriving at our doorsteps today (and until next week!). Feel free to comment albums that have caught your eye and interest.

Discussion Points

What are you looking forward to listen to?
Have you listened to any of these releases?
What are your thoughts?
What have you enjoyed from these artists in the past?
Why Friday?

Most (but not all) new LPs release on a Friday, as labels want to give the release a full week of sales before entering the charts.

~~ Feedback on the format welcome!

I'm looking for weird or obscure music that few folks have given a listen. To keep things interesting, I'll try and post stuff I've stumbled upon and liked rather than cruising newly uploaded stuff. The 20K plays limit is a soft limit and is not cumulative, so just check the numbers one platform like Spotify, YouTube Music or whatever. If it's obscure on one platform, it's probably, though not necessarily, obscure elsewhere too. I'll just be using YT Music numbers.

• Depois do Escuro - Kalouv at 377 views. Brazilian post-rock band. Not well known at least in my music circles. This song just slaps hard. It deserves more attention.

• The Search - Dougie MacLean at 8.9K views. Scottish folk artist. Some of his stuff is much better known: one of his tracks for the inspiration for the Last of the Mohicans theme). This whole album was made the Loch Ness Monster Exhibition and is much better than it has any right to be for a tourist attraction.

• Sólin Mun Skína - Rökkurró at 9.3K views. Icelandic pop and rock band. I like the lead vocal artist a lot. Edit: Their VEVO channel puts this one at 41K views, so it breaks my rules a bit. Oh well.

• Modulus - Marcus Fjellström at 733 views. Swedish composer and artist who did mostly moody and surreal dreamscapes and ambient music. Sadly he passed away in 2017 after composing the score for the tv show The Terror (one of the few excellent survival horror shows). Not really "easy listening" but I'm really impressed with his work and wanted to share it.

• Misery Needs Company - Lovedrug at 2.1K views. Indie/alt band. Great song. Simple as that.

• The Lunar Effect - Kebu at 19K views. Kebu, a Finnish keyboardist and composer, does lots of old-school synth and electronic work like you'd find in the tradition of Jean Michel Jarre. Edit: The live performance of this song has like 300K views... so I really shouldn't include it here.

• Summoning Lesser Demons - Ivar Tryti at 10.1K views. Ivar is a regular on the synthesizer discord which is how I found his stuff. He's a wizard with Elektron synths/samplers and gear so I keep up with his releases.

If you're having trouble finding stuff <20K (I know I did when searching my history!) then increase the threshold to say 100K. If anybody has a good way to find rarer stuff, ideas are welcome. :)

The first one that comes to my head is Viking Metal, which i think is self-explanatory.
Also one that I like but is a bit more popular is Doomer Wave. Usually just remixes of music on Youtube that are more depressing.

I love microtonal music. Ever since discovering the concept about 6 years ago, I’ve become deeply fascinated by alternate tuning systems and have sought out and listened to microtonal music wherever I can. Most people I’ve talked to are not familiar with microtonal music, or have had a bad experience with it, so I wanted to make a post that explains what it is, and how one might appreciate and eventually acquire a taste for it, along with providing a variety of examples to choose from. All discussion related to microtonal music welcome!

What is microtonal music?

In short, microtonal music is any music that contains notes or intervals not found in the standard Western tuning system. Of course, this invites the question: what is the standard Western tuning system? If you are a musician, you are probably intimately familiar with it: the division of the octave into 12 equally-spaced steps, to which we typically give letter names like C or E flat (etc.). Most people come to unconsciously use these notes as the baseline for determining whether a note or interval is in tune or out of tune.

However, there is nothing intrinsically ‘correct’ about the Western tuning system. In fact, by some standards, it can be quite out of tune. If you listen carefully, you may even notice that our major thirds are ‘wobbly’ - the notes come close to a 5:4 ratio of frequencies, but the interval is about 14 cents too wide, which causes a subtle wobbly sound. We find these slightly ‘off’ intervals acceptable in part due to sheer familiarity. But it turns out, you can familiarize yourself with almost any interval!

