How did your taste change in 2001?

a) I tolerate and enjoy more music I'd otherwise hate if I hear a good melody eg. that Travis "Flowers in the Window" track.

b) I'm less tolerant of music I can't hear a tune in, unless it is particularly interesting in terms of rhythm or sounds. I'm listening to less and less electronica and downtempo music.

i sort of went so deep into noisy musics like free jazz and noise- rock that i came out the other end and couldn't listen to them for a while. i think it was all the talk of destiny's child on here that drove me back to phil spector's girl group records, and my ears opened up a lot more to r'n'b/pop etc when i had some sort of new way of listening. in the end, i think i'm actually more discerning as a music fan because i have a lot fewer self-imposed barriers, and now i choose only what really appeals to me.

In the place of the stuff I felt like passing over I listened a lot more often to hip-hop and jazz. Well, in a kind of way. I wasn't out buying hip-hop CDs every other day, but I felt like at some point I'd heard enough different hip-hop that hip-hop that was new to me started making more sense quicker. Some of it is definitely the joy and excitement of figuring out what's going on in strange territory. In contrast, I've liked jazz a lot longer, and more of it. Something similar happened, though, and I sort of felt my field of interest expand. I didn't listen to jazz as much as hip-hop, though, I think in part because the new stuff I was picking up on was sort of less novel to me, despite being new.

I think my indie blinkers have also been removed, and I'm much more open to genres I'd previously rejected flat-out: pop, hip-hop. Phew, it was a long time coming. I've also listened to a lot less indie and had much less desire to. That desire hasn't been replaced with anything in particular, just a greater awareness and openness. And I'm 22 now so about time, too, that I uh passed through my pupa stage.

I'm half bemused and half concerned by my overwhelming conceptual focus on grooves these past three years - eg. I listen to much more rock music than many might think, but when it comes to saying much about it I tend to blank out, because deciphering the music has rarely felt like a pressing concern for me.

In summation, if I list my mp3s by date, towards the bottom you'll find Autechre, Seefeel, BOC, SchneiderTM, Capitol K, Jan Jelinek, then some Miss E starts to trickle in, followed by Outkast, Aaliyah, Jay-Z, NERD, Kelis, Daft Punk, Mystikal, Basement Jaxx, Omni Trio etc etc. And after the remaining pop-barriers went down last year, it's open season. I used to walk into the 2nd hand store with some idea of what kind of record I might walk out with. Now, it's as likely to be James Brown as it is the Insides (the last 2 cds i bought 2nd hand) and that's a good thing. And I have you, at least in part, to thank.

1. I've pretty much stopped listening to indie rock and indie pop - the odd old favourite song here and there, and a few standout bands (currently the Happy Mondays), but that's it. Even the bands I know I like - the Pixies, the Fall, etc. - I don't currently want to listen to. I think I finally accepted that new stuff in this style was never likely to appeal much to me again, and with that acceptance came a realisation that there wasn't much point in complaining about it, given that what I needed/wanted from music had changed, rather than that the music itself had got much worse.

This was something that had been building up for ages - I'd been bored of indie music since 1994 or so, had preferred pop music since 1999, but it took me until fairly recently to just kick away/grow out of the emotional programming that was saying 'you are miserable = you must listen to a sad white songwriter guy' and just stop listening to the wretched stuff. This has made me a happier listener but a less happy writer, incidentally. But my apologies to any readers who got frustrated with my constant carping at indie - the offending limb has so to speak been cut off and the grumpiness may now cease.

2. I've become even more of a dilettante - I've been buying more compilations than ever, and most of those compilations are little summaries of whole rich styles or genres which I might never be arsed to properly explore. I'm happy with that - it's better than the situation I was in last year, where I was feeling my tastes atrophying. I'm particularly keen currently on music which is still 'pop' - designed for mass appeal - but doesn't sound like what pop has sounded like across the years since 1960 or so. Pop which uses older, or different, building blocks, so to speak - pre-War dance bands, Bollywood, Bhangra, Western Swing, Brazilian street funk, African Pop, computer game music...not that I'm buying lots of most of this stuff but I'm excited when I hear it, like I'm learning new things from it.

