See Moir Music: Almost May
I'll leave you to make your own JT joke
Where I’ll Be
Staring into oblivion at the corner of trees I can see from my living room windows. It’s basically May, people. What?! In other news, I finally made a 1001Tracklists account so that I can share my Shazamming prowess with the world. So far I’ve had a grand total of one ID accepted. 👶🏻
Just Announced
if you see a set (recorded or livestream announcement) you think I might enjoy, send it my way!
Music Most of the Time
These are the ones I attempt to listen to.
Diplo and friends and labelmates on Mad Decent Live on Twitch with music most evenings. Really tho, it’s all about Lazer Sunday.
Boiler Room has been doing streams from isolation.
The Anjuna Twitch channel is hosting occasional streams at awkward-for-the-US times but the replays still exist.
Special Events
May 1 – May 3 — Shaky Knees TV will have pre-recorded videos, likely festival sets from prior years? available at 8PM EST. Unclear if it’s 8PM EST of the date that each artist is listed for. Saturday artists include Bloc Party, Cage the Elephant, Car Seat Headrest, Interpol, Phoenix, Social Distortion, The Strokes, and Vance Joy. Sunday includes Beck, Cold War Kids, Dr Dog, Foals, Jimmy Eat World, Lord Huron, Manchester Orchestra, Portugal The Man, The Head and the Heart, and The National.
Basically just save this email and then open it on the web on like, Thursday and there will magically be like, 3 more festivals announced for next weekend. I discovered a bunch for this weekend during the weekend so like, that’s a thing too.
Artist Streams
Other artists are consistently streaming live on their own channels on YouTube/Twitch/Instagram:
Calvin Harris as Love Regenerator (come back to us, Calvin)
Livestream highlights
I finally watched Joris Voorn’s set from Beatport ReConnect and it was excellent. I’ve been hearing his name for the last couple years but never bothered to dig into him and that was a mistake but I’m here now. (1 hr, YouTube)
I also made time for Rodriguez Jr. playing a live set for Beatport ReConnect and it was well worth it. Going to continue to keep an eye on him. (1 hr, YouTube)
Praise be, Black Coffee’s Home Brewed set this week was still on YouTube when I saw mentions of it on the internet a couple hours after he streamed. Full of straight “ID - ID” tracks, that’s the (somewhat frustrating) sign of a great set in my book. (1 hr, YouTube)
Jamie xx played an essential mix for BBC Radio One. Since it’s radio, and they’re required to record the track IDs so that royalties can be paid, I didn’t have to go Shazam hunting for this one (but I still did). (2 hrs, BBC)
This is the part where I talk about the sets you can’t relive except through semi-shady copied streams I’ll let you find yourselves if you’re so inclined.
Disclosure did another kitchen mix for Earth Day, but while the YouTube video is still there, it’s unavailable.
I scrubbed back in the live stream on Saturday so I could watch Dombresky’s set for the Chill Nation set at the Room Service festival, and it was great. Hopefully he’ll post a recording, or they will, at some point soon. Tracklist on 1001Tracklists.
Hayden James also played an excellent set. He’s another DJ I’d been vaguely aware of but mostly ignoring for the past year or so. Or last month or so. Tracklist on 1001Tracklists.
Elderbrook played a live set for Chill Nation, and it was impressive. Tracklist on 1001Tracklists.
A-Trak played a set for Club House and it was fun. Tracklist on 1001Tracklists.
A-Trak also played a set that was entirely featuring cowbells, which was entertaining although it lacked the Bawrut song More Cowbell which was an obvious oversight. (1 hr, YouTube)
Looking forward to checking out
This is my list of artist livestream sets I want to check out that I couldn’t watch live. I’m still behind on many of these!
Peggy Gou played a set at like, 5 AM local time for Boiler Room. (1 hr, YouTube)
Joris Voorn played a vinyl-only set. Pile of ID - IDs here I come. (1 hr, YouTube)
Oliver Heldens shared his set for Chill Nation stage at Room Service festival, played live from a BOAT. Obviously looking forward to that. (1 hr, YouTube)
Duke Dumont played another set at home. (45 mins, YouTube)
SG Lewis Intermissions 005 for Foreign Family Collective. (1 hr, YouTube)
Floating Points with the KDV Dance Ensemble. (2 hrs, YouTube)
Bob Moses played Bobcast 4, a DJ set this time. (1 hr, YouTube)
Bob Sinclair shared a set live from Paris. (1 hr, YouTube)
Sylvan Esso shared a live concert film, WITH. (1 hr, YouTube)
Lane 8 shared his set for the Chill Nation stage at the Room Service festival. (1 hr, YouTube)
Guy Gerber live on Twitch. I was supposed to see him play this weekend, so nice to see a video from him. (1.25 hr, Twitch)
Other notes
Recent great releases
A new Cassian song, Laps. Hayden James played it in his Room Service/Chill Nation DJ set (Cassian did too) and it’s great.
Goldfinger released another Quarantine music video performance and it is enjoyable, though a song of theirs I don’t think I’ve heard before. I mostly just listened to San Simeon and Superman on repeat, let’s be honest.
