Listening to 2015: A Collaborative Music Project for ILM in 2016

whatever path gets you up the mountain is good by me!
Yeah, i don't sleep a lot these days and i try doing this to be "productive" when i can't.

I assumed you had eschewed sleep in favour of some meditative waking-sleep-music-listening operation.

misread this

I can't say that I'm surprised that people care about modern music but I never knew to what extant until I just now clicked on this and the eoy list threads.

I heard a 2015 song I liked today. Not surprisingly it was from an old dude and I've never delved into ELO before. I also like the new Bowie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfH8EJA-hg0

so maybe I can slowly work on an ILX Rolling Old People 2015 Spotify Playlist and add it here

i had no idea there was an elo album last year! Added to the pile

I was trying to remember where I heard about that Amara Touré anthology, and I'm pretty sure now it came from one of your playlists. Cheers for that!

you're welcome. it's SO good.

Hello!

work is making it where I haven't had a chance to talk up anything but the listening is continuing apace. I just knocked out the Angie Stone album and am chewing on Anna Caragnano (with Donato Dozzy) and Anna von Hausswolff. I may type a lot while I watch the superbowl over the weekend.

I am taking a lil breather for the rest of the night with this playlist collection of early polyphony. It's part of one of my OTHER OTHER projects: transferring my old high school era cassette tapes into playlists for quick reference and listening because my tape player has long since up and died and how else can I access this stuff in the sequencing I've become accustomed to in the core of my soul? The polyphony dubbed double c-90 set was a gift from a visiting scholar to my dad decades ago and it had no impact on him but it blew my mind and I used to play it to vibe out and fall asleep to through much of my early teens. Discovering that it was all on spotify makes me very glad; bless that obsessive cassette dubber for including titles and composers.

tangent, i look forward to you tackling the emo when you get 'round to it.

I'm still here btw (sort of). I've not had opportunity to post in depth recently (I habitually disappear, unfortunately) but I am keeping up to date with my listening. Almost finished time travel! I'll post more once atmospheric tectonics have reassembled a bit. I'll be catching up on all your recommendations too. Are people allowed sabbaticals for 'cultural engagement'?

Sure, the whole point of this is to do it on your own terms!

As it came recommended from a number of different sources and since I found a few solid tracks on his first album, I felt compelled to slog through more or less the entirety of A$AP Rocky's prog-pop rap album AT.LONG.LAST.A$AP and my takeaway is that the future of glossy-magazine cover rap is no longer speaking to me. Duets with Lil Wayne ("M'$"), Schoolboy Q ("Electric Body"), UGK and Juicy J ("Wavybone"), Kanye ("Jukebox Joints") and the unlikely duo of Rod Stewart and Miguel ("Everyday") do little more than highlight Rocky's lack of charisma and star power. His very few solo tracks lean to somnambulance. I respect the desire to push the envelope and leap from concept to concept, but it doesn't bear fruit here. I have some grudging appreciation for the breathy pseudo-psychedelica of "L$D" (imagine Zappa-by-way-of-Blind Melon), but I don't think I found a real keeper beside the RIP YAMS elegy and Yasiin Bey duet "Back Home". All in all, a lot of work for not much fun.

No such problem with the Nigerian R&B/hip hop trio A'won Boyz light and lovely ballad "Forever"; this is nothing but pleasure from the first listen. Autotuned guest vocals from another West African star, Tekno (who, at this rate, I'll get to in early 2017) round the song out nicely.
Also HIGHLY recommended is the A'won Boyz take on Future's "Fuck Up Some Commas", which proves that tricksy little piano hook was missing just one or two more drum presets for maximum adrenaline density.
Get it: https://soundcloud.com/awonboyz/commas-come-and-go

Londoner A-Minor's "Be Mine" is perfectly serviceable, unremarkable club anthem sugar water with somebody named Kelli-Leigh on diva duty. I think the brits call this "bog standard"?

A-Villa's Carry On Tradition album is nostalgia packed with "rapper's rappers" lyricists, including Cormega, NORE, Big KRIT, Kool G Rap, Freddie Gibbs, Vic Spencer, Elzhi, Roc Marciano, Guilty Simpson, Freeway, Sean Price, Joell Ortiz, Killer Mike, Action Bronson, Ras Kass... and that's not half of them. There's also a penchant for wallowing in boom bap beats, lengthy transitions and skits that ramble on; "A Hustler's Soliloquy" ends with a minute and a half of the Omar and Brother Mouzone standoff. I'm almost disappointed in myself that this didn't grab me; there's something more cypher than song in the production, a certain leaden monotone to the beats that carries over from track to track. I appreciate the aesthetic at play here more than it moves me; by album's end I was hard pressed to remember any individual song. "Sucker Free" with Saigon, Joe Budden and BJ the Chicago Kid was my keeper by the third spin and, on listening to it now, it feels entirely worth fighting for but damned if I could remember what it sounded like before I hit play again.