The centre of my listening now, though, is MP3s of pop, dance and hip- hop tracks from the last 20-25 years, with a bias towards the current. That hasn't changed much over the last year.

Hm, interesting...but does that mean that undie rap is the nu-indie, given hip-hop's obvious cultural dominance (using John's Pavement/Seven Mary Three example as an earlier example)? Obviously there's been a critical assumption that it is in some corners, but does your own specific experience make more sense as a way to think about it?

What I realise now is that I got into indie music at pretty much just the point it had started to stop being that wonderful and inventive, so I was trying my best to adore records - by Ride, Carter USM, The Wedding Present - which weren't as good as I wanted them to be. I still like those records a lot, actually, I just like them for what I was more than for what they were (not a bad motive, as they go).

Then the second big listening-to-indie-music period for me was much more a social thing. I was at university, my new friends liked indie, all the bands that played were indie, it was a fun thing to be listening to. We all listened to other stuff too - a bit of rave, a lot of pop, quite a lot of old stuff - but indie was the common bond. But my actual love for it had gone before that.

Continuing to explore and enjoy salsa and Latin music in general, as well as Arabic music, and continuing to buy older music I like from various phases of my musical past.

I have started to get into more 20th century classical like feldman and xenakis but i think even those things happened indepedently from ILM. but that's what's happened from last year. for the coming year I'm interested in more electroacoustic music. Also I got a henri chopin alb just before I cam to canada for a while. After i play the journey alb Sean gave me (heh) once i get back to london I'll probably get some more of his 'sound art poetry' and investigate that for a while.

But I still find the odd 'song' gem (and I'm always on the lookout). I'll prob. post a thread abt my latest discovery soon (though that a early 90s alb.

Towards Summer, reacclimated to guitarstuff with Mogwai (though I didn't really appreciate till Winter), which led me POSTROCK IS THE NEXT BIG THING. More trendy genre-hopping[tm] and more chinstrokingcredibility. I.e. any artist that makes songs less than 6 minutes is trash. But then I warmed to Sleater-Kinney and threw all that to hell. And I guess this is where I can sez that I came from electronic to indieish, though more appropriately I primarily focus on bands rather than mass movements. And I've been gradually getting more "urban" music, though I haven't been listening much at all lately.

(I just checked my e-mail and there was the latest update from www.descarga.com featuring new releases, many of which sound promising.)

bitter and sour have both been replaced by petrol.

I don't actually expect this to stay stable. So while my taste hasn't changed a whole lot, it's come into sharper focus for me.

i have hardly listened to any new bands this year. i can count the amount of releases by brand new bands that i've bothered listening to at all on one hand:

the coral
the darkness
einoma
the bug
remarc (don't even know if he's new or not)

and the majority of those i've only listened to a couple of times. cue: "so, what is brand new and good? s/d" thread.

Nothing in the case of music this year. Got an R.E.M. videos DVD, but as they've never been my favourite video band I exchanged it in the shop for Elbow's "Cast Of Thousands" (which is great, but which was my choice anyway) :-)

as for my tastes: as I said above, I did investigate all that 'sound poetry' stuff and I have listened to improv/free jazz but this was the year I got slsk and I've burned and listened to a heck of a lot of this stuff and more classical so I feel as if i got enough of the stuff that now I can buy other stuff (though I'll keep at it, of course).

so i've been getting back into nicely rhythmic music like Microhouse, started getting the odd AC/DC, bossa nova and hip-hop album and i feel (like some others have said in the 2000/2001 threads) that i could like anything.

um, my 2002 post had an imcomplete sentence. wonder what i was gonna write?

2004: FOCUS UP)

so much for dreams.