There are a great many ways to design a tuning system that produces notes and intervals which are different from what we’re used to. Some of these might be more ‘in tune’, others less so. And there are even those that are in tune with respect to ratios that don’t even exist in the Western tuning system. As a result of these unfamiliar features, microtonal music may give the uninitiated listener the general impression of being ‘out of tune’. But if you give it a chance, it may surprise you - the only way to develop the familiarity that governs taste, after all, is to keep listening.

I think it also helps to know a bit about different tuning systems, to ‘see what’s going on under the hood’, so to speak. This conceptual familiarity may eventually support a degree of aesthetic familiarity.

Tuning Systems

Equal Division Tunings

Where the Western tuning system chose 12 steps, we can also divide the octave into some other number of equally spaced steps. These tunings are often referred to ‘EDOs’ (Equal Division of the Octave) - e.g., the Western tuning system could also be called 12-EDO.

Globally, perhaps the most common EDO (other than our very familiar 12-EDO) is 24-EDO, which is used by many musical traditions in the Arab world, such as Turkish, North African, Persian, or Arab itself. Conceptually, 24-EDO is interesting because it ‘contains’ all the notes of 12-EDO, plus 12 new notes exactly in between the other 12. As a result, it can be used to play all the intervals we are familiar with, and music which strongly relies on this feature is definitely on the more accessible end.

I tend to refer to 24-EDO music as simply being ‘quarter-tonal’ (the 12 semitones of 12-EDO being divisible into 24 quarter-tones). This distinction is useful since in many cultures, quarter-tonal tunings are not precisely 24-EDO, but some slightly sharp or flat variation of the general 24 notes per octave structure. It can be hard to distinguish the two, so ‘quarter-tonal’ is probably most accurate.

You could divide the octave equally into any number of notes, though - I’ve seen as low as 5 and as high as 500. Each has a unique sound depending on what intervals the division produces. Some EDOs, such as 19-EDO, 31-EDO, and 53-EDO produce very similar intervals to what we have in 12-EDO. Played with some restraint, they can be difficult to distinguish from 12-EDO, though they also have the option to play unfamiliar notes as well.

Other EDOs, such as 17-EDO, 22-EDO, and 27-EDO sound quite different from 12-EDO, producing lots of unfamiliar intervals while ‘missing’ ones you’d expect to hear in 12-EDO. And finally, there are of course EDOs such as 10-EDO, 13-EDO, 23-EDO (and many more) that produce few truly ‘good’ sounding intervals. Nevertheless, this doesn’t stop people from trying to extract something decent-sounding from them!

Just Intonation

In short, just intonation is the practice of tuning different intervals to exact ratios of frequencies. Instead of trying to accommodate or work around ‘out of tune’ notes you might find in EDOs, why not just make every note perfectly in tune, after all? The result of this is notes that harmonize perfectly with each other, even if these harmonies are at first unfamiliar to the untrained ear. Often, just intonation produces intervals or whole chords that have a very clear, resonant quality.

The downside of this, though, is that since the notes do not equally divide an octave, you cannot simply transpose scales and chords to a new key. You may have made everything in tune with respect to, say, B flat, but it may turn out that with respect to D, the ratios are far more complicated and their sound commensurately dissonant. To compensate for this shortcoming, a lot of just intonation music tends to play in only one key, or perhaps a few related keys. Certain genres of music, such as drone music, or modal examples of rock and folk, better lend themselves to this technique.

There are many possible tunings within the broad category of just intonation. Usually a musician selects, say, 9 different notes that form specific frequency ratios with each other, and limit themselves to that. So describing specific just intonation tunings often comes down to a list of ratios, which can be hard to interpret without experience in microtonal music.

Free Intonation

Enough of ratios and equal divisions - maybe you just have a particular sound in mind, and you’ll know it when you hear it. This practice of tuning notes semi-arbitrarily, is known as free intonation. The notes chosen may simply sound good to the musician playing them, and at times they may even come close to the just intonation ratios. At other times, they may be chosen because they are out of tune. Maybe the ‘beating’ quality of out of tune notes provides a desirable texture, or maybe a certain ugliness itself is desired.

Free intonation per se is somewhat less common than the other two categories of microtonality. However, some musical traditions are actually more similar to free intonation than anything else, the difference being that instead of the ‘ad hoc’ quality of free intonation, the specific tunings are passed down from generation to generation.

