See Moir Music: 2021 is here
Where I’ll Be
Fri 2/26 — Bicep Global Livestream
Elsewise I'm not following many other livestreams, and am not attending any in person shows at The Midway or Public Works anytime soon.
Every Thursday in Patricia Green from 6 – 8:30pm, Curious Planet is playing a set live in the park. They're a jazz quintet, and at this point I'll take pretty much any talented live band.
What else to consider
Daft Punk just broke up, so it's an excellent time to watch this Daft Punk Lollapalooza concert from 2007. There are some really incredible moments in that set. Recommend putting it on your TV.
The Midway is having outdoor distanced dining shows again. It’s tough because the shows they’re booking have great talent, but getting texts from promoters in the midst of a pandemic about private parties, hearing about how Non Plus Ultra (which owns The Midway) cleared out unhoused folks in front of SVN West in the middle of the night, and also wanted to stage a protest on NYE at City Hall about the stay-at-home order…. I don’t see myself attending shows there anytime soon.
Public Works is also back to having shows outdoors, peep their Eventbrite for what’s coming up. I haven’t recognized anyone they’ve booked so far in 2021 (or at least been inclined to attend anything), but I’ll be keeping an eye on them. I felt about as safe at Public Works as I did at The Midway, and the community spirit is strong there so I’d be delighted to support them.
Other notes
What I've been listening to lately
I can't stop listening to Litany's 2017 4 Track EP. It's the right mood for my pandemic lately, although I first bought it a couple years ago.
Swardy's track The Gold Line appeared on my Discover Weekly some months ago and it's been in frequent rotation.
Haiku Salat's track Pattern Thinker did too, and it's a 14 minute journey for your brain. Recommended. I also appreciate that Salat is the German word for salad, so this artist name is basically a version of poetic word salad.
Chet Faker also has a new track, Low, which sounds a lot like it could have (should have) come out as his Nick Murphy alter ego. Maybe this is a part of him attempting to reclaim the name of Chet Faker to fit a more inclusive music definition as a result of playing as Nick Murphy.
The Cercle Records label has been putting out some incredible singles, have really been digging Ronda by Christian Löffler as well as Ordel by Parra for Cuva, who teased a new album release in their Cercle live set. Keeping an eye out for that for sure.
Shazamming while Dancing
I haven't shazammed anything in months if you believe it. This the last track I shazammed, from a DJ set Joe Muggs did and shared on Twitter.
Read Moir Music
I’ve been thinking a lot about the meaning of an album in the current era of music.
In terms of length, many albums vary widely—from 8 tracks long to 21 tracks long. Clearly, any albums that are released on vinyl stick to the more traditional album length, or are released in 2LP or 3LP editions, taking the step to turn the album into an ~ item ~ rather than a typical medium that is merely providing music.
In terms of release mechanisms, there are lots of options. Dua Lipa has done the re-mix and re-imagine the same tracks over and over again—once as Future Nostalgia (13 tracks), Club Future Nostalgia (DJ Mix) (17 tracks), and then again as Future Nostalgia (The Moonlight Edition) (19 tracks). I'm not entirely sure if this successive repackaging is best for streaming numbers or physical media numbers, or if it's just in the spirit of progressively producing new sound experiences for fans.
I had another experience with progressively-released versions of the same album, intensified by the way that Spotify frontloads new content (and combined with the fact that you never see album release dates, only years, listed for anything but the newest release). If you go to HAIM's page on Spotify, it presents their latest release as their album, Women in Music Part III, released on Feb 19, 2021.
In texting some friends about how I was enjoying their new album, one of them responded—wait, they have a new album? When I mentioned the title, they told me that Women in Music Part III came out in 2020, not last week. Wikipedia confirmed this, and it became clear that HAIM must have released a deluxe version of the album featuring a new track with Taylor Swift, thus overwriting on Spotify the previous album metadata with the new date specific to that track. As I've mentioned before, metadata in digital music is really tough, and this is yet another example of that.
In addition, the podcast episode, The Life and Death of The Greatest Hits Album from the Money 4 Nothing podcast about music and capitalism, touched on some comments (that I could more easily reference if they had transcripts :( ) about how albums have evolved, but especially how a greatest hits album was once the best way to get to know a new-to-you classic band, but now is shunted to the bottom of an artist’s Spotify page in the Compilations section. Instead, without guidance from an existing fan of that artist, you’ll usually start with the top 5-10 most popular tracks by the artist (thus creating a feedback loop for those track streams too), or the most recent album listed on the page. Yet another way that user interface design of these tools can shift the importance of various music packaging techniques.
These are my unfinished thoughts about albums, and how their meaning is shifting and packaging is evolving with the omnipresence of streaming. If you’ve noticed anything or read anything about this, please reply with your thoughts!
Other things I'm noodling about from a music and theorizing perspective is:
What is a genre, and what does it mean anymore? Influenced by:
This is Hyperpop: A Genre Tag for Genre-less Music in response to Spotify Wrapped revealing the seemingly-arbitrary granularity of the genres they store for artists
The book Record Cultures (get it from the library), about the birth of the recording industry as a major player in entertainment in the 1920s, which talks about the creation of various genres as a marketing tool. I also plan to read Categorizing Sound by David Brackett, referenced in a footnote in Record Cultures, but that's after several more books.
Patreon posts by Water & Music about Why artists are releasing "mood EPs" to game Spotify's algorithm, in conjunction with the many articles that have been written about the rise of mood-based playlists.
Is mood the new genre? What function does genre perform in the music industry, and how is its role changing? Is it being superseded by mood, complemented by it, in what ways are these categories reductive or gatekeeping?
What effect does a shifting emphasis on data and metrics have on the music industry, from music production, to songwriting, to music promotion and marketing investment, to tour bookings, and so much more?
I wrote previously about the role of audio metadatasets, but left the question of the behavioral metadatasets that streaming services create, repackage, and then trickle out to artists (via platforms like Spotify for Artists), sell to record labels (directly or as a side benefit of licensing deals), make available as APIs in a restricted format (only the data points and endpoints that they decide to make public, if any), and hoard on their own (is data the new (old?) equity?), as something to explore later. There's a lot to dig into here, not all of it unturned ground.
That’s a lot of words, not a lot of links, but that’s where I’ve been at in 2021 so far. Sending you all great health and excellent live music. See you on the dancefloor again sometime.