Author: Stoneygate

Playlist of the Week (2018/29)

Playlist of the Week - Filtersweep Collective - Easy Listening / AOR

Playlist of the Week: JJ Christie’s ‘Filtersweep Collective – Easy Listening / AOR – Around the House and Lying in Bed’.

This week’s playlist has been compiled by Jamie Christie, also known as the music producer JJ Christie. Jamie is from Australia and has played as a bass player and lead vocalist in heavy rock bands, but the music he makes under his own name is synth based.

There is often a spacey feel to a tune from JJ Christie, and genre-wise he covers a broad spectrum from synthwave through to trance and ambient electronica.  Jamie says his goal is to “produce multi layered textures and soundscapes resembling a tapestry of sounds, evolving and morphing into a palette of auditory experiences”. I’d say he achieves that – his tunes really take you on a bit of a journey.

JJ Christie is also the founder of the Filtersweep Collective, a record label, which caters to the Synthwave, Darksynth, Electronica, and Industrial genres.

This playlist is all about having a lazy morning lie-in at the weekend, or for lounging around the house, perhaps with a newspaper or book in hand. It has a light and bright feel about it.

Playlist of the Week (2018/28)

Playlist of the Week 2018, No 28: Staalklang's collection of epic music - art rock, prog rock, cinematic...

This week’s POTW is very special. It’s Nothing But Epics, a collection of prog rock, compiled by Staalklang, from Norway. According to Staalklang, the rule for music to be included is that, “it has to be epic, meaning recurring themes, keychanges, beatchanges, progressive, odd, cinematic.”

It certainly does all that. Pink Floyd, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Yes all feature, as well as Staalklang’s own music, and he has not shied away from including longer tracks, that might not get a look in on other playlists, due to their length. In fact, the longest track is over half an hour, which is highly unusual for a compilation, but well worth the time listening!  Similarly, some of the tracks – such as ELP’s Tarkus – are more demanding to listen to, making this playlist a pretty rare find. You may find that you want to listen to this when you don’t have competing distractions, to really appreciate the complexity of the music.

Staalklang is a multi-instrumentalist who plays guitar, drums and keyboards, and who is interested in both rock and electronica. He is making his own approach to ambient music – he has already completed his 4th album, late last year, and says that progressive rock and ambient electronica are the genres closest to his heart.

Overall this playlist is a very immersive listening experience, and I thoroughly enjoyed playing it, as well as contributing several suggestions for tracks to include.

Playlist of the Week (2018/27)

Playlist of the Week: Raj Patel invites the general public on Twitter to contribute to his playlist.

POTW: DJ-Twitter by Raj Patel, and Twitter users.

This week’s POTW is DJ Twitter by Raj Patel. Raj took the brave decision to create an experiment on Twitter, where he invited anyone in the general public who saw his post to add tracks to his playlist. Like it says in the playlist’s description, ‘what could possibly go wrong?’

The results are far better than you might expect – o ye of little faith!  The good people of Twitter came up with a very palatable collection of classic tracks, current pop and songs by lesser-known artists. I can’t guarantee this list will be ‘safe for work’ as there are a few tracks with the ‘explicit’ label, but then, you’d probably expect that for a playlist that was written via Twitter.

Tune A Day Fail

My jungle-garden has taken over

I was planning to do Tune A Day again this year, but the album release date ended up being later than I had originally thought it would be, and pretty close to the start of June. No chance for proper time off afterwards. Work was really intense getting the album completed and I was completely burned out afterwards. But I wanted to stick to the plan, because that was what I’d decided I was going to do in June.

I start the 30 day challenge, still feeling really tired. First day is a drag. Second day goes pretty well. Phew! I can still do this. The third day is a drag and I barely write a half tune. Fourth day – doesn’t even happen. I think I’ll catch up on the fifth day. Nope!

I thought it all through and realised the reason for my lack of motivation (and stress about the challenge) was that I already have quite a large backlog of material that hasn’t been released and that I know will take time to get ready. There are also other important things that I haven’t attended to in a long time, like all those jobs around the house and garden that I have been neglecting. I also want to collaborate more with other artists and make some changes to my website which will need a substantial amount of time, too.  (You can’t really see how bad the garden is from the photo, because the buddleia at the front of the picture has taken over! This photo was taken after I’d already started on it, too…).

I realised I needed to stop trying to be superwoman – at least for a while, there was only so much I could do, and it’s better to do fewer things well. So, this year, Tune A Day June has not happened, although I want to do another 30 day challenge because I got so much out of it the last few years.

