I really enjoy music that blurs traditional genre lines and draws on multiple different influences to make something unique and distinctive. I'm sure I'm not alone in that, so I'd love to hear of any groups that have caught your attention for the same reason!

I'll start out with one of my own recs, as an example - I absolutely love the band Hollenthon. They're probably most closely described as black/death metal, except that they include full orchestras + choirs as part of their instrumentation, and draw on a bunch of diverse inspiration across classical music, modern movie music, and even traditional ethnic/folk melodies. The result is an incredibly interesting and distinctive sound that I haven't heard paralleled in any other band I know of. Example song - Y Draig Goch

So I am wanting to update my playlist from more recent decades, but also to maybe find classics I'm not familiar with. I have some time on my hands after working quite hard for a couple of decades.

Would anyone be willing to suggest music/songs based on this list of things I like a lot?

Otis Reading Sittin on the Dock of the Bay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTVjnBo96Ug

Peter Paul and Mary Don't Think Twice It's Alright
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu-DWUngjhk

Jethro Tull Aqualung
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0jMPI_pUec

Janis Joplin Me and Bobbie McGee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfjon-ZTqzU

David Bowie Space Oddity and Ziggy Stardust
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYYRH4apXDo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qrOvBuWJ-c

Johnny Cash Ira Hayes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEwSwQtSmDQ

Bruce Springsteen Ghost of Tom Joad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkv9UpDZPXk

Heart Barracuda
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdOkQ6THDVw

Dolly Parton Jolene
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixrje2rXLMA

Leonard Cohen Dance me to the End of Love
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EImVucJO7Ok

Tina Turner Proud Mary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTfYnRQgKgY

Indigo Girls Closer to Fine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUgwM1Ky228

Edit Dire Straits Sultans of Swing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIufLA7Bx2Q

For the metalheads here, wondering what you all are reading for news, releases, tour announcements, etc that's primarily focused on metal.

I really enjoy black metal so would definitely be interested in sites/forums that focus on that!

As the holiday comes up, I’m building a tongue-in-cheek party playlist that speaks to the full color of this beautiful country we Americans call home.

I’m kicking it off with these songs, but what would you add to this playlist?

• Uncle Sam Goddamn by Brother Ali
• This is America by Childish Gambino
• National Anthem by Lana Del Rey
• American Pie by Shea Diamond
• Holiday / Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day
• Know Your Enemy by Rage Against the Machine
• Gentrify by Propoganda

What songs would you add to this playlist? I’ll add songs to my playlist as we go!

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Hello Tildes!

Short term lurker, first time poster here. Please let me know if I did anything incorrect. Also, not sure if this is the best place to post this question but....

Recently, I stumbled across a really slick Spotify music show called DnB All-Stars Radio (https://open.spotify.com/show/4WiHEU7mnT5n6uYRyTnWtv?si=5qFaxyvvRuSsO_tq3KPZFw) that I really enjoy. It's basically a DJ mix for Drum and Bass music. This type of show is easy to find on SoundCloud and other various websites but I really love the format Spotify has created. It's a nice mashup of audiobook, podcast, and music playlist.

Does anyone know how to find more content like this on Spotify? Given DnB is generally a nieche genre of bass music, I'm feeling like there should be more shows like this. I've looked under podcasts, audiobooks and artists, but I can't seem to find anything similar.

I've recently started teaching myself piano again after a long hiatus. I started by picking back up a piece I half-remembered from years ago -- Chopin's Nocturne in E Minor, Op. 72 No. 1 -- and about the first half of it feels right for my current skill level (basically everything up until all the RH 16th note runs start). While that's going great so far, I no longer have a piano teacher to recommend me new pieces beyond just this one, and I'm not entirely sure where to look myself to find things that are interesting without being too technically challenging. Would love a few recommendations from any pianists on here, either for specific pieces to look into and/or for good ways to find suitable pieces more broadly!

I am going on a road trip with my family, including two young kids. I want to build a massive playlist for this, as we will be in the car for probably 30 hours round trip. I’m looking to branch out and add some stuff that I haven’t heard of before, but also I want to keep it PG (no swearing, sex, drugs, etc.)

Open to all genres and styles.

