Dec 27 - Benedict Benjamin / Jack Grace / Soft Glas / Lunacre / Lisa Tullgren

So I mentioned that I had this great weekly playlist this week. I'm sure many of you know that Spotify makes a weekly playlist of recommended music, and I try to listen to mine every week. Generally I come away with maybe 3 artists who I want to hear more from, and rarely do I actually go on to like someone enough to buy their album and become a fan of more than a single song. But this week was great. Not only did I go away as a fan of 2 new bands (Y La Bamba and Vittoria Fleet, who I already blogged about), but I also got a bunch of other artists to follow up with, all of whom ended up having 1 or 2 good songs, but nothing amazing. But, since it was so good last week, I will share a few more of those songs that caught my attention.

The first one was Thin Skin, by Benedict Benjamin. Thin Skin is off of Night Songs, the Londoner's debut album that came out in March. Thin Skin is by far the best song, with a couple other standout tracks, and a generally pleasant sound. May be good for fans of Jose Gonzalez.

Up next, we have Jack Grace. The Australian's debut EP, River, also came out earlier this year. It was All Lost, the closing track, that caught my attention. Again, there's a couple other good tracks, but this one is the real stand out.





I don't generally go past 2 tracks, but today I will. So for number 3, we have Soft Glas, a Brooklyn producer who put out both an EP (Dos) and an album (Late Bloom) this year. He gets all kinds of people I've never heard of to feature on vocals, and Latency, the song I'm sharing today, is featuring Stalking Gia. Pretty great stuff, kind of like a chilled out Little Dragon or something.





Number four is Lunacre, a British band that's maybe between Radiohead and Lo-Fang (just to note, they are good but not Radiohead good. Just soundwise, it's close). Their second EP, Schtum, came out earlier this year and is pretty interesting. So here's [Re]Cycle.





And finally, we have Lina Tullgren. She's an American singer/songwriter, making quiet, sad, acoustic songs. She has one EP, Wishlist, which has a bunch of pretty songs, all of which are individually nice, but as a whole it's kind of a boring EP. But Grace is a really pretty song.

Dec 26 - Vittoria Fleet

I am so tired today. I am getting absolutely nothing done at work. That's not completely true. I did do some stuff. But very little. I hosted a Chrismukkah party lats night, which went quite late, so now on top of it just being Monday, I am lacking in sleep and therefore brain power. But at least I have enough brain power to introduce you to Vittoria Fleet, the second band I came away from this week's Spotify playlist with. They put out an album called Greed back in 2015, but I have just heard it this week. And it starts out great right away from the first track, Mother Ocean.




So yeah, pretty heavy and dark stuff. I feel like it's a much less spastic version of Crystal Castles. So here's one more song for you, Brute, off of the same album.

Dec 23 - Y La Bamba

It's coming to year end, and I have a few songs to share before the end of the year so I may have to up my game over the next few days. And to make things harder, I found a couple great things today thanks to my weekly Spotify playlist. In fact the whole weekly suggestions playlist was pretty on point this week. Probably more so than ever before. But the main take away was Y La Bamba. Y La Bamba is the project of Luz Elena Mendoza from Portland, and she put out her 4th album, Ojos del Sol, last year. Ulysses, the closing track to the album was on my playlist this week and I really like it.




So I listened to the whole album, and immediately fell in love thanks to the first song. Ojos Del Sol is the opening track and I can't get enough of it. I love the little warble in her voice, I live the simplicity and beauty, I love how the vocals don't ever really go where you think they're gonna go, I love how timeless it sounds, I love the lyrics. Seriously this song is amazing. It makes me so happy and I can't stop listening.

Dec 22 - Soft Hair / Zammuto

I am in southern China finishing up my last business trip of the year, which brought me to Shenzhen and Nanning for the week. Plus a quick hop over to Hong Kong for the day on Wednesday, ostensibly for a meeting so work would pay for my transport, but really just to see my friend Shuk-Wah and eat char siew bao. But it's back to Shanghai tomorrow! Yay!

I've got some pretty weird music for you today. First up is Soft Hair, a very strange band called Soft Hair. This is a duo made up of Connan Mockasin and and LA Priest, neither of whom I've heard but both of whom apparently also make music. They somehow got together and over a 5 year period recorded an album. That album, also called Soft Hair, came out earlier this year. And it is super weird. I'm not actually sure I like it, but it definitely caught my interest. Specifically the first single Lying Has To Stop.





And then there's Zamutto. This is another weird one, though probably a bit less weird than Soft Hair. But it is the solo project of one of the guys from The Books, so if you know The Books you know what to expect. It's still a lot of electro weirdness like what you'd expect from The Books, which is exactly why I probably liked it. Zammuto just put out an EP called Veryone, and I'll be sharing It Can Feel So Good off of that.

