A personal update: I finally deleted my Spotify account. + brief thoughts on valuing music.
A personal update: I finally deleted my Spotify account. I removed it from my phone months ago, and have been slowly going through all of my liked songs (3k+ when I made the active decision to work towards leaving it) and my ‘to listen to’ playlist (1k~).
I’m now the proud owner of two massive spreadsheets, one containing single songs and the other containing full albums I want to buy eventually.
Spotify doesn’t allow you to copy and paste the text from song listings, discouraging the transfer of playlists to spreadsheets. Yes, it was very, very tedious. But these spreadsheets were all typed out, one song or album at a time, and I am all the better for it.
I’ll consider myself lucky. While I have sunk the better half of a decade of my music exploration, discovery, and cataloging into Spotify’s ecosystem, I’ve actively culled my ‘liked’ songs playlist approximately once a year to get rid of songs I simply no longer enjoy or value.
For anyone preparing to leave Spotify short of cold turkey, I’d highly recommend this, especially if you plan to then buy the music from artists (which, c’mon. Do it!). If you wouldn’t buy that for a dollar, it doesn’t need to be taking up mental real estate. Refine your tastes: you know what you kinda like, really like, and really really like.
Why waste the mental real estate on something you don’t even value a dollars worth?
Speaking of value, the songs and albums I have bought since beginning this wind down have been excellent. By really having to make decisions about what was worth my time and money, I’ve completely rejuvenated my listening experience. I’ve ended up spending more time with the albums I have bought since, I understand them better, and their positive impact has been more firmly imprinted on my life.
I never do number ratings on this site, but I’d rate this choice a 10/10.
Brief Thoughts is a column of sorts by Lubert Das for Resident Sound. Updates, musings and, well, brief thoughts. Putting the B-rate in Blog.
As our first calendar year comes to a close, we take a look back at some of our hits! Be they blessed by the search engine algorithms or that people actually liked them, here’s Resident Sound’s top 5 most viewed articles of 2021!
Unfortunately, this article wouldn’t have been possible without the loss of one of Vaporwave’s early stars. The article started off Resident Sound’s +Brief Thoughts blog column, which is something we look forward to doing more of in 2022. Let’s remember Cesar as we go into the new year. Keep your speaker systems bumping. Take a look back at In Memorium: Cesar Alexandre, + Brief Thoughts on Legacy.
Probably also doubling as Resident Sound’s most internally linked article, our guide to Doom Jazz was incredibly fun to put together. Both our first genre guide and our first feature of the Doom Jazz genre, we look forward to bringing you more Doom Jazz-y goodness and more guides over the coming year! Take a look back at The Fast Paced, Lighthearted World of DOOM JAZZ.
Angelo Badalamenti’s original score can’t be beat, but that doesn’t mean good Twin Peaks music ends there. Like our Southern Gothic Music guide, look out for further updates and coverage on Twin Peaks music as we fight our way through the new year. Take a look back at 5 Twin Peaks Inspired Albums Worth Your Time.
If anything, 2021 needed more tension, more stress, right? No? Are you sure? Well, either way, we chose 5 True Crime podcasts that we thought were, well, worth your time. It is what it says on the tin, and we like to think our readers appreciated that. We look forward to making a part 2, as well as covering more podcasts in the coming year. Take a look back at 5 True Crime Podcasts Worth Your Time.
Thank you so much for coming along for the ride in our first calendar year! We hope we see you next year!
Is this all I am to you? Words on a screen? Consumable content? If so I’m delighted you’re reading this, for one. And two, I would be achieving the basic goal for contemporary music media.
Contemporary ‘music media’ is an extension of the music-based lifestyles we buy into. Much of the time it’s forced positivity in the age of hype; a digital onslaught of quick consumable media reassuring our tastes, opinions, and associations to the point of borderline enforcement.
Hype-content, alongside its contrasting partner hate-reviews, feels vapid. And this content flows through our social channels at a torrential rate.
We’re consuming crumbs out of couch cushions to sustain ourselves culturally. While my love for the obscure and irrelevant has allowed Resident Sound something different from other outlets, it only adds different crumbs to the pile.
The bar is incredibly low here. But how to provide value as a music commentator in the most effective way possible still alludes me. I turn to critics, thinkers, and just about anyone who is smarter than me. Who brings value to my life? How do they do it?
Of all music commentators, a favorite of mine (and many, I hope) is Oliver ‘Oli’ Kemp, better known as DeepCuts on YouTube. Kemp has slowly built a catalog of artist discography guides, genre introductions, reviews and discussion topics among other work. His passion and intellect surrounding his choices are both thrilling and insightful while remaining accessible for nearly any viewer.
