Music, Rudolf recommends

⊕

Music affects me (I bet it affects you too) in many ways, and when I started thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that — depending on my mood, the context and what I need — I also listen to it in very different ways:

• I let myself get carried away by the mood (and actually, then I don’t even need to understand the words, if there are any)
• I follow the rhythm itself — letting it hypnotize me (I have the feeling that I’m letting the track into the most primitive layer of my mind when I do that)
• I listen closely to the harmony of the sounds and their wonderfully rich tone
• I marvel at how the musicians in a band play, make weird faces, communicate with their eyes and get carried away by what they themselves are creatingIf you’re like me, I especially recommend the recording sessions of bands like Pomplamoose, with special mention of the bassist in this music video .

My younger son also told me recently about how he can experience music (and even be transported by it) — he painted a picture of some little birds flying around and nestling on the sounds he was hearing — fascinating!

And I don’t know if it’s a matter of how many kinds of music I’ve heard, or of anything else, but I believe we’re living in a golden age of music. Music is incredibly diverse, incredibly accessible.

But you know what? I note with sadness that… nobody talks about music anymore, at least in my bubble!

Okay, maybe not quite nobody, but you get it, what I mean is that 30 years ago, when whole social groups were exposed to similar new music (in other words: the availability of music, at least in Poland back then, was poor), people talked more about what they’d discovered, what moved us, what delighted us and what put us off.

Today, I have the feeling, it’s mostly that last thread that’s left, and only in the form of scraps: people mostly complain, and even then only half-heartedly, as if they couldn’t be bothered, as if they didn’t care.

With that kind of approach to swapping opinions, how are you supposed to find new sounds, new artists?

I often hear that subscription music services have great recommendation algorithms. My experience says: bullshit! I’ve tested the recs from Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube — every one of these services is hopeless at serving me up new music!

Maybe it comes from the kind of music I listen to (I doubt it), or simply from the fact that I’m not their target audience for these services? Well, in that case, for those who aren’t the target either, today I’ll recommend a bit of “my” music: not always new, but the kind that’s made a good impression on me over the last few years.

So let’s start with the oldest one on today’s list: a very cozy, wintry track going by the title “Raising Venus”. A track that makes me think of hot chocolate sipped in the evening with my eyes closed.

Sticking with female vocalists, I also warmly recommend “Hollywood Calling”: Addie Hamilton has a great, sweet voice, and putting it together with a rock-orchestral backing just blew me away, plain and simple.

Relatively recently Petite Etoile caught my attention — a track poppy enough that I once heard it on the radio while I was driving. I dream of someday seeing a really well-made video where I could watch Beth Ditto sing it.

Moving away from vocal tracks for a moment, though, I was seduced by SMASH — I don’t know how anyone can play such a fucking awesome number that, without any words at all, it manages to conjure up such dynamic images in my head, but as you can see: it can be done.

And to finish, a banger, my favorite artist of the last few years, Noga Erez with her “End of the Road”. Actually, I recommend the whole concert recorded back then, if this kind of music is your thing.

I like to savor music, the same way I savor good food. But if you (like me) also like to savor the written word, today I invite you to a beautiful essay by Henrik Karlsson, a fragment of which I’ll take the liberty of quoting at the end, as a little encouragement to read the whole thing:

Now that I think about it, I suspect the reason I’m dissatisfied with all of the explanations of why music moves us comes down to this enormous distance between how simple the building blocks are and how far reaching their consequences.

I wonder if music is perhaps best thought of as an emergent phenomenon. It is built from small, mundane actions (plucking a string, manipulating our emotional processing, synchronizing our body movements with others to create a sense of bonding, and so on). But the thing that emerges (these swooping existential experiences) can’t be understood by just looking at the building blocks—much as the behavior of a sand dune can’t be understood by considering a single grain of sand. Sand dunes move around, larger ones more slowly than smaller ones, and when they collide, they exchange sand in various ways—none of which are properties that sand grains have.