Music Discoveries (Jan 2023) #23

See also: Dec 2022 and Feb-March 2023 (View all)

I put my emusic account on hold for financial reasons. So I won’t be buying many albums for the next few months. Fortunately I have been checking a lot of cool CDs from my local libraries.

Actually though I really just want to sit around and listen to all the things I’ve found over the last year. I don’t consider myself a particularly astute music critic but I can get excited about things nobody else notices. I resolve to write more music reviews. One side benefit of writing music reviews is that it forces me to focus on what I’m listening — to concentrate on the album itself.

Another thing. My listening habits are haphazard. I do my most serious listening on my PC with Foobar2000 program. It’s nice, but frankly my digital music collection is so vast that I end up overlooking many artists and albums. I need to devise a good way to plan my listening — even if it’s simply to play a random album on this list sometime.

I don’t really listen to a commercial streaming service like Spotify, but I’ve been uploading my favorite albums to ibroadcast, which is an online music locker/streaming service . I’m still on the free plan, but will eventually roll over to the premium plan I like it so much. I have to create my own playlists, but that is not too terrible a problem. Actually though it’s somewhat hard to order classical albums correctly in my playlists.

Also, I plan to revisit some musical favorites — and maybe do casual posts about them. This month will be Mazzy Star

Articles and Interviews

Here’s a wonderful annotated list of Eurovision participants by country. Of course, many Eurovision winners either were distinguished musicians or later did many interesting things. Eurovision — like any contest — is just a good way to keep track of musicians since most of them pass through there at one time or another.

Emusic Purchases

1. List begins here

Bandcamp Purchases

This may not be considered a “purchase”, but about 6 months ago I bought lots of Name Your Price albums on Bandcamp. Then I did something unusual. I bought a “DIGITAL DISCOGRAPHY” to the Business Casual label which allowed me to download/stream all the catalog’s albums. That turned out to number in the hundreds. Wow, that took a long while — plus I’m not sure that everything on the catalog is worth listening. Will report back.

1. Begin

Youtubey Things

start

Freegal and Library CDs

Mostly I’m downloading tracks by former Eurovision winners, using names found in the subreddit article mentioned above.

1. Bert Jansch. Scottish folk singer.
2. Anggun
3. Edurne
4. Gromee
5. Loic Nottet
6. Laura Tesoro
7. Samira Said
8. Kuunkuiskaajat

Reviews (Rateyourmusic/Personal Reviews, etc)

See also my rateyourmusic profile and my review spreadsheet.in Google Docs.

Podcasty Things

I’ve been listening to the always excellent 60 Songs that Explain the 90s podcast. It’s great hearing a dissection of seemingly unremarkable pop hits and back stories behind the production, the genre and the musicians. I’ve been enjoying the episodes about Offspring, Britney Spears, Spice Girls.