At the end of each year, I have a tradition of sharing a bunch of music. It started out as a little antidote to Christmas music, but then I started to focus on a different theme each year.

Today, I’d like to share music that represents my personal trajectory. I started listening to music in high school–and by that I mean actually choosing music for myself instead of just listening to whatever’s playing on the radio. At first, I gravitated towards electronic and techno. From there I started following a few individual rock bands. Then I went into more niche genres.  There were several different threads running in parallel, and I’d like to share a few examples of each.

1. Electronic music

When I was in high school, I remember having a big folder of music, thousands of tracks from all sorts of bands. I never knew where the folder came from, it seemed to have plopped down from the sky. Presumably someone had pirated it, put it on a bunch of CDs, and it eventually ended up on our computer, free for anyone to play. The only question was, which ones would I choose to play?

At the time, I had an aversion to vocals. I think I found them embarrassing–what if people heard what I was listening to? Nope, the only acceptable vocals were sample quotes from old sci-fi movies. So I ended up listening to electronic music. Here are a couple examples:

Orbital – Tension

Astral Projection – Black & White

It’s alright if you like this music, but to be frank, I do not like it.  These examples I’ve picked out specifically because I continue to find tolerable, but I don’t like most of the electronic music I listened to back then. A lot of it was dance music, although I never danced to it. I just played it on the family computer. For a brief time I was into programming music visualizations on Winamp, so some of these songs conjure memories of pulsating colors, rotation matrices, and blur effects.

2. Individual bands

Towards the end of high school, there were a few bands that broke through the barrier of me not liking vocals. Behold, the transitional form:

Radiohead – Everything in its right place

I originally found Radiohead in the folder of pirated music. I also picked up Nine Inch Nails the same way. And when I was a college freshman, I randomly found Deerhoof on Ruckus, a free streaming service for college students.  So those were my top three bands for a very long time.

Deerhoof – Byun

Now I didn’t just listen to those three bands, but for many years I didn’t really listen to more than a dozen bands. I followed Tool, Queens of the Stone Age, Portishead, The Mars Volta, and a few others tangentially. I’d periodically go through the list of artists I liked, and googled them one by one to see what they had done lately. That includes side projects. So I know all about Thom Yorke’s supergroup Atoms for Peace, Trent Reznor’s movie scores, and John Dieterich’s obscure collaboration with Jeremy Barnes.

What do I think of these bands today? I think Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, and Deerhoof were very good picks! But I don’t listen to them as much as I used to, and I’ve even declined to purchase their most recent musical projects.

3. 20th century classical

Although I didn’t choose music for myself until high school, I did play flute from a young age, and was classically trained. I also took music theory in high school, and a music appreciation course in college. From this background, I formed the opinion that the best classical music was from the later periods, such as the impressionist period. In my freshman year, I did a deep dive on Claude Debussy so I could write a report for my music appreciation course.  (The course instructor told us to use Ruckus, which is how I found Deerhoof!)

Claude Debussy – String Quartet in g minor

I was initially hesitant to ever go beyond the impressionist period, as it felt like the sweet spot before things got too avant garde. But you know what, now I like avant garde. In 2013, when I was in grad school, I did a deep dive into Hindemith. I listened to a bunch of works across his entire career, and bought 5 hours of recordings, and carefully sorted them into chronological composition order so I could experience it all in the context of his developing style. Hindemith is a very unique composer, he does not sound like anyone else!

Paul Hindemith – Symphonia Serena: 1. Moderately Fast

And then… I did the same thing with Krzysztof Penderecki in 2016. And then, I did the same thing with György Ligeti in 2017. Oh, but that was pretty much it. Just those composers.

György Ligeti – Lux Aeterna

This is definitely not a typical way to appreciate classical music. Most people listen to the biggest hits from the 18th or 19th centuries, with a lot of weight on the big names but certainly not an exclusive focus on them. But personally I want to really get into a composer or not at all.