Dec 19 - Maggie Rogers

So I normally don't like talking about real things in a very public manner, but my friend Min passed away about a week ago, and I would feel wrong not mentioning it at all. Min was a friend of mine here in Shanghai for a bit over a year now, who died suddenly last week due to complications after having emergency open heart surgery. I don't really want to talk about it very much here, but it was rough and surprising and sad, and she will be missed. Everything is good now, but it was definitely a very rough couple of days when I first found out. Kind of a huge deal in my life this year, so I feel like I need to mention it even though I don't want to talk about it. So there you go. 2016 sucks. Very glad it's almost over.

But on to happier subjects. Now that I've written my 2016 best of list, it's time to look at 2017. One of the big artists who came out in 2016 was Maggie Rogers, who shot to a tiny little bit of fame when she produced the song Alaska as a student in Pharrell's production master class at NYU. As it turns out each student in the class had to produce 1 song, which she forgot to do, but happened to have a song on her laptop ready to go. And so she played it for the class, and brought Pharrell to tears. That song was Alaska, and it is great. Maybe not tear inducing great, but really great. She has one other song out now, but definitely one to watch for 2017. And the BBC agrees, as they have her on their Sound of 2017 long list.

Top 10 albums of 2016

Normally I wouldn't write anything for this blog, just give you a list, but when I post it on Facebook they're showing a preview that shows like the first five albums before you even click on the link. And I couldn't have that. So I needed some filler. Here's your filler. And now here's your list.

10. Solange - A Seat at the Table

9. RY X - Dawn

8. Anderson .Paak - Malibu

7. Warpaint - Heads Up

6. Bayonne - Primitives

5. Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool

4. Cross Record - Wabi-Sabi

3. Michael Kiwanuka - Love & Hate

2. Bon Iver - 22, A Million

1. Frank Ocean - Blonde

And if you like, here's the Spotify playlist with these 10 albums, and a few others that were on the long list (which are not presented in order after number 10).

Dec 6 - Alek Fin

This weekend was my Limmud conference. That's the Jewish conference thing I was volunteering with. It's basically this volunteer conference, all planned and run by volunteers, and with volunteer speakers. You have to pay to go, though, since there are conference rooms and meals and stuff that need to be paid for. Anyway, it started Friday night but I didn't go until Saturday. My friend Joyce was in town from London for the weekend so I went out to see her Friday night. And we went to my friend Jenny's Sichuan pop-up, which is always a priority if she's doing one. I thought it was gonna be a quiet dinner with Joyce and a couple other friends, enjoying delicious food from Jenny, and instead it was like 20 people I haven't seen in weeks or more that all ended up in the same place at the same time and we were there until midnight just talking and drinking. It was fantastic! Great start to the weekend.

Then from Saturday it was Limmud all day. Like literally all day. I was there from 8am to 1am. There were speeches and stuff I went to, but I was also busy helping out to run things and make sure stuff stayed on time and everyone was registered and in the right place at the right time. And then after the evening activities (for which my only volunteer participation was as a voluntary wine taster) I just stayed at the hotel with 3 people talking about political theory until 1 am. Again, fantastic! And more of the same Sunday, except with less volunteering and more just going to speeches.

There were some really interesting speeches. I went to one about the Jews of Gibraltar, which was nice since I'm probably gonna go there with my parents during Chinese New Year. And there was an awesome Chinese consumer trends panel. I also went to speeches on Ethiopian Jewry, Jewish Architecture and the idea of creating holy spaces, Hungarian Jewish humor, Jews in pop music, modern dance and much more. Actually, the modern dance one may have been one of my favorites. I wasn't planning to go to it, but the woman needed help with the computer so I got sucked in. She started out by going into a bit of history, which was interesting, and talking about some of the prominent Jewish figures who helped shape modern dance. But what I really liked was one comment she made about how modern dance is a moving painting in space. My sister has danced all her life and I just don't get it. I've never been able to watch a dance performance and really be inspired or moved or anything. I'm just like "whatever" most of the time. But the way that this woman talked about dance gave me a way to think about what I was seeing differently, which could really change the way I perceive and enjoy dance. I hope so, anyway. So for that reason it was maybe my favorite.

All in all a good conference (despite some organizational issues which became a pain in my ass). And what's the first thing to do after a big Jewish conference? Go to a Christmas Market of course. So I did on Sunday afternoon, at Paulaner. Traditional German Christmas market. Always a good time, especially with a ton of mulled wine.

Really great weekend of course calls for really great music. And today it will be Alek Fin. Alek Fin is the stage name of Alek Finkel from Calabasas. Given that information, he must be a Jew, so also fitting for this post. I first heard his newest EP, Strannik, which he produced over the internet as a collaboration with a Russian producer named Galun, and it is terrific. Case in point, Ionosphere.




So with a start like that, I had to go back and listen to his last two EPs, Mull and Án Mynda. Both fantastic. For track number 2, we're gonna go all the way back to his 2012 EP Mull, and listen to Rocks in Paper.