Mix 24: A summery grab-bag of bubblecountry, piss-take rap, remixes that are classy/clashy and crass-y, soccer shit, dembow, Indian indie, and the strange disappearance and reappearance of MILLI
I have a more general question about your process, and I'm sorry if you've already answered it. How do you make yourself present and attentive for the large volume of music you try out? Or is this something you don't worry about? How did you develop trust in your initial impressions? I have been trying to sample more new music this year but often zone out, and I listen to, at most, a tenth of what you go through each week.
Oh that's easy -- I do NOT make myself present and attentive for the large volume of music I try out at all! I consider this an almost entirely intuitive (not to say random) process. Since I was a kid I've had an extremely annoying compulsion to speed-seek through radio stations until my brain tells me to stop, and this is just that tendency applied to as close as we have to a celestial jukebox.
To toot my own horn, I am VERY good at sussing out the general shape of a song within about four seconds, at least in terms of whether I'm going to immediately click with it. "Immediately clicking" is strongly correlated to whether I'll actually like it but it's not 1:1, and if I have even a moment's hesitation of skipping I pull it out for a relisten. My "relisten" playlist whittles things from 2,500 a week down to about 50, of which 20-25 will make a weekly mix. I did a little informal study a few years ago, where I wrote down an impression of each of about a 500 songs. The #1 "skip" quality is vocals, which are an immediate green light/red light, followed by tempo (not just the tempo itself but whether the song feels too slow for what it's doing; songs are rarely "too fast," might just be a my brain thing), then instrumentation.
To un-toot my own horn, I accept that I probably burn lots of good songs every week -- but the longer I do this the less convinced I am that I'm really missing as much as you'd think. And I have lots of evidence of re-selecting songs a following week that I've already shortlisted, or re-listening to a huge section I forgot to delete and picking the exact same songs to relisten to. That said, missing even one perfect song would be a shame -- but I'm so thankful for how much music I have frictionless access to that I kind of let the chips fall where they may. (And I do still read other people to fill in gaps, though my gap-filling songs are usually only 1-2 selections in a given week.)
My process is mostly a volume game, though -- sometimes there's that One Perfect Song you find through the process, and I'd say I find 1-10 of those in a given year out of the roughly 1,000 I end up selecting. But mostly it's just an intuitive sense of the shape of some subsection popular music in various countries and genres, and when things keep reaching out and grabbing me, I'll start to dig into a scene with more intention, or add a genre playlist to my overall weekly pull. (Finally found a mbalax track this week that helped me find a more reliable playlist for it, e.g.). I've started talking a lot about genres and scenes that seem to be in "ferment," areas where so much stuff grabs my attention that I have to stop being so intuitive and learn more about what's going on. But that doesn't happen as often as you'd think, which is lucky for me because I'm *extremely* bad at it. My unique talent is rapidly sifting through garbage and picking out the bagels that don't have slime on them. (Not really -- I'd say the average quality of the music I'm skimming through is a [5] easy, and it only takes a [7] to make it on a mix.)
Big Shaq's still making music?
I have a more general question about your process, and I'm sorry if you've already answered it. How do you make yourself present and attentive for the large volume of music you try out? Or is this something you don't worry about? How did you develop trust in your initial impressions? I have been trying to sample more new music this year but often zone out, and I listen to, at most, a tenth of what you go through each week.
Oh that's easy -- I do NOT make myself present and attentive for the large volume of music I try out at all! I consider this an almost entirely intuitive (not to say random) process. Since I was a kid I've had an extremely annoying compulsion to speed-seek through radio stations until my brain tells me to stop, and this is just that tendency applied to as close as we have to a celestial jukebox.
To toot my own horn, I am VERY good at sussing out the general shape of a song within about four seconds, at least in terms of whether I'm going to immediately click with it. "Immediately clicking" is strongly correlated to whether I'll actually like it but it's not 1:1, and if I have even a moment's hesitation of skipping I pull it out for a relisten. My "relisten" playlist whittles things from 2,500 a week down to about 50, of which 20-25 will make a weekly mix. I did a little informal study a few years ago, where I wrote down an impression of each of about a 500 songs. The #1 "skip" quality is vocals, which are an immediate green light/red light, followed by tempo (not just the tempo itself but whether the song feels too slow for what it's doing; songs are rarely "too fast," might just be a my brain thing), then instrumentation.
To un-toot my own horn, I accept that I probably burn lots of good songs every week -- but the longer I do this the less convinced I am that I'm really missing as much as you'd think. And I have lots of evidence of re-selecting songs a following week that I've already shortlisted, or re-listening to a huge section I forgot to delete and picking the exact same songs to relisten to. That said, missing even one perfect song would be a shame -- but I'm so thankful for how much music I have frictionless access to that I kind of let the chips fall where they may. (And I do still read other people to fill in gaps, though my gap-filling songs are usually only 1-2 selections in a given week.)
My process is mostly a volume game, though -- sometimes there's that One Perfect Song you find through the process, and I'd say I find 1-10 of those in a given year out of the roughly 1,000 I end up selecting. But mostly it's just an intuitive sense of the shape of some subsection popular music in various countries and genres, and when things keep reaching out and grabbing me, I'll start to dig into a scene with more intention, or add a genre playlist to my overall weekly pull. (Finally found a mbalax track this week that helped me find a more reliable playlist for it, e.g.). I've started talking a lot about genres and scenes that seem to be in "ferment," areas where so much stuff grabs my attention that I have to stop being so intuitive and learn more about what's going on. But that doesn't happen as often as you'd think, which is lucky for me because I'm *extremely* bad at it. My unique talent is rapidly sifting through garbage and picking out the bagels that don't have slime on them. (Not really -- I'd say the average quality of the music I'm skimming through is a [5] easy, and it only takes a [7] to make it on a mix.)
thanks for the detailed response! Your process is fascinating.