There, Where New Colors are Born

There, Where New Colors are Born

There, Where New Colors are Born

If you read the first of the double-blog posts this week, I am going to go into some of my thoughts and philosophy behind putting together thematic playlists to compliment my spotify library, and I did want to go ahead and kick one example out the door this week. (Fun fact; you can click the above link to pull this up in spotify and listen)

"There, Where New Colors are Born" is a playlist that takes it's name from Alcest's Là Où Naissent Les Couleurs Nouvelles, and is a collection of atmospheric, shoegazey, post-black metal.* I felt this was a solid starter point for the blog, because this is probably one of the most approachable playlists I've been slapping together lately. If you're one of the types who isn't into "metal," this playlist should very well challenge your idea of what "metal" even is (start from the top, with Alcest - clean vocals are your friend if you're just now breaking in to these things). It's highly emotional and poetic music, that strikes with a sense of melancholy or longing, and simultaneously, beauty and reverence. As well as simply keeping the musical elements similar to each other, a big part of my thought process/philosophy here was that the music should carry a heavy emotional weight to it.

Alcest themselves are a French band, and the primary inspiration for the playlist, so you'll also notice there's several other French bands in there that are clearly drawing from similar musical inspirations; Les Discrets and Amesoeurs. Interesting fact; Germ is actually a project from Australia, but also has some vocals done by Audrey Sylvain of Amesoeurs, and obviously also has a lot of influence from that particular realm of the French post-black metal scene.

Lifelover is a little heavier, and perhaps even a little out of place on this playlist, but to this day, Sjukdom, when listened from start to finish, is one of the most emotional albums I've heard, and I couldn't help but toss that in there.

If shuffle-play isn't your style; here's the recommended listens to get the intended feel:
Alcest - Là Où Naissent Les Couleurs Nouvelles
Les Discrets - La Traversée
Amesoeurs - Gas in Veins
Germ - Butterfly
Lifelover - Expandera 
Deafheaven - Sunbather
Hypomanie - She Couldn't Find a Flower, But There Was Snow

*So to break that down for you newcomers, I effing love classification of music because it's super interesting.

"Post-black metal" would be what describes the primary genre. When something is "post-whatever," this essentially translates to "music that took root in said genre, but has pushed out past the traditional limits and aesthetics into new territories." 

The other bits are different types of descriptors that aid to more accurately pin down the sound. "Atmospheric" music generally focuses on the timbre of the song; if, in sight, you would describe something such as a movie or television show as "highly visual," then, in hearing, atmospheric music is essentially the equivalent of watching a highly visual film.

"Shoegaze" is a descriptor for the type of guitarwork; it's high-distortion/gain, usually with lots of reverb AND delay, to create a "wall of sound" type of effect, and it's often, characteristically, billowy-soft and pretty pleasant to listen to, as far as metal goes. 

Return of the Blog, and Thematic Playlists

Return of the Blog

I've taken a crack at this music blogging thing before and shut it down, but I think I've got a bit more to write about these days, and decided to crank this thing back up.

I wanted to start with a more simple set of tasks or goals this time. Last time, things started off rather ambitiously, with my starting goal of trying to recap 2013 with an in-depth top 10 albums list; I quickly lost interest because so much of that stuff had happened in the past and I was over my usual "freak out and share this stuff RIGHT NOW" phase.

Building on how efficiently that urge always takes a hold of me, I figure I should have a lot more success sticking to writing about current interests, while I can still pour all my thoughts out of my head.

So, let's just hop right in and get started again.

Thematic Playlisting

As a little background, my weapon of choice for music listening is typically Spotify; and it's actually made me quite a music hoarder. By music hoarder, I mean I have 700+ playlists stashed away in my library, organized alphabetically by genre and subgenre. 

To explain that ridiculous number, my process for quite some time has been to find a new album I like, simply toss it in it's own playlist, and file it away in a series of genre-defined folders and subfolders, so it's all neat and organized. A good example is the below; you can kind of see how I've got things going on, starting with the broadest definition of the Black Metal genre; and drilling down in to that folder; you find several folders for various subgenres:

The above system works great for me personally, for example, when navigating through all that music for that album which suddenly strikes me as going perfectly with my morning commute. On my phone, I can usually get to any album with just a couple taps of the fingers, and not too much scrolling. But, the problem is that Spotify is also meant to be a social media application, and it really lacks the tools for others to see and benefit from that entire organizational structure to my library. If you were to look at my profile; you just see the equivalent of one of those containing folders, something like this:

On the surface, I'm sure that makes things seem a little jumbled and eclectic to the casual observer, when really, I'm very aware of the social aspect of Spotify, and I do my best to keep things approachable and accessible, in a way that I think makes sense. But, unfortunately, nobody's ever going to just sit down at my computer and pick through my Spotify library and take notes. Long story short, I love y'all so much that I want to share music with you, so I've had to find a way to overcome what Spotify sort of lacks. 

That's why lately, the theme for me has been thematic playlisting. It's just falling back to basics, really. I still keep my folders and subfolders system - consider it the back-end of everything now, if you will. But, as far as presenting this stuff in some type of comprehensible format, I've been having quite some fun mashing all these albums and artists together into thematic playlists that convey a common idea, set of emotions, or simply just similar musical styles.

I thought for a good opening set of posts, it would be fun to take a crack at this and show you guys some of my playlists, and try to explain how they came to be.