Related Recs

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olympic signals (improbable music for people who aren’t very disposed)

I found this album the other day and it feels so sacred to me that I almost don’t want to share it with anyone, but……check it out… Italian avant-garde ambient realness. Your ears need this! singular! hidden gem! overlooked! I have been pairing my listening with open windows so that the cicadas’ songs in Tennessee are in harmony and it is bringing me so much peace.

@sonofthechallenger

May 12, 2024

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double fantasy - universal ave (1987)

incredibly lush german soundscapes. synthetic sci-fi score quality with endless guitar shreds. little new age-y and tangerine drea-like. highly rec zoning out and listening to this in full

@dakotablue

Feb 1, 2024

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Favourite instrumentals

Can't pick favourites so I'm letting myself choose a bunch :) Sue me Mogwai Fear Satan, Mogwai —A quarter of an hour of post-rock with a beautiful, beautiful build. It Never Entered My Mind, Miles Davis Quintet — Feels a bit cheaty because it's jazz and there definitely are lyrics inspiring the lead melody.. still wonderful for pensive late-night walks. Earth Moon Transit, Duster — if you haven't sat back and spent time with this album, what are you doing? Clear an evening and put it on repeat. Yes, technically it has lyrics. Personally I barely hear them. Prologue, Kamasi Washington — Such powerful energy on the closing track of last year's album. Blade Runner Blues, Vangelis — the song that made me fall in love with synthesisers.

@greebo

Jan 6, 2025

Top Recs from @rachel-seville

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Sailing

It’s like rock climbing, kayaking, hiking, and surfing combined--except you can talk to your friends!

@rachel-seville

Mar 30, 2021

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Herend Figurines

These are SO COOL!!! My grandmother used to collect them--she had a swan and several ducks which now festoon my parents’ guest room--and my parents bought a mouse for me, because they call me “Mouse.” But someone stole it when I had a party! Terrible behavior. Good thing it was years ago and I now have all-new friends. At any rate: I love the little boxes for letters and jewelry, I LOVE the pigs, and I think the miniature snakes ROCK. If my boyfriend and I ever move out of our cozy shoebox apartment I’ll start a collection in earnest.

@rachel-seville

Mar 30, 2021

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Albert Ayler

My dad is one of the biggest jazz heads in the world. He used to pick me up from the mall in eighth grade blasting Pharaoh Sanders or Maynard Ferguson, and when I got in, instead of turning it down, he would turn it up and say, “LISTEN TO THIS, MOUSE!!! JEEZ!!” Anyways: I first fell in love with Albert Ayler when I saw the 2013 Whitney exhibition Blues for Smoke, and on the ground floor--this is when the museum was still in the Breuer--they were playing this beautiful film of Ayler performing “Spirits Rejoice”--I think on French television. It’s very bizarre, very classic Ayler--it starts and stops multiple times, it mocks its source material, it discharges it into ecstasy. He’s like...the Herodotus of jazz. You can hear Louis Armstrong as much as you can hear Pharaoh Sanders. Ayler had one of the most fascinating lives. It was far too short: he died at 34, and there were rumors for decades that the mafia murdered him by tying him to a jukebox and throwing it into the East River. Where to start? Well, his version of “On Green Dolphin Street” is one of the craziest things you’ll ever hear. Same goes with “Summertime.” And his live recordings are W-I-L-D: try “Live At Greenwich Village.” You can practically hear the paint peeling off the walls during “Truth Is Marching In.”I think there’s this idea that free jazz was somehow inevitable, the same way that Abstract Expressionism was--that it was simply the logical endpoint of the art form. I don’t think that’s quite right. There’s an album called The Albert Ayler Story, which is like an audio documentary and which I also recommend a lot, in which there are lots of interviews with Ayler and friends, plus formative recordings. And his drummer Milford Graves talks how there was a movement in the 1960s to stop jazz music--specifically Pharaoh and Sun-Ra and Ayler--because the musicians were too involved in political activism. Critics said it had nothing to do with the music. But to Graves, this free or avant-garde jazz was always about political progress, because it allows you to have “abstract thoughts” that you later “condense” into something “more logical.” He says of the work he was making and would have continued to make with Ayler, who died in 1970: “I think the music was going to direct people into another area of consciousness.” That’s what was lost when Ayler died. Whereas in something like pop music, “you’re constantly moving around in a circle, where there’s no kind of opening out. You’re caught.” Isn’t that fascinating?

@rachel-seville

Mar 30, 2021