4. Metal

So I got a lot of music recommendations from my brother, and around 2010 he started listening to metal, so I did too. But it should be said that there are different subgenres of metal, and I stuck almost exclusively to the slow genres, such as doom, sludge, and drone. Here’s an example:

Yob – Burning the Altar

I started out listening to UFOmammut, Earth, Yob, Electric Wizard, Lento, and Cough. But I didn’t necessarily follow these artists as intensely as I did other bands, because I was honestly a bit ambivalent about the genre. I think the genre can be quite repetitive at times. I also don’t share the same musical values, because people talk about listening to metal on full blast while stoned or something, and I very much prefer music at low volume! The nice thing about loud music is that the volume is very consistent, which basically cedes all control of the volume to the listener. That’s right, I like volume compression.

Initially my tastes were fairly aligned with my brother, but then they started to spin off in opposite directions. My brother started listening to death metal, but I went in the direction of slower metal.  And now I have a deep appreciation for Sunn O)))’s ability to play a single note for 10 minutes.

Sunn O))) – Frost (C)

5. Music Critic Grab Bag

In 2015, I started following a couple music critics, and that led me to a handful of artists that were a bit off-genre for me. Here’s an early example:

Beauty Pill – Steven & Tiwonge

Maybe this music still fits into whatever alternative rock thing I had going on? Although critics helped me cast a wider net, I was, after all, still only picking out stuff I liked. For good measure, here’s another example:

Chelsea Wolfe – Mer

A few years ago I stopped following any critics, because it just takes so much time and energy to try out that much music. It got to the point where I was just skipping over the vast majority of it, as soon as I identified that it was part of a genre that I knew that I never had success with. Following critics has also led me to buy several dud records that lost their luster fairly quickly.

6. Drone & Ambient

So I liked drone metal, and I liked classical drone. And in 2017, one of the music critics I followed highlighted this drone track:

thisquietarmy – Tu aimerais parfois te retirer de ta matière

I bought the album on Bandcamp–the last good streaming service–and I learned about searching genre tags on Bandcamp. So I started occasionally browsing the drone tag. You can read more about the drone music I enjoy in another blog post I wrote several years ago

Although I came from avant garde classical drone and drone metal, music that is specifically labeled as “drone” often comes from ambient music. So yeah, I started listening to some ambient music too. Here’s a random example:

Witxes – The Strands

7. Xen

Starting in 2018, I got into xenharmonic music, which is to say, music that deliberately and systematically departs from western 12TET tuning. I’ve already shared a bunch of examples in another blog post, but here’s a recent example:

The Mercury Tree – After the Incident

The nice thing about xen is that even if I stick to searching the xenharmonic Bandcamp tag, I still get exposed to a wide variety of stuff, because xen music can be of any genre.

Conclusion

Some people say that our musical tastes are defined by whatever we happened to enjoy at age 14. I’ve written about how this is a myth arising from an NYT article with very bad math. Much better studies show that people start out with popular music, and then get into more niche music as they get older. “Taste freeze” generally happens to people in their 30s, when people stop discovering new music.

I think that my musical trajectory follows the typical pattern. I started out with fairly popular bands, then got into niche genres. And now, I feel like I don’t discover as much music as I used to, as I found it too exhausting to follow music critics. I find myself wondering if I’ll experience any more major shifts in musical taste at this point. It’s unclear.

On that note, although I’ve had this annual tradition of sharing music at the end of each year, I’m considering that this might be the last year that I do it. I feel like I’ve exhausted the genres of music that I can really talk about. That said, I’ve enjoyed writing these each year. They’ve helped me feel more comfortable sharing my thoughts on music, even when my musical tastes can be a bit unusual.

(In the interest of transparency, this blog post is loosely based on a series I wrote anonymously years ago. You can find my original writing here, but be forewarned that the tumblr ads are so bad they will prevent you from reading it.)