Playlist of the Week (2018/35)

Award winning choreographer Laura Kriefman's 'Star_Gazing' playlist is this week's POTW.

This week’s POTW is Star_Gazing by Laura Kriefman. It’s a crowd-sourced collection of songs about stars, space and the sky. I thought it would be an appropriate playlist for sitting outside after sundown, staring into space after a busy day in the heat of summer*.

Laura is an award winning choreographer, and founder of Hellion Trace, a Bristol-based company which specialises in ‘augmented dance’, bringing movement and technology together. A great example of their work was the Crane Dance in Bristol, where the group animated three cranes to music, captivating a live audience of 10,000 people – and a further 4 million online. Other creations have included a LED Dress that reacts to live sound, wearable controllers and a collection of street-installed constellations made of interactive lights that you have to step on to illuminate.

 

*If the weather isn’t behaving, please listen indoors – we don’t want you or your headphones to get wet!

Playlist of the Week (2018/34)

Playlist of the Week (2018/34): Relaxing Ambience, compiled by Susan Moss

This week we have another of DJ Sue’s playlists as POTW, and this one’s a cracker. Her Relaxing Ambience playlist brings together globally stellar artists such as Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, Lana Del Rey and Ed Sheeran. But it doesn’t stop there: a selection of unsigned artists feature, including Dan Fogelberg, Tracy Colletto, the must-hear Zialand, and yours truly. Barry Mcloughlin, whose Acoustic Treasures playlist was POTW a fortnight ago is also included, with his song Far, Far Away.

It’s a good playlist for working to, but you’ll need to put it on repeat or combine it with other playlists for a full workday, as it is one of the shorter playlists, at 50mins.

Playlist of the Week (2018/33)

Playlist of the Week (2018/33): ENILSounds' Traffic Jam List 2018

This week’s POTW is the fantastic Traffic Jam List 2018 from ENILSounds, aka Line Munch-Petersen, an indie musician from Copenhagen, Denmark. Line produces mainly electronic pop with a “sprechstimme” (simultaneously sung and spoken) style vocal delivery, but her collaboration with ZODALITT (Lise Jonsson) has taken her into some quite different musical territory with overtones of 1930s music halls, where her vocal performance style sounds very much at home.

Line’s Traffic Jam list focusses in on songs about travelling and journeys, both physical and metaphorical.

 

Playlist of the Week (2018/32)

Playlist of the Week (2018/32): Barry McLoughlin's Acoustic Treasures collection.

This Monday’s POTW comes from a Dublin-born and Canadian-raised acoustic artist, Barry McLoughlin, who has been lauded for his songwriting as well as his vocals.

A resident of a small town Sioux Lookout, Ontario, McLoughlin is a prolific songwriter, who first appeared at Toronto’s Massey Hall, at just 17 years old.  For a taste of his sparsely produced guitar-folk ballads, check out the beautiful love song “Dulcinea“, or “Do You Still Believe?“.  If you like the music of Gordon Lightfoot, Iain Archer or Glen Hansard, I think you’ll enjoy his writing, too.

The Acoustic Treasures playlist is a collection of songs by lesser-known artists, which fit with the aesthetic – but not necessarily the genre – of his own music, where the songs speak for themselves. I really enjoyed playing it and hope you will too.

Playlist of the Week (2018/31)

Playlist of the Week - No 31: Electronic / Ambient / Future Garage, by Amanda Krause.

This week’s playlist of the week is Electronic / Ambient / Future Garage from Amanda Krause, a self-confessed workaholic bassist from Colorado, USA who has a day-job in Digital Marketing.

Amanda has assembled a wonderful collection of laid-back tunes, including some of my very favourite artists in the ambient electronica and trip-hop scenes, such as Boards of Canada and Massive Attack, who I consider among my musical influences. It’s a real honour for me, therefore, that Amanda accepted my instrumental Polarisation onto the list.

Playlist of the Week (2018/30)

Playlist of the week no 30 2018 - Cool for the Summer / Hot Summer Songs by Susan Moss

Cool for the Summer / Hot Summer Songs – this week’s POTW.

If you’ve not yet brought out the barbecue, or boogied on the beach this year, now’s the time!  This week’s playlist, Cool for the Summer / Hot Summer Songs is another from my friend Susan Moss, who has been working incredibly hard to support the indie music community, all while working on her own new material and keeping family life going.

This playlist is a fun one with a party flavour, with a mixture of chart hits and songs from lesser known artists. It’s perfect for a hot summer’s afternoon sizzling burgers over hot coals, but if the weather won’t play fair, stick the meat in the oven, play it loud and try to imagine some sunshine!

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.