Music I'm Listening To (June 2022)
A personal musical update from me - here's a bit of some jazz we (Daniel, Viraj, Patrick, and I) played at an art exhibition earlier in June. Recorded on the XY mic for Zoom H6, which sounds reasonably close to how it sounded in real life (except not bassy enough).
Fun or maybe not fun fact, I ran out of space in both my Google Drive and Soundcloud, so I wrestled ffmpeg and YouTube's useless error messages for a while before getting the full recording up for us to listen back to. No, I'm not going to post that here. Maybe I should switch to torrenting them or something like Magic Wormhole, but I do like to have browser-based playback.
Anyways, here's the music I've been listening to lately - I've been traveling recently so much of this is from a couple months back.
Natalie Layne - Love Me Back To Life
I first heard this song via TikTok, where Natalie Layne has been dripping previews for months now. I'm happy that it's finally out - it's very different from her other stuff. And I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a more acoustic version since I really liked the piano demo (and live horn demo) from her TikTok. Potentially it could be a lot like Couch's self-titled EP.
Lizzy McAlpine - hate to be lame (feat. FINNEAS)
Back to simp songs - Lizzy McAlpine is one of my favorite singer-songwriters and lately I've been listening a lot to her recent collaboration with FINNEAS. I think it's the combination of cute romantic-tension lyricism and duet orchestration touches - the a capella beginnings of each verse; the unison male voice on the second verse; the buildup into the bridge and then cutout into FINNEAS's verse. Lizzy McAlpine has also been landing other big collaborations recently, like erase me, feat. Jacob Collier. Good, she deserves it.
GSoul - Broken Record
Groovy. GSoul continues the sounds of K-R&B - though the EP is actually in English, I think it still feels more Korean with the tight harmonies, blocky piano comping, and rhythm that lays back for the tenor vocals. Deceptively high, in that it sounds easy to sing until I try it myself.
Past recommendations here, and I'm always looking for more!