Every now and then, my Japanese class and I head out to sing karaoke. I've never really been a fan of karaoke, but perhaps that's because most karaoke libraries don't really have any of the songs I've learned and/or want to sing.

So does anyone have any recommendations for Japanese karaoke songs? I'm not mentioning my personal music taste to keep the topic general, but feel free to ask if you're interested in helping me in particular.

What's your classical music playlist when you hit the gym? Lately, I've been enjoying classical minimalist composers for my workouts. I like that the pieces are long and build gradually, which matches the energy and intensity I feel in a cardio workout. Also, the minimalist pieces I select have no rubato, so I can get in a groove. They often lack variety in dynamics, which is good because I want to be able to hear the music over gym noise. Most importantly, they are droning and repetitive in a way that doesn't demand constant attention. They allow me to enter a meditative state.

Here's my playlist these days:

• John Adams - Phrygian Gates
• Steve Reich - Electric Counterpoint
• Steve Reich - Variations for winds, strings, keyboards
• Philip Glass - Pruit Igoe (from Koyaanisqatsi)

More than suggestions, I'm just curious to hear what classical music is on your playlist. But also I'm curious about ambient/trance suggestions, as I suspect that there's a lot in those genres that might fit my criteria, but I'm ignorant on the topic.

We have a language learner in our household and I am tired of listening to J-pop at random on road trips. Do any of you music lovers have japanese language songs or even better artists or bands you really like?

Thank you very much

Calling all Deadheads on Tildes!

I've listened to the Grateful Dead sporadically throughout the years but never really took a deep dive. The incredible goldmine that is https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead is just waiting, mysterious and silently beckoning... but I have no map of the landscape so the question is, where to begin?

What are your favorite recordings?

Edit: Thank you all for your suggestions. I'm so eager to listen them all through!

My favorite band is Caamp. If you like American Folk, definitely check them out. I’d recommend these:

• Vagabond (most popular)
• No Sleep
• 26
• Lavender Girl
• Strawberries (slow/sad song)

I’m looking for new music so I want to hear what everyone else listens to. Here are some more musicians/bands I love: The Lumineers, Jack Johnson, Tyler Childers, Eric Clapton, John Mayer, and Greta Van Fleet.

As somebody who loves live music and audience recordings thereof more than almost anything, I've always been quite a fan of listening to ROIOs—recordings of independent origin. I spend time every day finding new recordings, as well as making, mastering, and distributing my own.

Of course, the community of people that do this is very large indeed! And yet, I rarely see people discussing how they listen thereto in this digital era. It's hard to avoid being advertised one of the uncountable software solutions for listening to one's favourite albums, but no software seems to specifically cater to fans of live music to my knowledge, with the only options being either to bodge some metadata for every single live recording one has and treat each like an album, which drowns out actual albums (do I really want hundreds of live recordings of Godspeed You! Black Emperor or black midi amid their respective small number of released work?), takes a lot of work, and feels a bit silly, or one can navigate through a file manager and open a directory of a live performance in, say, VLC Media Player, which is functional if awkward and unglamorous.

I've always wondered how others approach this issue: how do you?

Hi everyone!

I've been using Vox for about a year now to listen to music and while there are some good qualities to it, I'm honestly fed up with the lack of volume normalisation and having to constantly adjust my volume manually (There's heaps years old of threads on their forums requesting or complaining about this). So here I am looking for a replacement and was wondering if anyone has a setup that I could copy. Here are the requirements that I have:

• I can stream my own music library of high quality music (FLAC format).
• It provides volume normalisation.
• I can set my whole library to shuffle.
• Native macOS client.

I've been doing some looking around and so far the most likely solution will be for me to set up a Gonic server at home and use Strawberry Music Player on my laptop. A close second contender was Youtube music but they don't provide a native client and I currently use a combination of keyboard shortcuts and applescripts to manage playback (I found media keys insufficient but that's a topic for another post).

I am currently paying a subscription fee for Vox so I don't mind if I have to pay for the new player, I'd prefer a service like that for ease of use rather than rolling out my own.

