When I was younger, I was very much into music. As a school pupil, I played the tuba. As a student, I often went to concerts, particularly at the Marquee Club in Wardour Street. Once I started working, I would explore various genres by buying music I didn’t know, following reviews in the music papers of the day, buying albums by genre from trusted music shops, buying something based on a snippet of music I heard, or buying albums from artists and composers I’d first heard at concerts. I subscribed for a while to the Society for the Promotion of New Music, and that led me to a good number of new young composers whose music I later bought.
Much later, I worked in many cities across many countries, my concert habit died. For a while, I subscribed to emusic, to pick up things new to me, but I dropped that when I forgot to tell them about a new credit card, and their prices doubled. In consequence, my music exploration had died. The only things I found in the last twenty years are Basic Channel (RIP), Brandt Brauer Frick, and Søren Bebe.
Many online sites, including subscriptions and services, offer a “music like this” facility, but, for me at least, such features are utter dross: their selections have nothing remotely in common with the stuff they’re supposed to resemble. They might as well have recommended the Sex Pistols after Beethoven’s Fifth—actually, no, that comparison would have been interesting. I don’t know if it was just bad taste, bribery & corruption, confusing artificial categories for musical taste, a failure to appreciate music, or just randomness, but, for me, they always failed. As a specific example, I tried following up my intereset in Basic Channel by asking for similar works, and not one of the services produced something with complex rhythm: those services simply didn’t understand music.
When I was living in the UK, I used to listen to the radio to pick up new music. Unfortunately, too many British radio stations promoted airhead dross. By that, by the way, I mean the idiots interrupting the music, not the music itself—with honourable and dishonourable exceptions. Now, dross has its place; when I have a virus turns my brain to dormancy, I like the stuff, but mostly it’s not for me. The one UK radio station I did like, which I kept listening too despite everything else, was BBC Radio 3. There was also Classic FM, but I found it was too many adverts, a failure to understand that good music needs a silent space afterwards for the listeners’ emotions to settle, and too little music.
The problem was that, when I left the UK, I left Radio 3 behind; for licensing reasons, they couldn’t broadcast most of their stuff outside blighty. Now, I could cheat, and use VPNs and the like to pick it up, but I just don’t like that kind of dishonesty. So I stopped listening, and thus stopped picking up new music to check out.
But perhaps salvation is at hand! BandCamp have introduced a new subscription series, highlighting their offerings, to help people explore particular music genres. These subscriptions are chosen by individuals, whom the burble suggests are experts in their field, although given AI, I am suspicious that their pictures very much fit my clichéd understanding of how musical experts self–present.
I initially subscribed to two of these subscriptions, but I so appreciated the choices that I’ve now subscribed to all four.
Let me make something very clear. My goal in taking these subscriptions is to explore contemporary bands. I don’t expect to always get music I’ll enjoy, I expect to get a feel for what’s out there. Amongst the offerings I will find occasionally something I really like, and will, from that, explore and discover new music for me. But I until I grasp the breadth of a genre, that’s not going to happen. So I’m subscribing to explore, not love: the love will grow from one or two things I hear in the exploration.
This is why I have no problem with the detail that I love none of the first batch of offerings, and I don’t really like two of them. Ironically, one of those two is why I decided to commit to all four subscriptions: I don’t like it, but it is so different to what I expected, that it showed me the subscriptions deliver on properly exploring the genres, so should deliver on finding new music to love.
I will comment on two subscriptions offerings, though. The heavy subscription (“Hard Stuff”), which I subscribed to pretty much to complete the set rather than because I’m fond of heavy music, had the best of this round of albums (“The Exodus of Gravity by Arcadea”). The offbeat subscription (“Kosmos Klub”, with a name which, to be honest, sounds to me like it should be a children’s biscuit) offering, Jabu’s “A Soft and Gatherable Star”, reminded me very much of the early–1980s new wave. That genre, particularly The Pop Group, led me to dive deeper into minimalism and modernism, which left me a lifelong fan of Reich and Stockhausen.
I’ll follow these subscriptions for at least six months, to see how they work for me.