Examples of cultures that use non-just, non-EDO tuning (for lack of a better name) include Indonesian gamelan music, Georgian liturgical music, and lots of different types of African and Asian music, just to name a few. If you needed proof of the notion that microtones are, in principle, capable of becoming familiar, even ‘normal’, these long-lasting traditions of unsystematically tonal music should suffice.

Examples

After listening to a lot of microtonal music, some good, some bad, some very bad, I have amassed quite a collection. Below I have listed what I feel to be prime introductory examples of microtonal music in a variety of genres. A lot of it is very approachable to people unfamiliar with microtones, and I hope you can find something you enjoy among the albums listed.

Of course ‘microtonal music’ is such a broad category I can’t hope to be even close to exhaustive. In many cases I am summing up a huge subcategory (such as Turkish psych rock or Arab dance music) with one or two representative examples.

For any other fans of microtonal music out there, please post your favorite albums or tracks! I’m sure there is some great stuff I’ve missed, and I would love to expand my collection further.

Rock

Altın Gün - On
YouTube / Bandcamp
Altın Gün - Aşk
YouTube / Bandcamp
A lot of Turkish folk music uses a tuning similar to the quarter-tonal tuning used in the rest of the Arab world, and a lot of modern Turkish rock music (especially starting in the 70’s and 80’s) features these same tunings. I think Altın Gün is probably the best example of the ‘Turkish Psychedelic Folk’ style from the past decade or so. Some songs on these albums, in part or in whole, focus more on the normal Western tunings. But pay attention to the vocal parts and the baglama (similar to a guitar) and you’ll hear lots of quarter-tonal inflections. These two albums are a very accessible introduction to quarter-tonal tunings, in my opinion.

Balungan - Kudu Bisa Kudu
YouTube / Bandcamp
This album is a juxtaposition of Javanese gamelan music (explained in detail at the very bottom of this list) with RIO-style avant-rock (featuring the drummer of French band Etron Fou Leloublon) that uses the more typical 12-EDO. Bombastic and strange without being too inaccessible.

Brendan Byrnes - Neutral Paradise
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Brendan Byrnes - 2227
YouTube / Bandcamp
Brendan Byrnes has some excellent microtonal rock music which generally uses a lot of electronic elements as well (synthesizers, digital effects, and occasionally drum machines). Sometimes this recalls synthwave, but genre-wise it’s very much its own thing. He uses a variety of tunings, particularly 22-EDO, but also 27-EDO and just intonation, among others. His guitar work fuses these exotic tunings with fluent, articulate playing that is a joy to hear.

Compro Oro - Simurg
YouTube / Bandcamp
Another great modern example of Turkish psychedelic folk, from a psych / funk / fusion band whose other albums do not use microtones (most of them exploring a more ‘Ethio jazz’-influenced style). As with a lot of music in this style, the microtones often play a more ornamental role, which makes them more accessible to the uninitiated listener.

Feeding Fingers - Do Owe Harm
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Some very fresh-sounding post-punk / darkwave that uses quite a diverse selection of exotic tunings (listed on their Bandcamp page). This album has that dour, ‘Joy Divison’ sound, and the use of microtonality alternately lightens the sentimentality or darkens the menace that music in this genre evokes.

Horse Lords - Interventions
YouTube / Bandcamp
Horse Lords - Comradely Objects
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Horse Lords are one of the most exciting, interesting microtonal rock bands out there, in my opinion. They primarily use just intonation tuning, and a lot of their tracks even use other compositional elements to point out the mathematical features of this tuning (for instance, using a 3 on 5 on 7 polymeter, with instruments that play the 3rd, 5th, and 7th harmonics of a note). Polymeters and polyrhythms are a regular feature in their music, and along with other cool techniques such as hocketing, change ringing, and repetitive riff structures reminiscent of North African music, they serve as a fascinating, unique vehicle for exploring just intonation. These two albums are probably the best examples, but pretty much everything this band has put out is excellent.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Flying Microtonal Banana
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - K.G.
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - L.W.
YouTube / Bandcamp
King Gizzard is probably one of the biggest-name artists on this list, and while only 3 of their albums (out of like 20-something) are exclusively microtonal, they are a great example of heavy psych rock or garage rock that draws a lot from Turkish psychedelic rock. This is some high energy rock music for dropping acid and kicking ass. Flying Microtonal Banana, which marked the point at which I personally got very into microtonal music, is almost entirely based on the microtonal ‘Huseyni’ scale most common to Turkish folk music. The other two albums on this list have more variety, but still employ the characteristic quarter-tone tunings.

