¶ When You Run Out of What You Know · 23 September 2013 listen/tech
An NPR piece on Friday, in response to a request by a self-described fan of "sad, beardy indie-rock" for something more upbeat, asked Where Do Mopey Music Fans Turn When They Need Energy?
NPR's Stephen Thompson took a shot at recommending a few bands himself (Andrew W.K., The Polyphonic Spree, Cloud Cult, Mates of State, Jonsi), and invited other suggestions from readers, who added lots (with multiple mentions of Frightened Rabbit, Vampire Weekend, The Go! Team and CHVRCHES). Thoughtful individual suggestions from actual people are a pretty decent way to find new music. (And Frightened Rabbit and CHVRCHES are both really great.)
But we also have computers, and data-alchemized suggestions computed from the aggregate music activities of the people of Earth are another pretty decent way to find new music. So here, instead of just a few more band-names to answer a particular inquiry, are 5 data-driven paths for exploration that might help you answer questions like this for yourself:
1. How well do you know what you know? Before we start exploring alternatives, here's an overview map of what "indie rock" means to The Echo Nest. Maybe not all of this sad music is quite as mopey as you thought. Maybe some of this notion of indie rock is stuff you didn't know. Click around and see what you find. Higher energy tends to be up and to the right, although of course generally-mellow bands can have highly energetic individual songs, and vice versa. Or try "scan" or "radiate" at the top of the map to fly you around on a random tour. Or try the ENtro to indie rock, my algorithmic data-driven attempt at a canonical overview playlist for the genre.
2. Let me push some levers. At The Echo Nest we calculate a bunch of scores for every song, among them "danceability", "energy" and an experimental mood metric called "valence". With these I can take any genre and produce the "upbeat" version of it, picking only songs that are above the genre's average on all three of those scores. Here are the results for "upbeat indie rock". Whether any individual song or band appeals to you is a personal decision, of course, but that playlist has 344 ideas across 21 hours, so hopefully some of them will lead you somewhere for a few minutes.
3. Creep past your borders. At the bottom of the "indie rock" splattergraph from #1 is a map of similar genres. Higher energy is up and to the right, so the obvious stepping-stone path to try would be indie pop to dance-punk to indietronica to new rave to synthpop to alternative dance. Each of those steps is another whole world to explore, but they overlap and shift as you move from one to another, so maybe this is how you can find your way to somewhere new without ever feeling like you're being flung out of the world of what you already know.
4. But sometimes the nagging feeling of slight dissatisfaction with what you know is your heart's way of hinting that there are wonderful things you've never even dreamed. Edging from related genre to related genre is prudent, and not necessarily unexciting, but it assumes that "related" and "prudent" are required qualities, and maybe they are not. You are not constrained by your past choices. Indie rock is not the only principled music in the world. What about math pop, where guitars ping around like blades of Calder mobiles, or c86, where they chime and chirp like besweatered birds? What about noise pop, where the electricity becomes audible, or punk blues, where it starts to fray? What about chinese indie rock, where you can hear a culture still figuring out for itself what it means to express dissent and moral conviction in music, or swedish punk, where you can hear how a different one imported and adapted that dissent to their own climate? Frightened Rabbit and CHVRCHES are from Scotland, which is close to the Faroe Islands. Or maybe you have totally underestimated your tolerance for extravagance, and the frenetic dance exhortations of bouncy house or the epic anthems of gothic symphonic metal would open your world in ways you didn't know to want.
5. But the larger horizon towards which all these paths point is that this is a question you can best and most joyously answer for yourself. Unfold the map. You don't need me to point to places on it. Just click somewhere. Maybe you need to be flung out of what you know. The world is full of music, more full than you have probably realized even if you thought you knew that already. So go explore a little. It's easy, and it's free (or it's $10/month for Rdio, at most, which is about the same as free compared to what it used to cost to "explore" music). Play some sounds from categories you've never before seen on lists. Hear what people sound like in places you had never thought about visiting. Hear what the tiny things you think you hate turn into when somebody embraces them as the grandest truth. Hear new cults forming, or just let the currents whirl you through everything.