Rodriguez Jr. released his album Blisss which I pre-ordered as soon as I heard a track of his. Probably. I couldn’t validate this origin story with Shazam data, so maybe I just got trigger happy on Bandcamp and pre-ordered his new album based on my enjoyment of Malecon Azul? Seems unlikely. This is why I do data analysis with my music data: I have a terrible memory and enjoy attempting to validate the origin stories of music discovery.
Shazamming while Dancing
Still keeping my quarandjed playlist updated with my favorites from all the live and recorded streams I’ve been watching. So many.
It’s now a total amalgamation of Shazams from: Qrion, TOKiMONSTA, GRiZ, Black Coffee, Diplo, Calvin Harris/Love Regenerator, Kaskade, Manila Killa b2b Hotel Garuda, Louis the Child, Four Tet, Jacques Greene, Juju Le Moko, Sebastian Leger, A-Trak, Samito, Akantu, M.Touré, The Fitness, Luttrell, Rampa, Disclosure, Tinlicker, Moon Boots, HAAi, Pete Tong, Nora En Pure, Sonny Fodera, MK, Duke Dumont, Ape Drums, N2N, MPHD, Banksia, Justin Jay & Benny Bridges, Teh Raptor, Nightware, Hayden James, Wax Motif, Dillon Francis, Jamie xx, and more all the time.
Popular tracks of the week:
I also updated my playlist that I use to dig into new artists to find out if I like them or just the one track I heard with the notable tracks I enjoyed from DJ sets. That’s here. Basically I’m swimming in music all the time. Followed at least 10 new Spotify playlists created by various artists or record labels as well recently.
Read Moir Music
My friend Pam pointed out to me as we were chatting about Jamie XX’s just-announced Essential Mix that all of this livestream behavior and attendance is super reminiscent of radio shows. It’s not a coincidence that she brought this up as we were making plans to tune in to live radio to listen to a DJ set.
I remember when I was in high school, listening to the college radio station shows. Every night from 10-12 was the classic rock show. The indie show was from 4-6 on Thursdays, and then moved to 5-7 on Sundays? Or something like that. I tried my best to never miss a show (I had a radio walkman, I was committed) until the show ended a couple years later after all the hosts had graduated.
All of that is why I went into college radio. But back then I never knew if anyone was listening unless they called in, or if they were using AIM and knew that the DJs were signed into a radio station account and messaged us. But in this case, these aren’t radio DJs (the state of radio is, well, not great. Radio stations are being bought up by conglomerates, longtime legendary music directors are being laid off, and new cars with touch screens and bluetooth means that many people are likely listening to streaming services in their cars instead of the radio.
Not to mention the feedback loop that happens when all radio stations start to sound the same—if you know exactly what you’re going to hear when you tune in to the radio, and it won’t be new, and it likely won’t have a real person hosting it, then what’s the point. So now instead we’re listening to streaming services, and instead of going out to clubs, we’re staying in and tuning in to regularly scheduled programming.
Every Sunday, 3PM, Lazer Sunday on MadDecentLive on Twitch. Once a week, Qrion streaming another “home dj sesh” on her Twitch channel. James Blake going live on Instagram...Record labels, artists, and DJs are using streaming platforms like Twitch or YouTube, or social media like Facebook or Instagram to build audiences like radio shows once did (and in some cases still do).
It’s a lot more fragmented, though, and a lot more random. Like a music director for a radio station, we have to curate our own music based on the different Twitch channels we manage to find through recommendations in the platform or from friends, or based on the artists that we like enough to follow on Instagram or Facebook.
Right now, it feels pretty exhausting trying to discover what I want to listen to. Festivals get announced early in the week, set times arrive by the end of the week, then I’m sitting there with Google Calendar invites trying to take note of who is playing when that I might care about. Meanwhile I sign onto Facebook and see several different watch parties, some of DJ sets that finished before I even woke up, others of DJs I’ve never heard of. I was trolling around on 1001Tracklists while catching up on the Saturday Chill Nation sets and found tracklists for a bunch of DJ sets I didn’t even know were happening at all.
People all across the industry have built websites or trackers to attempt to make sense of it all but no one has gotten it down, and that’s because those sites largely rely on self-reporting. The APIs for Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, they’re not set up to communicate event announcements to other services like Bandsintown and Songkick have been collecting for years. So instead I just sit with myself daily, making these lists of sets that I want to watch, occasionally watching them, and coming to terms with the fact that I won’t see them all and that’s okay.
That was a lot! I also wanted to tell you all that the Tracy Chan, who was the main person at Spotify that helped create Spotify for Artists, and was previously at YouTube doing something similar, has now moved over to Twitch to be their head of music. I found it interesting how he emphasized the different forms of artist interaction that Twitch offers over Spotify in his LinkedIn post about the move: Spotify largely allows artists to engage with data about their music, rather than directly with fans. Twitch, as a livestreaming platform, enables artists to engage directly with fans, which offers different opportunities in terms of building a fanbase—the opportunity for personal connection instead of ~ data-driven insights ~. Bijan Stephens also wrote about another opportunity that Twitch creates for artists and their fans—the raid.