2023 - This Week in Sound - Selected Albums
Plus Some Advice for Recording Artists That Will Be Ignored
I’m a paying customer of Marc Weidenbaum’s This Week in Sound on Substack. He has a free version, too, to get you started.
Whenever I see a list of music without a playlist, I just can’t help myself.
In his January 6, 2024 TWiS, Weidenbaum selected 20 albums for 2023.
While I’ve heard some of this music in the past year there’s no way I would listen to the others unless they’re sitting in a playlist. My day is always broken up, so when I have time to settle down and listen I’d like to have a playlist accessible. So I made this playlist for myself, and I’ll publicly share them with anybody else who is interested. (Isn’t that what the Internet is all about?)
18 of the 20 albums are on Spotify (and Apple Music and Pandora - I checked). More about that further down. Here’s the Spotify public playlist:
This 169-track playlist is also available at: iTunes / Apple Music, Pandora, Deezer, and Tidal.
This playlist is on other streaming services, but playlist transfer isn’t always perfect and some tracks get lost along the way. 26 tracks were initially missing from the Pandora transfer, but I was able to reconstruct it manually. Over 40 tracks were missing on the YouTube Music version, and I’m not going to bother with it.
There’s a few reasons why this happens. The main problem is usually “additional artists”. If an album has “guest stars”, like how most pop music is today (and jazz and avant-garde collaborations, and classical), that can be trouble for transferring a playlist from service to service. I don’t know why, other than the music industry still has occasional metadata problems.
That leads me to another thing I’ve seen: similar song titles being replaced with the wrong ones. This occasionally happens with Pandora. One track in the Pandora playlist was by the wrong artist, but I corrected it.
Too bad for Scott Tuma and Éliane Radigue. Tuma’s “Nobody’s Music” is on Bandcamp. Éliane Radigue’s “Naldjorlak” isn’t even on Bandcamp.
Some of the titles of the tracks here are a bad idea and I would advise other artists not to do some of these things. I’ll admit that I’ve been guilty of similar crimes in the past, but I’ve never done the “e. e. cummings” thing and put a title entirely in lower case. I don’t think any of my distributors would allow it. I wouldn’t do it, even if I could.
Another thing is “20210310” and similar by Ryuichi Sakamoto. Again, I’ve done that sort of thing a long time ago and I’ll never do it again. Huge mistake on my part. Maybe they’re titled that way because he didn’t title the track before he died and that was the file name.
I’m also not a fan of punctuation and symbols in titles. It’s going to cause problems down the road. I don’t like commas. I especially don’t like periods. If I see a “greater than” symbol, a pipe, or a tilde, then I loudly exhale in disgust. (I’m joking, but it’s true…) And, for crying out loud, never put the “tick” symbol at the start of a track. You’ll have endless problems with Excel reports if you do that.
Recording artists are free to do whatever the distributor allows them to get away with, but some artists make things so difficult for themselves.
Out of all the titles, I’m most intrigued by Boxhead Ensemble’s: “The Incandescent Wanderer”, “An Illuminated Afterthought”, “The Cadence of Lunar Time”, and “A Farewell Under the Palo Verde Tree”. Titles like that make me want to listen.