The Mercury Tree - Spidermilk
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Some very aggressive prog rock using the curious 17-EDO tuning. The sound of this tuning is very different from the standard 12-EDO, which gives this album a dark, otherworldly sense of harmony that fits its angular melody and unconventional rhythms. And yet, the vocal parts are very smooth and natural sounding, which is an interesting contrast. The Mercury Tree have several other albums using this tuning, but I think Spidermilk is their best work.

Secret Chiefs - Book M
YouTube / Bandcamp
Extremely eclectic music (featuring members of the bands Mr. Bungle and Estradasphere) that employs Arabic-style quarter-tones. The band wanders between folk traditionalism, speedy electronica, swanky funk rock, and industrial metal with each subsequent track, but somehow the aesthetic is all of a piece. Some really great musicianship here as well, especially the violin parts (in my opinion). A few of the band’s other albums feature microtones but I think this one is the most cohesive and approachable.

Ventifacts - Ventifacts
Bandcamp
A duo consisting of the frontmen of The Mercury Tree and Jack o’ the Clock, who play rock music which heavily features the hammer dulcimer (of all things). Stylistically, you could call it progressive rock, leaning towards acoustic but still quite intense in places. Some of the songs use quarter-tones, but others use such tunings as 10-EDO or the 17-EDO favored by The Mercury Tree.

Yossi Fine & Ben Aylon - Blue Desert
YouTube / Bandcamp
Israeli hard rock / world rock which uses the standard Arabic quarter-tone tunings. Heavy desert vibes, with simple, approachable riffs and microtonality that is way out in the open, but still very accessible.

Metal

[syzygy] - [escape]
YouTube / Bandcamp
10-EDO is a pretty wild-sounding tuning, and [syzygy] works it beautifully into some stoner doom metal. This EP unrepentantly embraces the out-of-tune feel that this tuning has, but it was surprisingly easy for me to acquire a taste for. It helps that the singer belts out a very strong performance, exactly nailing those hard-to-grasp notes. Not necessarily for beginners, but rewarding if you can get into it.

Agonanist - The Cynicism of Solitude
YouTube / Bandcamp
Atmospheric black metal with extra creepy microtones (I’m pretty sure it’s 17-EDO but I couldn’t find any information about it). The microtonality is a good fit for the genre, where the extra-dissonant parts find themselves buried among blast beats and guttural roars. Yet at times, the tuning provides a melancholic feeling that is softer than you might expect. Really interesting stuff, especially if you’re already into black metal.

Cryptic Ruse - Unfertile
Bandcamp
An impressively heavy sludge metal album featuring the super dissonant 23-EDO tuning. Cryptic Ruse has albums with other tunings, but this one is especially impressive with how well such a strange tuning works. Of course, by any reasonable standard, it’s still extremely bizarre, so tread with caution.

Jute Gyte - Perdurance
YouTube / Bandcamp
Jute Gyte - Mitrealität
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
If there was such a thing as using quarter-tones for evil, Jute Gyte is it. Absolutely crushingly heavy avant-black metal with hyperspeed blast beats, harsher-than-harsh vocals, and the most dizzying, angular approach to quarter-tones possible. These two albums are a good place to start if you like the sound of pure madness. The liner notes on the Bandcamp page for Perdurance explain a bit of the (really crazy) compositional approach.

Kostnatění - Úpal
YouTube / Bandcamp
Blackened death metal that incorporates microtonality through the usage of fretless guitar. A lot of the microtonal sections seem to roughly follow quarter-tones, but there appears to be some free intonation stuff as well. It’s a surprisingly accessible album, at times seeming to draw a bit from (Slovakian?) folk music. A really catchy release, overall.

