Writing this listening journal has been the biggest thing I've done for building my music taste in years – more than the previous few years of just listening to music passively. The exercise of writing down what I like and articulating why, even in a few words, forces me to actually pay attention.

Looking back, my music taste has had many such phases. As a teenager, I used to breakdance and I joked with friends that we were computers that turned sound into movement, and every dancer had their own "algorithm", their own way of hearing the music and interpreting it in movement. We were bored by dance schools, where everyone copies the same "algorithm"; instead we spent hours making up our own moves and styles. That was a super fun time of very careful listening that built my taste. I had many other such periods, as a kid when I played the piano, or when YouTube launched and I started making, cutting, remixing and uploading videos with soundtracks. There are many ways of engaging with music (or anything else). Writing stuff down is just one of them.

Here is some of my April in music. All of these (and more) on Spotify.

Grain delay

• Track: Voice Actor, Coni, Rune Kielsgaard – Life's a mess (new Voice Actor release, dreamy artsy ambient pop, spacey and mysterious)
• Track: Jonny Nash – Smoke Rings (balearic ambient jazz, i don't usually like saxophone that much but this is smooooth)
• Album: Carlos Ferreira and Dasom Baek – Unbalance (very unbalanced album (in a good way), free experimental improvisation, guitar, electronics and wind instruments; the first half of the first track didn't catch me and I almost dropped it, but then I caught my balance and I finished it)
• Album: Heathered Pearls – Window (warm drifting ambient techno, very aligned to John Beltran, who I've been listening to a lot lately after his Canada release; fav tracks: Soft Lock (wrote about it in October – "cosmic ambient, soft and spacious"), Earth Ultra, Zero Repeating)
• Album: John Beltran – Ten Days of Blue (5/5 ambient techno classic from 1996 – Beltran described it as many happy accidents but it feels very intentional; emotional despite being so minimal, dreamy and meditative, could listen to this on repeat anytime anywhere)
• Tracks: Appleblim – Crow Crag, Globule (ambient with beatless weight, drifting and flickering, very much aligned with the John Beltran style – this glassy sound is totally my vibe right now)
• Track: Oneohtrix Point Never – Dim Stars (ethereal glitch, atmospheric, a bit surreal – ambient but not ambient, meditative but not meditative; lives up to its title)
  • his Marty Supreme score was easily the best part of the movie; wild that the film got 9 Oscar nominations and not one of them for best score
• Album: The Detroit Escalator Co. – Soundtrack [313] (weightless, atmospheric ambient techno classic from 1996 – same year as Ten Days of Blue; a love letter to Detroit built from sampled street sounds; fav tracks: Gratiot, Force, The Inverted Man (Dreaming))

Overdrive

• EP: Donato Dozzy – Hypno Trance (Hypno Trance 0 is slow, heavy and groovy, like a dance; Hypno Trance 9 is nimble and energetic, like a run)
• Track: Nikos – Spine (trancy, energetic, flowing well – the kind of thing I'd put on for a night drive; nice and clean)
• Track: Terrence Dixon – When Stars Remember (detroit techno, quite minimal – but if you listen to it long enough it becomes very meditative and groovy through repetition)
  • "If you stick with the same layered tones, and repeat it over, after a while your brain changes it on its own; you hear a lot of things" – Terrence Dixon
• Track: DJ Nobu – Mudita (distorted, gliding guitar that enters halfway, restless pulsating drums, tense – not your typical DJ Nobu track)
• Album: Xylitol – Blumenfantasie (dreamy jungle leaning into IDM, light, drifting, airy, like the title suggests; fav tracks: Blumenfantasie, Melancholia, Mirjana, Sudwestwind, Lights)

Thanks for reading (and listening)! Let me know what you think and have a nice May.

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