A-Wax's Everlasting Money is admittedly frontloaded but those first seven tracks are as good as any hip hop that reached my ears in 2015. Dude's nimble, nasal voice reminds me of Ice-T; he's blunted and laconic even when he's lacing a track with autotuned interior rhymes. A-Wax has a declamatory confidence to his style that reads as world-weary, learned and burned. There's dull rage on "Been A Long Time", murder ballad self history on "Tried As An Adult", vindictive loneliness on "Smoke Alone" and nauseous desperation on "Never Saw It". He's deeply sad and deeply defiant; Beckett's cadence lurks just beneath the surface of every song: I must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on. Great music for bad times.

Believe it or don't, I haven't fallen off on the listening portion of this project... just the typing.

Gotten through about 700 tracks for the year and up alphabetically to Benjamin Clementine. The chances of getting even to "J" this year are highly unlikely. The experience continues to be highly rewarding though! I suppose I should double back and write about a few things in the A's though, see if I can get caught up so that writing echoes the current listening before the summer gets here.

The PC Music Vol. 1 compilation sweats saccharine to the point of nausea but I will admit an affinity for A.G. Cook's "Beautiful", spastic bleating thing that it is. On the other hand, "Keri Baby" spackled with Hannah Diamond's Speak-N-Spell rapping makes me want to break neon lightbulb tubes with a crowbar. Just line 'em up and let the celery crunch pops drown out the atrocity nattering in my ear. Not a fan.

A.KOR's "Always" is not especially memorable late 80's AC nostalgia rock put through the K-Pop mill.

I've seen Aaron Diehl play live several times at Dizzy's and at the mainstage at Jazz at Lincoln Center on his own or with Cecile McLorin Salvant; he's a top notch jazz pianist but I hadn't heard any of his personal compositions on tape. His 2015 album, Space, Time, Continuum trapped me for a few days. From the slinky title track (featuring vocals from the striking vocalist Charenée Wade), the assured virtuosity of "Broadway Boogie Woogie", the silky soft "Flux Capacitor" and the likely-to-be-a-standard swing of "Uranus", it's excellent top to bottom. If you're only going to try one song, make it "Kat's Dance", a secretive call and response duet with Stephen Riley on sax. Diehl isn't much of an experimentalist but if you have any love for post-bop, you won't be disappointed.

Aaron Watson is a Christian warrior and honky tonk lifer of the variety that dodges major label support but still lassos a few top 50 country radio filler tracks every other year. The Underdog is his thirteenth album and his first Country (and Indie!) #1. The breakout hit is "That Look", a cockeyed cowgirl-on-a-pedestal love song that celebrates without minimizing. "Getaway Truck" is worth a listen or two as Eric Church lite. I gotta admit the 'everybody dies' glurge of "Bluebonnets (Julia's Song)" got under my skin, mostly on the strength of Watson's painfully honest delivery. Wikipedia informs me Watson is a Ted Cruz supporter which is a bummer.

Abra's breakout album, Rose, is chillwave alt&B or quiet storm electropop or whatever the hell I have to call it to get you to listen to it; it's warm milk and kahlua is what it is. The lead vocalist/composer/namesake has a gorgeous voice and good taste.
Discussed a bit here: Abra - Rose
The album's great but front loaded; I would've been happier with an EP. Even so, don't miss the Aaliyah influenced "U Kno", the Pet Shop Boys pastiche of "Roses" or the one-two punch of Fruit and No Chill. I'd be surprised if Abra doesn't blow up in the next few years; this feels distinctly marketable in a way that, say, Kelela does not.

Absofacto's "Dissolve" is craftsmanlike fizzy pop with Scandi touches that made me think of Komeda. That's high praise from me. Be warned though: if, after a few listens, there's no aftertaste tempting you to return, well he did tell you as much in the title...

Still doing this believe it or not.
this colin stetson and sarah neufield album omg

Are you alphabetising by first name or last name?

first name as that's how it's organized on spotify.
I've gotten through about 1600 songs from the 1975 to Colin Stetson at the moment. Almost nine months! At this rate, I should be done by 2015 in 2018 which would bother me more if a) this was all I was listening to (it's not) or b) i wasn't finding great gems on an almost daily basis.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: taken as an aggregate, ilx's taste in music has about a 70% hit rate with me, which is pretty fantastic!

November threw me out of whack (along with everybody else); at this rate, I should be about 2k songs and 130 hours of music down by the end of the year with another 6300 and 468 hours to go.
No reason to stop there as far as I can see tho'! Still finding great music on the regular so 2015 may last to 2019.