Update
For posterity I'm posting what I ended up doing. I tried Roon and while it looked and felt amazing, the ability for streaming out of home is very limited, it's intended to stream within a local network. It appears you can only do remote streaming to a mobile device and requires a custom port to be forwarded, I wanted to put this behind a reverse proxy but was not able to do that (Seems it's not supported).
I did not try Plexamp, after all the work I did to get Gonic set up properly it felt like I was doing too much work myself to pay for a solution. Ideally I wanted something that would "just work" even if it wasn't free but no solution did that. If I had access to a free trial I would have probably tested it as well.
I already had Gonic working within my home network going into this but setup of it is still trivial. The bulk of the work came in setting a dynamic DNS set up, and a reverse proxy (NPM) inside my network to provide HTTPS support with Letsencrypt certificates for Gonic (It's only HTTP). I spend too much time trying to have a secure setup (Crowdsec + Cloudflare) but after ditching that, I'm still happy with it and looking at logs it does not appear there's any significant risk to my network (I'm also using a geoip block to outright block requests from some countries).
As far as clients go, I settled with Strawberry. Tried the following:

• Sonixd: It had limited hotkey functionality and doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore.
• Submariner: Did not work.
• Clementine: Current version crashes on launch, rc version complaints about wrong credentials when connecting to the server.

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Hey folks,

A few years ago I went in to the basement room where the cool kids hung out while they did video conversions and such. They had a playlist in the background of "Haunting Covers" or something like that. It was a take on all different music, but played in a really chilled, gothic style and by a mix of un/lesser-known artists.

Does anyone have some recommendations? To give you an idea, one of the more known tracks I heard while I was there was Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit but covered by Tori Amos.

Thanks.

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Choose one album
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that you think deserves more love

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Choose one album
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that you think deserves more love

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I'm making a big fat party mix. Right now its mostly house and related genres

• Walker & Royce, VNSSA - Rave Grave
• Salvatore Ganacci - Horse
• Mikey Lion - Burn with Me

I don't really know anything about these genres, so I'm tumbling down the rabbit hole and adding anything that seems alright.

Anyway, give me your party jams. I'm totally cool with more indie dancey stuff like Toro y Moi's Freelance or El Guincho's Bombay -- this is stuff I actually listen to, so there will be a bunch of this.

Any help is appreciated! If you're listing EDM stuff and can also include genres, that'd be super handy. This is still a cultural blindspot for me.

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I did a fresh install of Foobar2000 [1] for the first time since it came out. I'm rebuilding playlists and figured I'd do some digging for some new ones. My old list had a bunch from somafm, Luxuria, the BBC ones, and a few others. Here's a list of some ones I dug up tonight. If you have any other good ones that are indie, hip hop, jazz, exotica, or really well-curated EDM, list 'em up! Bonus points for direct links to the stream.

• 90.9fm WDCB
• Luxuria Music Radio
• BBC6
• BBC3
• WWOZ
• KEXP
• BBC1XTRA
• Pigpen Radio (Internet-Radio.com)
• The Current
• Arctic Outpost

Hey everyone!

This year I've started getting into music collecting, and I'm wondering what everyone around here uses/recommends to manage a music collection. Basically what I'm after is software where:

1. I can pick the albums that I own.
2. I can pick albums that I want to own.
3. I get notifications when one of tmy tracked artists releases a new album.
4. Should not be a mobile exclusive app.

I've looked at Discogs but this one goes a level of complexity beyond what I need (It tracks all the different releases of a same album) and MusicBrainz which seems more what I'm after but not sure if it does #3; though I could supplement that with a different service. Looking for suggestions on software available online or self-hosted.

Might be a weird one, but I like the uh..... aesthetic? I guess?

Some examples would be:

Maybe that atmospheric death metal band you like recorded an acoustic folk cover of a Rihanna song. Maybe that bubblegum pop artist you follow made an experimental post-rock album.

The goal is to highlight range: try to find two songs that are as "far away" from one another as possible while still being from the same artist.

Link the songs here, and identify what makes them so different.

So currently I get most of my music from soundtracks ripped from games and from Bandicamp. However, quite a few artists that go through traditional publishers are not on Bandicamp.

