If the best laid plans go astray, my half-baked ones don’t stand a chance.
My original intention was to request the data that Spotify had collected from me over the years, search through the weird buckets its marketing gurus had put me in, and put the most bizarre ones on display for the reader’s general amusement.
I know I cut a strange profile on Spotify. Ninety-nine percent of my use of the platform boils down to podcast streaming.
Distantly followed by the occasional marathon listen and deep dive into covers of a single song. Usually “Unchained Melody” by The Righteous Brothers, which I could listen to endlessly. Nothing approaches the original, but Elvis Presley, Norah Jones, Willie Nelson, Al Green, U2, Etta Jones, Lykke Li, Cyndi Lauper, LeAnn Rimes and Sam Cooke have all had a go with interesting results.
What kind of music listener does the Grand Inquisitor of Music Streaming make me out to be?
I’ll have to get back to you on that because Spotify gave itself around 30 days to comply with my personal data request. The company, valued around $138 billion, which boasts about its use of cutting-edge technology (including AI, of course) to profile and cater to your music listening habits in real time, needs a month to send me a list of the songs I’ve clicked on at its platform. I can tell you right now: “Unchained Melody.”
Hopefully I’ll have something to report on before the end of November. In the meantime I’ll keep reading this eye-opening book “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist” by Liz Pelly, which is how I got motivated to learn what streaming data I’m putting out there into the universe. The book makes a great holiday gift for the thoughtful music streamer in your household, apartment, couch fort, etc.
By the way, do you recognize the name: “Liz Pelly?” If you’re old enough to remember when The Strokes were an exciting band on the rise, then you’re old enough to remember when Liz and her identical twin sister Jenn were putting on house shows and local indie rock lineups all over town. Now they’re writers and journalists. Both of them.
It must be really fucking weird to have an identical twin, right?
Hit this
Saturday: Blue Heron, A Celebration of German Poetry & Song, c. 1150-1450 (First Church in Cambridge)
The Codex Manesse is an illuminated 14th century German manuscript filled with poetry from the Middle Ages, including verses from such household names as Friedrich von Hausen, Walther von der Vogelweide, Hartmann von Aue and Neidhard. Experience the musical works of these four poet-composers brought to life by our local renaissance ensemble Blue Heron in concert with Philadelphia’s Piffaro. The latter group performs with period instruments such as the shawm, sackbut, slide trumpet, douçaine and bagpipe, meaning your ear will be at least within a stone’s throw of what these songs would have sounded like in thee olde days of yore.
Wednesday: Sean Nicholas Savage (Warehouse XI, Somerville)
Somerville is a nut that Sean Nicholas Savage was meant to crack. He didn’t quite crack it with an uneven performance at The Rockwell last May, but we’re here to take another swing at Warehouse XI. With an artist such as Savage, who’s carving his own improbable path of art through an increasingly homogenous pop culture space, you don’t sweat the occasional strikeout. His highs are high and his lows are more interesting than most of what you’ll find on the streamwaves. He’s capable of every soundscape from folk to pop, and his current comfort zone is a kind of recherché vocal balladry that explores the B-side aesthetics of ’80s FM radio. Openers Bayleaf and Glek/Opera make for a motley bill. But it’s nothing that Sean Nicholas Savage hasn’t rocked with before, having cut his teeth in the Canadian underground, and you’ll get your money’s worth.
Oct. 31: Halloween with Dub Apocalypse! (Lizard Lounge, Cambridge)
There’s a decent argument for never making event recommendations for Halloween night, since most of our readership finalized plans weeks ago. The young kids are going to trick or treat. The parents are going to take their young kids trick or treating, or stay home to hand out candy. And the rest of “us” will be at private parties dressed up as KPop Demon Hunters or human-sized Labubus. Right? Except what counts as “us” contains multitudes. There’s a significant and possibly growing demographic of childless adults who are too old for the sloppy houseparty throwdown, too young to opt out entirely and would be happy to have a landing spot to celebrate the spooky season for a few hours before getting to bed in time for work in the morning. Then again, Halloween is on Friday this year … Can I recommend the timeless reverbed rhythms of Dub Apocalypse. It’s a houseparty houseband, no house required.
Live Review: Mndsgn and Pachyman at The Sinclair
Los Angele’s Mndsgn (pronounced “mind design”) rolled through The Sinclair on Oct. 13, sparing the expense of every vowel in his moniker with the madcap aplomb of an Aughtsy breakthrough artist …
[Puts on Grandpa hat] “Gather ’round, children and let me tell you a story of a different time when artists like MGMT, Strfkr and Swmrs took a stand, raised their magician’s staff against a stormy sky and announced a stern ‘No pasaran!’ to all vowels. With the occasional bending of the rules when it came to replacing vowels with numbers, like S4L3M, which corresponds to the spirit of the law, if not the letter, and reminds us of song titles from old Prince songs such as ‘I Would Die 4 U.’ Which is cool.”
[Takes off Grandpa hat] It was a different time with different music, and some of it’s due for a renaissance. Mndsgn, the moniker of West Coast producer and beatmaker Ringgo Ancheta, headlined as a solo act, perched behind a steep bank of samplers and keyboards, bathed in the red stage lights and hazy exhaust of the Sinclair’s fog machine.
Mndsgn plays beats. The beats are chill. But they’re not “chill beats,” heaven forfend!
If you’ve had your aesthetic purchase on “chill” steamrolled into oblivion by the targeted analytics of Spotify playlists and the muzak of “lofi chill beats” Youtube channels, I weep for you.
But I’m also hopeful because there is a minor cosmos of exciting artists waiting for your (re)discovery, who broke through in the Aughts and early Teens with a preternatural understanding of how digital and analog sounds meld, a love of lo-fi and woozy textures and a gift for finally finding a way to reappropriate jazz, funk, hip-hop and prog in ways that paid homage to the classics while announcing itself as something decidedly new.
The chillwave broke and started to recede from the pop music zeitgeist around the middle of the Teens. Most of the biggest names that had made their mark within the genre – Washed Out, Neon Indian, Toro y Moi, Com Truise – evolved or disappeared. The formal characteristics of the genre were too vacuous to plant your flag in forever. Like all music that relies heavily on samples, it never sounded like just one thing, and realized its time in the spotlight as a movement more than anything.
Movements come and go – maybe this one is due to come back?
In the meantime artists such as Mndsgn, who, like most artists that got the tag, were only peripherally related to the sound, will find plenty of work in the hip-hop and dancehall space. Music that you can dance to or rap over will always find a seat at the table in pop music.
The dub reggae outfit Pachyman (which actually received top billing on the Sinclair’s marquee as a kind of co-headliner) served up plenty of danceable beats. As did solo opener and bossa nova hound Gabriel da Rosa – provided your hips can track those 2/4 rhythms.
Michael Gutierrez is an author, educator, activist and editor-in-chief at Hump Day News.
A stronger
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