Playlist of the Week (2018/26)

Playlist of the Week: Independent Music Playlist by Jon Magnusson

Playlist of the Week: Independent Music Playlist by Jon Magnusson

This week’s POTW is Keep Out of the Mainstream – the Best Independent Music, by Jon Magnusson, from Sweden.

I’m sure I’ve already mentioned Jon before, because he’s the person behind the ‘Monster Thread’ community of music artists (which is now over a thousand strong) and the playlist of the same name. Jon’s an indie folk-rock artist, who also draws influences from punk, soul and jazz. Earlier this year, he ran a remix contest of songs from his Always a Rebel album, which had some rather unexpected results for an indie-folk artist (if you ask me, anyway).

Playlist of the Week (2018/25)

Playlist of the Week 2018, no 25: Musical Artizan's Indie Songs.

This week’s Playlist of the Week comes from David N Slater, aka Musical Artizan, another indie artist who is doing his bit to support other musicians.  Musical Artizan – Indie Songs does exactly what it says on the tin – it’s a collection of songs by indie artists.

David’s tunes have a classical slant and can be heard on Soundcloud; “String Metalica” is probably my favourite on his page.

Playlist of the Week (2018/23)

This week’s POTW is Lis from Adra Sengué, who is from the beautiful Baden-Württemberg region of Germany, which I have happy memories of visiting on several occasions.  (There’s also an almost-parallel playlist on Soundcloud). Adra is a music fan and also manager at Rogalist Records, an independent electronica record label. Rogalist, in its own words, focusses on “electronic music oriented to psychedelic dub deephouse with world & jazz influences and acoustic elements”. As that’s a bit of a mouthful, it’s probably easier to just have a listen to what they produce; there’s some pretty cool and interesting music!

This playlist features artists that work with the Rogalist label, such as Spaceschneider and Dephinite, as well as a huge variety of other independent artists. (You may recognise some of the artists’ names if you’ve been following Playlist of the Week for a while!)

 

 

 

Singing The Post-Album Blues

I don’t think I should really be surprised by how I’ve been feeling this last week or so – I worked extremely hard over a sustained period of several weeks in order to reach my self-imposed deadline to finish the Survival album and finally be able to move on to working on other projects. (It turns out I do need real deadlines even if I am not going to be 100% rigid about applying them – the release date for Survival was moved back by a week after I’d committed to it. Deadlines are motivating for me and oddly quite liberating – they force you to focus on the immediate priorities.).

After weeks of being full of adrenaline, by the time the album hit the online shelves, I was cream-crackered. Putting all my energies into finishing the music, I’d been neglecting my diet and my sleep routines – if you can call them that – had flipped over to Aussie time.  Again!  A week ago, I looked like a ghost in the mirror, and was having trouble staying awake. Zero motivation to get stuck into the to-do list that I’d been saving for after the album release.

Rather than have a big fight with myself and a major guilt trip about how much I wasn’t getting done, I’ve had to be sensible and accept a certain level of defeat, recognising that I had been burning more energy than was in the bank for a few weeks there and that I needed a bit of time off for my body to recover.  Out with the vitamins! I’ve still done some productive things the last week, but have also slept a lot, letting my body call the shots apart from the couple of days when I had to be somewhere – a hospital appointment with Dad and a carboot sale with a friend. I’ve now got some colour back and am feeling motivated to do some song-writing collaborations with other artists. That wasn’t strictly part of the do-list, and has appeared somewhat out of the blue, but it is a nice treat to work with other musicians after months of being quite isolated. Plus, if it gets me fired up again about making music, I’m in.

 

Playlist of the Week (2018/22)

This week’s POTW is Elegant Electronic Music, compiled by Roz RK, aka Resonanz Kreis. In this playlist, RK has pulled together a great collection of tracks from across the world of electronica, encompassing genres as diverse as chillhop, EBM, ambient, synthwave and plenty of tracks that I couldn’t quite assign to a particular genre*.   Some of the tracks make for more challenging listening, but overall this is a good playlist to put on whilst you get on with a few hours of work, as it feels rather like a film soundtrack.

Roz is an electronic artist based in Northern Italy and Resonanz Kreis is a solo project that has been going for about 20 years, but is a relatively recent discovery for me, via the loose network of independent musicians in contact on social media. Resonanz Kreis’s best work has an uncluttered simplicity with hints of classic electronica from such artists as Kraftwerk, Jean-Michel Jarre and Enigma. I’d especially recommend My Silence if you like tracks by Enigma, or T.F.L.D. if you like a slightly more experimental sound, like this one by the Flying Lizards.

 

*Disclaimer: I’m pretty rubbish with genres: the electronica scene is always coming up with new genre names and their meanings shift over time. If I tried to keep up 100%, I’d not have any time left for making music!