Now, while I could go through the hassle of installing iTunes on Linux through WINE, I dont want to because:

• WINE can be a hassle, especially if the app does some strange things.
• Id rather not support apple in any way if I can

So, are there any major platforms that allow downloading .mp3 or better yet, .flac files, especially for artists going through bigger publishers?

The first roundup thread is right here.

This is the last thread before I make the playlists. If you've got any 2020 albums to share that didn't end up in the last roundup, please share them here in the new thread. Any album you like enough to spin repeatedly or buy released in 2020 should make this list. We're not collecting enough votes to matter on the albums, so don't worry about sharing multiple albums in a single comment this time. Plug as many as you like.

Since we're past Jan 1st, all the other music publications have their bestofs out there, and many forums and websites have long threads with people sharing their favorite records. I'd also appreciate links to any of those lists or threads you've found where people are sharing their favorite albums. Just leave them in the comments and don't worry if it gets messy, I'm quite used to it. :)

I'll let this float for a week to collect any late submissions and then build the final list with links for easy listening.

The final set will look something like this.

I thought maybe we'd play this game again? This time the "iron chef" ingredient is good singing, but in a language that you don't understand.

Ground rules:

• One song per comment, so we can vote for them individually.
• One top-level comment per user, so pick your favorite song.
• If you want to post more than one song, reply to yourself to add more comments.

Previously in this series:

• Happy Songs
• Cover songs with an an unusual instrument

This time the "iron chef" ingredient is storytelling. What's a song you know that tells a good story?

Ground rules:

• One song per comment, so we can vote for them individually.
• One top-level comment per user, so pick your favorite song.
• If you want to post more than one song, reply to yourself to add more comments.

Previously in this series:

• Happy Songs
• Cover songs with an an unusual instrument
• Good singing in a language you don't understand

A bit over a week ago, I posted share a link to a happy song and it seemed like fun, so how about we play again?

The “iron chef” ingredient this time is that it should be a cover song with an unusual instrument. (How you interpret that is up to you.)

Ground rules:

• One song per comment, so we can vote for them individually.
• One top-level comment per user, so pick your favorite song.
• If you want to post more than one song, reply to yourself to add more comments.

I'm curious to know what music is out there that:

• is explicitly about the world's current COVID-related situations, or
• had its recording/production significantly influenced by those situations.

Examples of the former would be Koffee's "Lockdown" or Chromeo's Quarantine Casanova, which have their influences right there on the label.

An example of the latter would be Charli XCX's How I'm Feeling Now (mildly NSFW album art), which was created in self-isolation while collaborating over Zoom with producers and fans.

I'm interested in seeing what's out there, not necessarily getting specific recommendations for music, so you don't have to consider anything you post an endorsement.

Here's a couple of examples of what I mean from The Voidz' 2014 album Tyranny:
Father Electricity
Take Me In Your Army

Mainly looking for electronic and rock, but any genre from any century is welcome.

I'm looking for some new material for my ice dancing playlist.

Anything decently musical and rhythmic is good. Current favorites: weapon of choice, stop the bot, uptown funk, blackheart (tsfh), burn (Goulding).

This thread can be used for general recommendations for everyone, so feel free to recommend anything that fits.

For me specifically, I'm looking for soundscape-style music that has the following properties:

1. no lyrics
2. very "low motion" (the music feels smooth, slow, and uneventful -- no fast or abrupt sounds, rhythms, or melodies)
3. euphonic (the music has an overall pleasant sound and feel to it)

A lot of the ambient and drone music out there hits 1 and 2, but doesn't often hit 3. Much of what I've found tends to have a darker or more neutral tone than what I'm looking for, and some of it comes across as a bit grating. I instead want something that's sort of persistently, mildly pleasant, if that makes sense.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that I'm specifically looking for music that I can fall asleep to and read books to, which is why the fact that it should be almost completely unobtrusive is so important!

Little disclaimer: I posted this on reddit too!

I love melodic music and often prefer instrumental bands. So far I only know Demetori. (Don't judge it by the anime pictures if you're not into that.) They make covers of music from a game series, so it's bound to be melodic. And they're really good! Here's another great one from them. They make some lighter stuff, too.

Another example: The Black Mages. Again, they make video game covers. But Nobuo Uematsu is a member of the band, so they're awesome too!

One more example is Akira Yamaoka, but his style is more like rock.