DeepCuts is “a channel dedicated to music, for lovers of music” and is essential viewing for any would-be music commentator. Whatever lesson is to be learned here I’ve yet to fully embrace it to my own liking, but I hope to get there soon.
But like DeepCuts, the output at Resident Sound has dropped significantly, in part due to the jobs that pay the bills (or pay anything). It is more or less a 1-being team at the end of the day. But with this time I hope to discover what brings value to my life as a consumer and what I can in turn offer to you, the reader.
If you enjoyed this, consider checking out more +Brief Thoughts pieces on the Resident Sound blog.
Looking for a music recommendation? We highly recommend these:
This post originally appeared on the 10th Dentist blog on Tuesday, March 4th, 2021. The following version has been lightly edited for clarity.
As if standing in stark contrast to taco-laser-cat t-shirts and ‘millennial whoop’ overdosing (how noble), the rise of 80s worship in the mid-teens has brought back the worst of bad hair days and their musical counterparts. So if you’re looking to spice up your new-found identity or if you’ve finally realized that Africa by Toto isn’t worth it, than this list is for you!
Soft Cell – The Art of Falling Apart (1983)
Soft Cell (a band that, yes, has released more than 2 songs) started in 1978 and rose to prominence in the early 80s with their hit cover of Gloria Jone’s 1964 single ‘Tainted Love’. But enough of that. 1983 would see the release of Soft Cell’s second full-length release The Art of Falling Apart and the glory of it’s titular closing track. ‘The Art’ is a song about drugs that isn’t trying to be anything other than a song about drugs. Big synth stabs and an under swelling reverb makes this a ‘no duh’ for anyone looking to dip their toes in the weird and wacky world of the 80s (FOETUS is only a few steps away from here).
Naked Eyes – Promises, Promises (1983)
There is always something there to remind me that there were much better songs on Naked Eyes’s 1983 album Burning Bridges. The best album to ever be recorded at Abbey Road Studios (Flippant? Maybe. The truth? Definitely), Burning Bridges gave us great songs like its titular track, When The Lights Go Out, Fortune and Fame, and Voices in My Head. But it’s Promises Promises with its minimal production, back and forth melody, and vague funk influences that rounds out this album as one of the best closing tracks on a pop album ever. Naked Eyes is 2 British guys, a Fairlight CMI, and a lot of vague romantic dance tracks. Do I need say more? Well, except to clarify I mean that entirely as a good thing (in this case).
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – So In Love (1985)
So In Love may not be stupid enough to meme-ify, but it’s an emotionally powerful song with all the melancholic nostalgia seeding you could possibly want. In this dreamlike state, you may feel as if your feet will lose rhythm to it’s smooth dance beat as you float away off the dance floor. Don’t worry, no modern DJ will be playing this any time soon, and your drinking that night will likely leave you face first on the floor. Look, were they a great band? No, not really. But if we’re going to collectively obsess over singular 80s pop tracks, OMD has all the trappings (and just enough good songs) to get a mention here.
Sharon Redd – Can You Handle It (1980)
While you were busy fetishizing the 80s, disregarding the AIDS epidemic and the CIA starting a racialized drug war, black and/or queer people were out there making some of the best music of the decade. If you’re looking for peak 80s (in a good way), this is it. Just because it’s not Madonna-white doesn’t make it not so. So, can you handle it?
You may think, ‘why Sharon Redd? Why not something even more 80s like Chaka Khan, Cherrelle, Evelyn King, etc.?’ Those artists are amazing, but they’ve all had second-winds in the age of music streaming and cock and bull ‘I grew up with this’ nostalgia boasts. Either way, if you’re a trend sycophant than you’ve probably stopped reading a while ago. So kick back and enjoy this 6min+ jammer.
General Public – Anxious(1984)
Why are we culturally pining for the 1980s to begin with? Has sociopolitical pressures made us look for a ‘simpler time’? Is it 70s babies grasping for a time that they were the forefront of commercial culture? Can we simply blame all of it on vaporwave and Stranger Things? Who knows. Maybe culture is dying. In a press-play world that awards content and volume over quality and craft, why would anyone take the time to enrich their lives culturally? It may be my upbringing that put General Public on this list, but if the 80s are relevant now, than a track like Anxious is more relevant than ever.