Music is the thing that humans do best. That moment, when you run out of what you know? That is the moment before the great moment when you set out on the journey that will take you to find your next helpless astonishing love. That moment is the tiny, precious, terrible silence before music fills all of the air, before you realize that music is why the air is even there.
NPR's Stephen Thompson took a shot at recommending a few bands himself (Andrew W.K., The Polyphonic Spree, Cloud Cult, Mates of State, Jonsi), and invited other suggestions from readers, who added lots (with multiple mentions of Frightened Rabbit, Vampire Weekend, The Go! Team and CHVRCHES). Thoughtful individual suggestions from actual people are a pretty decent way to find new music. (And Frightened Rabbit and CHVRCHES are both really great.)
But we also have computers, and data-alchemized suggestions computed from the aggregate music activities of the people of Earth are another pretty decent way to find new music. So here, instead of just a few more band-names to answer a particular inquiry, are 5 data-driven paths for exploration that might help you answer questions like this for yourself:
1. How well do you know what you know? Before we start exploring alternatives, here's an overview map of what "indie rock" means to The Echo Nest. Maybe not all of this sad music is quite as mopey as you thought. Maybe some of this notion of indie rock is stuff you didn't know. Click around and see what you find. Higher energy tends to be up and to the right, although of course generally-mellow bands can have highly energetic individual songs, and vice versa. Or try "scan" or "radiate" at the top of the map to fly you around on a random tour. Or try the ENtro to indie rock, my algorithmic data-driven attempt at a canonical overview playlist for the genre.
2. Let me push some levers. At The Echo Nest we calculate a bunch of scores for every song, among them "danceability", "energy" and an experimental mood metric called "valence". With these I can take any genre and produce the "upbeat" version of it, picking only songs that are above the genre's average on all three of those scores. Here are the results for "upbeat indie rock". Whether any individual song or band appeals to you is a personal decision, of course, but that playlist has 344 ideas across 21 hours, so hopefully some of them will lead you somewhere for a few minutes.
3. Creep past your borders. At the bottom of the "indie rock" splattergraph from #1 is a map of similar genres. Higher energy is up and to the right, so the obvious stepping-stone path to try would be indie pop to dance-punk to indietronica to new rave to synthpop to alternative dance. Each of those steps is another whole world to explore, but they overlap and shift as you move from one to another, so maybe this is how you can find your way to somewhere new without ever feeling like you're being flung out of the world of what you already know.
4. But sometimes the nagging feeling of slight dissatisfaction with what you know is your heart's way of hinting that there are wonderful things you've never even dreamed. Edging from related genre to related genre is prudent, and not necessarily unexciting, but it assumes that "related" and "prudent" are required qualities, and maybe they are not. You are not constrained by your past choices. Indie rock is not the only principled music in the world. What about math pop, where guitars ping around like blades of Calder mobiles, or c86, where they chime and chirp like besweatered birds? What about noise pop, where the electricity becomes audible, or punk blues, where it starts to fray? What about chinese indie rock, where you can hear a culture still figuring out for itself what it means to express dissent and moral conviction in music, or swedish punk, where you can hear how a different one imported and adapted that dissent to their own climate? Frightened Rabbit and CHVRCHES are from Scotland, which is close to the Faroe Islands. Or maybe you have totally underestimated your tolerance for extravagance, and the frenetic dance exhortations of bouncy house or the epic anthems of gothic symphonic metal would open your world in ways you didn't know to want.
5. But the larger horizon towards which all these paths point is that this is a question you can best and most joyously answer for yourself. Unfold the map. You don't need me to point to places on it. Just click somewhere. Maybe you need to be flung out of what you know. The world is full of music, more full than you have probably realized even if you thought you knew that already. So go explore a little. It's easy, and it's free (or it's $10/month for Rdio, at most, which is about the same as free compared to what it used to cost to "explore" music). Play some sounds from categories you've never before seen on lists. Hear what people sound like in places you had never thought about visiting. Hear what the tiny things you think you hate turn into when somebody embraces them as the grandest truth. Hear new cults forming, or just let the currents whirl you through everything.
Music is the thing that humans do best. That moment, when you run out of what you know? That is the moment before the great moment when you set out on the journey that will take you to find your next helpless astonishing love. That moment is the tiny, precious, terrible silence before music fills all of the air, before you realize that music is why the air is even there.