Are there any melodic but instrumental bands out there? Progressive style is always a bonus.

This is hard to describe, but I'm looking for albums that I can kind of wallow in a bit emotionally, but that are also beautiful musically, aesthetically, or lyrically.

Because it's difficult to put into words, here's an example of a song that kind of has the vibe I'm going for: Snail Mail's "Deep Sea". It's sad but not too sad, and I find the arrangement and melody to be resonant and, well, beautiful. I want something that feels like this, but across a whole album (note that the "feel" doesn't apply to the genre of the song so much as it does my emotional response to it).

I'm open to any suggestions. Bandcamp preferred, but not required.

UPDATE: A huge thank you to the community for all your recommendations! I have a lot of wallowing to look forward to.

I'm building a playlist with that classic exercise montage aesthetic. Right now it's a bunch of new retro wave, montage tracks from Rocky, Top Gun, Rad, Karate Kid, etc.

Temporary playlist

If you have any suggestions for tracks that maintain this aesthetic, it'd be appreciated.

What are your favorite albums/bands available through Bandcamp?

I've used the platform a bit but certainly not to its full extent, and as Google Play Music is slowly winding down, I'm thinking I'd like to get more into a platform that better supports artists. It also helps that I'm kind of sick of my music library, as I've been listening to the same stuff for years now.

Give recommendations for any genre, as I don't want this thread to be useful to just me but to anyone who's interested in new music.

EDIT: All of these recommendations are so good! Thank you everyone, and feel free to keep them coming! I've already bought a couple of these, but I'm waiting on the next Bandcamp Friday to really go on a shopping spree.

Basically, an equivalent of JustWatch.com for music. I just tried looking up an obscure song to see if any streaming services had it and am amazed I can't find some sort of dedicated aggregator. I remember someone posting links in previous threads to a website that had various streaming options for each particular song recommended but I can't even remember what site that was.

You know how sometimes there's that hit song (or artist) that's super popular but you just don't like it? Sometimes it's because it's ubiquitous to the point you begin to resent it, but sometimes it's actually because the song isn't really that good. Those songs will be considered classics in a couple decades though, and there probably won't be too much push back on that from people who were around when it first came out. Some of my uncles used to be DJs, and they've put me onto old bands I'd never heard of before, but by all accounts the music they think was the best was popular back then too.

I'm sure we can all name examples of current music hits/acts that probably will perhaps undeservedly achieve that classic status in the future, but what about past music? Personally, I'm all about the deep cuts, and sometimes I wonder if I would have liked some of the bigger acts if I came up during those eras. For example, no matter how I try I can't really get into the Beatles, but I'm not sure how much of that is taste and how much is just being from a subsequent era that had already absorbed all the changes they made to pop music.

Of course, radio was a lot more important in the old days, and people having a lot less access to their own choice of music back then as compared to now would have shaped their tastes, but let's try to leave that aside.

Edit: I'm not just talking about rock music, btw. If you think Chopin is overrated, by all means, make your case.

I listen to music throughout each day but one of the most challenging things for me is finding good music to unwind and fall asleep to. What do you listen to before bed or while trying to fall asleep?

These are currently on my sleep rotation:

Sigur Ros - ( )
Explosions in the Sky - The Earth is not a Cold Dead Place
River Boat Sleep - Guided Meditation

I've tried listening to a lot of piano and classical but I get so invested in what they are playing that I can't fall asleep.

I'm curious if anyone has any good resources for learning music composition. My situation is that I've studied music for years, including being a music student for my first 2 years of college. I got out of music for a while, and am getting back into it now. I'm interested in learning more about music composition, but have been unable to come up with good resources on the internet. I know a lot of music theory (though have probably forgotten a lot, too), and have done some basic counterpoint exercises in the past. I can string together some nice chord progressions, and sometimes even a decent melody, but developing a musical idea into a full-blown song or other piece of music is more difficult for me lately. So I'm looking for something along those lines.

If it makes any difference, I tend to like instrumental music with American pop sensibilities. I play piano, cello, and tenor ukulele.

If this would be better under the "music" group, feel free to move it there. I was unsure as the music group seems to be oriented towards listening rather than creating.