Last Sacrament - Enantiodroma
YouTube / Bandcamp
Death metal using the 16-EDO tuning. Interestingly, this tuning preserves the tritones and minor thirds present in 12-EDO, so it’s a good fit for a genre that heavily relies on these intervals in its riff structures. At times it almost just sounds like regular death metal, though there are plenty of places (such as guitar solos) where the microtonality shines through.

Scarcity - Aveilut
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Atmospheric black metal using 72-EDO. With high-numbered EDOs like this one, you get so many intervals you can approximate almost anything you want, which allows this album’s droning guitars to be quite consonant - when they want to be. Long song structures allow for very gradual development of harmony, and it’s all underpinned by blast beats and screams like you might expect from the genre.

Victory Over the Sun - Nowherer
YouTube / Bandcamp
Blackened sludge metal using 17-EDO. Really dissonant, not only due to the standard screams and guitar distortion, but also along with sections that are kind of minimalist and not overwhelmingly distorted - rather, just written to be intentionally kooky and compositionally abrasive.

Electronic

Aphex Twin - London 03.06.17 [field day]
YouTube / SoundCloud
Aphex Twin is a pretty big name in electronic music in general, producing stuff in the IDM / drum & bass / acid genres, but a lot of his music is also microtonal. The London 03.06.17 EP is one where pretty much the entire thing uses microtones (I’m not sure of the tuning; it might be free intonation), but you can also find a healthy dose of microtonality on several of his other works, including Syro and Analord.

FASTFAST - New Color Bomb
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Bright-sounding funky synthwave which uses a wide variety of tunings. Very accessible, with some really refined-sounding, psychedelic vocals which gives even the most electronic tracks a slightly more organic quality. A lot of the chords are nearly the same as you’d hear in 12-EDO, but the changes between them occur over microtonal intervals. Neat stuff.

Lynyn - Lexicon
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Hyperactive drum & bass / IDM music that occasionally incorporates microtones (sometimes quarter-tones, other times more of a free-intonation thing). These harmonic qualities really fit the wonky, glitchy sound of the music, at times playing almost more of a textural role - as a result, it’s a very accessible album if you like the genre.

Omar Souleyman - To Syria, With Love
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
The music of Omar Souleyman is like something you’d hear at a Syrian wedding party. Quarter-tones are common to most forms of pan-Arabic pop music (a huge category that would of course be hard to effectively summarize), but I’ve found that I keep coming back to this album, among others that Omar has recorded. Incredibly fun dance music (‘dabke’) with a sort of cheesy 90’s techno vibe.

Sevish - Harmony Hacker
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Sevish - Morphable
YouTube / Bandcamp
Sevish is a big name among electronic microtonal hobbyists, and for good reason. Bright, uber-synthetic timbres are used on these albums to deploy a wide variety of equal temperament and just intonation tunings. Alien sounding for sure, but the fun, pop drum & bass approach keeps the overall experience pretty approachable. Sevish is probably many an internet-dweller’s introduction to microtones.

Trauma Triad - A North Facing Window
Bandcamp
I feel awkward promoting my own music here, but I do honestly think my album of quarter-tonal IDM / fusion is actually pretty decent and worth a mention. Primarily using electric piano and 808 style bass synthesizer, I tried to explore quarter-tones from a more harmonic and less modal perspective. A more detailed explanation of the harmony is included with the (free!) Bandcamp download of the album, for any deeply interested parties.

Jazz

Amir ElSaffar - Rivers of Sound: The Other Shore
YouTube / Bandcamp
This album explores a combination of contemplative spiritual jazz and quarter-tonal Iraqi folk music. The large ensemble provides a huge diversity of instrumental texture, and long song structures provide a chance to let the microtonal harmonies sink in before proceeding through the sprawling yet gentle improvisation. A must for any jazz lover.

Firas Zreik - Salute
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
The first half of this album leans towards quarter-tonal Palestinian folk music, while the latter half develops more into actual jazz. The star here is the kanun, an instrument similar to a dulcimer, which Firas absolutely shreds. The mastery of this instrument on both a rhythmic and harmonic level is really impressive. Overall quite accessible and entertaining.

