So when I came home from San Francisco I had something glorious in my possession. No, not mochi, although that was in my bag as well, and barely lasted two days once I'd touched down in DFW. What I'm talking about here is approximately 145 gig of delicious, strange, brand spankin new (at least to me) music.
Last weekend I fired the thing up to see what I could find, and after almost three hours I wasn't even halfway through it all. I've put a bunch on my iPhone and have been listening to it at my desk for the last week.
Some favorite artists/albums so far:
Fats Waller, Portrait Vol. 2
Baden Powell, Afro Sambas
Beau Soleil, L'Echo
Ibrahim Ferrer, Buenos Hermanos
Yo-Yo Ma, Soul of the Tango
Global Cultural Collective, Red Sands Dreaming
This week I find I'm being drawn to really poppy, jazzy, or bright music with Latinate beats. And I've tried zydeco - I didn't realize I'd like it so much. Maybe my coworkers' opinions would range on the other side of the spectrum, but I think it's pretty spicy stuff to have on hand for the streak of rainy days we had last week. It also makes me want to fire up the Visa and take a trip to New Orleans! (someday...)
The Process
The way I pick out such crazy music is pretty logic-based. I go into my iTunes and I've set up several Smart Playlists by genre (like Classical, Jazz, Latin, Rock, World, Zydeco). I click on "Match the following rule...", then select "Genre" and "contains" from the first drop-down box. In the last box on that row, I type in the genre that I'd like it to pull from, then underneath I set up the option as "Limit to [75] items, selected by [random]", and select "Match only checked items" so I don't get music I wouldn't otherwise listen to. (All of the music I've downloaded I have checked, because without listening to it I don't know if I'd want to listen to it, you know?) This means in that particular category I get 75 random songs from a genre I've specified. It sounds like a lot, but when you have the iPhone playing for hours on end it goes through pretty quickly.
I had five full days last week of this music, and had left my typical fallbacks (Chopin piano music, Aaron Copeland, most pop music, the Beatles Anthologies) at home in the hope of venturing out into something completely different. Using the aforementioned formula, this week will have a mix of the following, among others:
Flaco Jimenez
Benny Goodman
Academy of St. Martin in the Fields
Spacehog
Blue Men Group
Audioslave
If anyone reading this (lurkers or otherwise!) has suggestions for music I should try, please leave a comment. I'm pretty much open to any artist, any genre, although for the purpose of putting it on my iPhone to take to work I like to keep it pretty mildly work safe. Here's to an awesome music week!
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