Why? When streaming?
Because the streamers have yet to reproduce the experience of flipping through records / CDs in crates and boxes. In the same way that Amazon has yet to recreate the experience of looking at bookshelves of books in a given genre in alphabetical order of author. That is how people discover new stuff, because of the sheer chance of juxtaposition.
I picked up some very cheap experiments, a 2-CD set of 1960's Bossa Nova and a Steely Dan compilation CD.
Nobody had any flamenco.
This is a serious oversight in Britain's, and it seems, English-speaking music stores.
Anyway.
There are, I discovered, swathes of music I'm not even going near.
Reggae and its relatives. I was a Bob Marley fan back in the day. I even had a Burning Spear album. Not much more. I still have Catch A Fire in my collection. Don't feel any pull or curiosity about it now.
Beat music. There's a whole little world dedicated to beat-girl singers from around the world. 1960's boy bands I've never heard of. I'm going to pass on that. I have one Marianne Faithful album of her French hits, and that's enough.
Soul. Not the new stuff, the 1970's / 80's stuff. I may have had more of that than I think in my vinyl buying, but I felt no pull towards it. No curiosity about all those Northern Soul tracks, even if I did recognise some of the names. I'll leave those to serious crate-diggers.
Heavy metal and related genres. Will someone please explain the attraction of heavy metal? Actually, no, I wouldn't understand the explanation.
Punk. While I recognise the achievement of the Sex Pistols, I wouldn't want to listen to a whole album of it.
Obscure American and British bands who only made one album and that costs £85 second-hand. (There are YT channels about this kind of stuff, run by men who look exactly like you would imagine they would look like, if you had to think about it.)
Rap. I have a post somewhere about a number of rap tracks I can stand to hear more than once. A young colleague told me those were old old skool bands (Wu Tang Clan? I guess so) but then the best stuff was from that era.
Mainstream Chart bands. You know the ones. You recognise all the names, but I can't go beyond the hit single(s).
So what do I listen to?
Jazz up to about 1965 or so, plus all of Miles' output
Church vocal music from Gregorian chant to Poulenc's motets
Baroque, Galant, Classical, some Romantics, and some early 20th-century
Minimalism
Girl and guitar bands (from Jefferson Airplane to Halestorm)
Post-rock
EDM, electronica, and jazz-oriented hip-hop (but nothing that begins with thump-thump-thump)
Miscellaneous bands and singers from 1960 to the present (Electribe 101, One Dove, Joni Mitchell, Haywoode, Laura Nyro, Bert Jansch, John Martyn....)
Flamenco
What surprises me is that it seems to me absolutely natural that anyone who listens to, say, Leonin's pieces for church singers would also listen to Steely Dan, and that being able to sit still for the Bartok String Quartets also means sitting still for John Digweed's Structures. I'm hearing something in common between all this music, that I don't hear in the genres I pass by without even a moment's hesitation.
Nearly all the stuff I like is cleanly recorded, distortion and sheer volume is not part of the soundscape. It is instrumental and ranges from deceptively simple (Steve Reich) to absurdly complicated (J S Bach), so there's plenty to keep the brain going. Fluid rhythm is important - not a beat or a four-on-the-floor thump - and interesting sound textures help. That elusive touch of the blues, and the sense of an edge.
So I will leave you with a band you should know if you've never heard them before. Electribe 101 with the legendary Billie Ray Martin on vocals.
There are a handful more places to go looking, and I'll be doing those in the coming weeks.
Because random.
Only the physical world can do it well.
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