WILT_2020-01

What I Listened To: WILT_2020-01

WILT_2020-01

The playlist below is a collection of music I enjoyed over the listening period of 27 Sep 2020 to 03 Oct 2020.

  1. Holy Forest – Pinkshinyultrablast
  2. Thursday – Asobi Seksu
  3. 23 – Blonde Redhead
  4. Crucifixion / a Prophet – UNKLE
  5. The Other Side – UNKLE
  6. Feel More / With Less – UNKLE
  7. Last Chance To Evacuate Planet Earth Before It Is Recycled – Porcupine Tree
  8. Veil of Shadows – The Budos Band
  9. Olympik – EOB
  10. Humboldt Currant – Ozric Tentacles
  11. It’s Not Easy – Ofege
  12. Soubour – Songhoy Blues
  13. Akula Owu Onyeara – The Funkees
  14. Biscuits for Smut – Helmet
  15. Caffeine – Faith No More
  16. The Day The World Went Away – Nine Inch Nails

Hyperlink to Spotify playlist: WILT_2020-01

Notes

I’m excited to start something new on this blog.

Sharing music has always been a passion of mine, and I love connecting with individuals with an open mind towards music and its possibilities. Where I am now is probably also a synthesis of past experiences, whereby I am untoward force-feeding my preferences onto my sphere of influence, but rather I try to maintain a delicate balance of sharing what I like, what I find interesting, what I find fascinating, what piqued my curiosity, while also not being particularly militant in the way I share these discoveries and oddities.

Thus, I stumbled upon this idea to present a loose collection of music that I had listened to over a period from the previous Sunday to the current Saturday. Where possible, I’d like to publish this collection every Saturday.

What I like about this presentation, is that it’s not an active curation on my part, but a low-commitment negotiation with a music streaming service’s recommendation algorithm, as well as my own active seeking out of musical ideas and/or nostalgia.

If you like the sound of that, you can look forward to a new playlist every Saturday on this weblog, or seek out the public WILT playlists on my Spotify profile.

A final note about this particular WILT playlist, is that I felt nostalgic for shoegaze and dreampop, explored more into afrobeat, and suddenly felt nostalgic for nu-metal after coming across an interesting YouTube documentary that explored the beginnings of the sub-genre.

Singapore Community Radio in 2020

SGCR exists to champion music and creative culture in Singapore and provide the platform to help it grow and thrive. Besides serving the local community, we are also looking to connect to the creative scenes worldwide.

Singapore Community Radio (SGCR) recently made an announcement that they would be returning with revamped programming. (Link to NME article) For a clearer breakdown of what to expect, Timeout does a better job breaking down the new programmes on SGCR. (Link to Timeout article)

I really welcome this new direction because I’ve been on the lookout for independent radio shows. After listening to music for so long (self-curation), and also having streaming services like Spotify recommend me songs or playlists (automated / AI curation), I’ve felt a longing for a human to curate my listening experience. I also felt drawn to the idea that the curator should be Singaporean, because they would have a shared experience with me by virtue of geography and society. I’d always known about SGCR, but their Mixcloud account was dormant for the majority of 2020. So it’s really great that they’re back in the saddle, and I’ve really been enjoying the programming based on the one or two streams I’ve listened to.

Hyperlink to Midnight Ambient Hour with Evening Chants #1 by SGCR, hosted on Mixcloud

Ephemeral Tombstones

It’s funny, my first post here isn’t actually my first post. I think I had something written down a year ago, followed by a few more posts, and then I deleted everything and now I’m starting again.

The Internet and hyper-connectivity has allowed us to archive “things” indefinitely as well as allowed us to erase them from existence as if they had never existed in the first place. It’s entirely up to you or by the powers that be, but the potential to be all or nothing at all is there.

That got me thinking about art, museums, and archival. We are immensely precious about the things we choose to archive, yet it’s alarmingly precarious that anything can be edited or deleted at any time. In the end, so much meaning is put on something that’s published online, and at a whim or fancy, that meaning changes.

So really, all I can offer are notes and anecdotes, not to guide you to where I am, but so that if I get lost maybe I can find my way back.