Giorgi Mikadze - Georgian Microjamz
YouTube
The full album doesn’t seem to be available on YouTube or Bandcamp, but one track should at least give you a taste of the truly unusual Georgian folk harmonies. Neither equal temperament nor just intonation (nor even an approximation of either), this is some extremely strange sounding stuff, especially combined with some spacey instrumental timbres. Yet it’s ultimately buffered by a more familiar jazz fusion stylistic approach, complete with virtuosic solos and skittery rhythms.

Land of Kush - Sand Enigma
YouTube / Bandcamp
This album features Arabic quarter-tone styles worked into large ensemble avant-jazz. The addition of multiple vocalists is also rather unique. At times, the music swings like you’d expect, but a lot of the music here is more textural and experimental. There are sections of fiery free jazz, creepy noise-sculptures, and much more.

Mike Battaglia - Sweet Lorraine
YouTube
While I try to focus more on albums than individual songs, this cover song from YouTuber microtonalist Mike Battaglia is particularly fascinating. Using a stride piano style that gradually works in more and more quirks of the 31-EDO tuning, it perfectly toes the line between detuned honky-tonk piano and truly intentional microtonality. Mike has a bunch of other neat microtonal covers on his channel if this provokes your interest.

Ambient / Electroacoustic / Folk / Classical / Etc.

75 Dollar Bill - I Was Real
YouTube / Bandcamp
Incorporating the quarter-tonal aesthetic of North African music, 75 Dollar Bill deeply plumbs the idea of desert folk for this really excellent, wide-ranging album. Many of the tracks are in a sort of meditative near-ambient style that highlights the subtly-amplified guitar. In others, hand percussion and occasionally other instruments (e.g. viola, saxophone) push lightly in the direction of rock. Overall an extremely relaxing album.

Basiani Ensemble - Georgian Polyphony Singing
YouTube
I bet you didn’t think you’d be listening to microtonal Georgian church choir music today, but here you are. As I explained for ‘Georgian Mikrojamz’ above, Georgian folk tunings are quite otherworldly, but here as a solemn purely vocal performance they acquire a strange profundity that is hard to describe. Some of the tracks use typical 12-EDO harmonies, but about half of them have these odd, resonant microtones that probably sound even better in a huge space like a church (I imagine). Start with tracks 2 and 5 if you want just a taste.

Duane Pitre - Omniscient Voices
YouTube / Bandcamp
Ambient electroacoustic music primarily featuring piano. The very slow pace and gentle, quiet sound are very conducive to hearing the details of just intonation tuning, whose exactly tuned ratios produce intense and evocative ringing sounds. A great album for relaxation or meditation, in my opinion.

Guillaume Costeley - Seigneur Dieu ta pitie
YouTube
Guillaume Costeley was a 16th century French composer, and one of the first Western examples of experimentation with microtones - particularly, he used the 19-EDO tuning, which is good at approximating similar intervals to 12-EDO, but gives new options for key changes. This video is a brief composition of his, played on microtonal organ, along with sheet music and a more detailed explanation of how this tuning works. Fascinating stuff.

Julia Reidy - World In World
Bandcamp
On this album, just intonation tunings are played using only almost exclusively clean electric guitar, using heavy reverb, delay, and looping to create some expressive, mystical soundscapes. The almost tactile textures produced are sometimes rather dark, though never sinister. At other times they are bright and expansive, though no less quiet and intimate. Another great relaxation album.

Methods Body - Methods Body
Bandcamp
Electroacoustic avant-rock that uses free intonation to create harmony that is bizarre yet curiously organic-sounding. You can hear the warbling texture of the intentionally out-of-tune intervals in a lot of these tracks, which fits the earthiness of the acoustic instrumentation. A lot of the tracks also have a danceable groove to them reminiscent of some free intonation African music. Methods Body also recently released an album called Plural Not Possessive that is an even more low-key, ambient example of some of these features.

Sound Tracker - Gamelan
YouTube
Indonesian folk music, also called ‘gamelan’ music, uses some very unusual tunings - neither equal temperament nor just intonation, but some idiosyncratic set of intervals cooked up long, long ago. In addition, gamelan ensembles pair up instruments that are tuned slightly differently, so when they play in unison you get a beautiful, ‘shimmering’ texture. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of high quality recordings of purely traditional gamelan music. This is probably the best one I’ve seen, and it also lets you see some of the musicianship involved in actually performing the stuff.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

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