Twin Peaks inspired music is everywhere. By now, you’re probably well familiar with David Lynch’s 1990’s cult-classic turned pop-culture phenom. Whether searching for classic shows or just minding your damn business, Twin Peaks iconography is everywhere. Composer Angelo Badalamenti’s score would go on to influence the creation of doom jazz, inspired parody and thousands of musicians. Much like David Lynch, Resident Sound doesn’t like to be too obvious. So while you won’t see Xiu Xiu’s tribute album or the doom jazz stalwarts Dale Cooper Quartet here, get ready to strap in and hear 5 Twin Peaks inspired albums worth your time.
If you’re looking for a refresher, or better yet for someone to explain the entirety of Twin Peaks’ meta-narrative, well, Youtube channel Twin Perfect has you covered:
Now with that out of the way, here’s 5 Twin Peaks Inspired Albums Worth Your Time…
1: Messer Chups – Twin Peaks Twist
Saint Petersburg, Russia’s Messer Chups are the campy horror surf scene’s crown jewel. Often interchangeable with Messer für Frau Müller, the band they originally spun-off from, Messer Chups’ Twin Peaks Twist is a 4 song EP of campy surf tracks. Starting with a slow then fast, off-and-on reworking of the Twin Peaks theme, the EP culminates on Eduard Artemyev’s theme from the 1974 Soviet Russian epic Siberiade.
2: Liquid Rainbow – The Blue Rose Sessions
In reference to Lil in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,The Blue Rose Sessions are a synth-heavy, spaced-out, post-rock extravaganza. Outside of just being Twin Peaks related (and tolerable), the album blends strange elements in a masterful way. Track Morning Joe mixes heavy vocoder-esque synths, jazzy drums and guitar, organ and banjo in such a way as to make itself almost as distinct as Angelo Badalamenti’s original iconic score. Pulled from the album’s listing on Bandcamp, “This album is inspired by the Art and visionary Genious of David Lynch and Mark Frost… …We’ll keep on dreaming and scrutinizing the Mysteries.”
3: Côte Déserte – Dale Cooper’s Case
Having more in common with its doom jazz predecessors, Dale Cooper’s Case is a piano heavy noir triumph. The half Saint Petersburg, half Moscow based duo Côte Déserte originally released Dale Cooper’s Case in 2011, and followed up the album with Strange To Look At Her. It Seems That…in 2014. Like the best (and all the rest) of doom jazz, the Côte Déserte Bandcamp page has remained more or less abandoned since 2014.
4: Silencio – She’s Bad
It says it right there on the tin, folks: “more music inspired by the works of David Lynch & Angelo Badalamenti.” But all you need to do is press play and the influence is immediate. She’s Bad is part Portishead, part April March, part Messur Chups, part… um… huh… Actually, the album is stylistically all over the place, and if there is any one thing it can be called it’s Twin Peaks-y. Get ready for some twangy guitar.
To pick a Twin Peaks song so notoriously hated and farcical and then decide to to record and press it to vinyl as a single has to be one of the more interesting choices within Twin Peaks inspired music circles. But what else is there to say? It’s a good record. If you ever wanted to hear a version of Just You that didn’t include Twin Peaks most-hated character James Hurley’s high-pitched awkwardness, well, this record is for you.
Honorable Mention: Black Market – Welcome To Twin Peaks
The news was broken to me last night that Cesar Alexandre, the person behind Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza and Mount Shrine has passed away from coronavirus.
I never met or talked to Cesar Alexandre. I was well aware of their underground-classic 2013 release Daily Night Euphoria EP, at times serving as the high-water mark within vaporwave (at least from an outsider’s perspective). Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza was an early building block to vaporwave culture, strengthening the legitimacy and legacy of those that came before it while simultaneously expanding the potential and outreach of the genre as a whole.
Tonight we've learned of the passing of one of our earliest collaborators, Lindshaven Virtual Plaza, an icon of the vaporwave scene. His memory will live on through his music for years to come. pic.twitter.com/GirUFo5kOy
The idea of legacy within music can be complicated. Usually a word saved for the most famous of artists. But Dave Brockie’s death in 2014 wasn’t lost on me, and neither was Randy ‘Biscuit’ Turner’s death to the Austin, TX scene when I visited nearly 15 years after the fact. In the same way, Cesar Alexandre’s legacy will not be lost on the vaporwave community.
The enrichment of our collective cultures depends on artists and the work they do, regardless of the medium or stylistic movements in which they work. And with that, let’s remember the legacy of Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza, Mount Shrine, and most importantly Cesar Alexandre.
The Resident Sound 