Somebody asked me recently how I originally found/got into Gizzard. In the moment, I just blanked and couldn’t really answer (social skills failed me again…), except to say that once I found Polygondwanaland, I knew it was my kind of thing.
I probably just tripped over it in Bandcamp recommendations, which is something that works fairly well as long as I have patience with a good number of misses. Right now, I’m being so brutal to my Bandcamp wishlist that maybe I should just step away for a while – I’ve been unhearting lots of stuff.
How do you all find new stuff that you actually like?
Word of mouth from friends, people on forums like this & reddit sharing music, I love seeing live music so I follow music venues near me (via email lists mainly) and check out music that comes out, going to festivals like FoV and smaller local ones, also just randomly on YouTube or Bandcamp.
I know I’d heard of King Gizz around 2016 and listened to a bit, but then on some headphone subreddit someone said to check out Poly since it was free and sounded awesome on good headphones, the minute I heard Crumbling Castle that was it…
Mostly via forums in music/band communities I enjoy. Much like our community here on the .net, there are so many folks with wide ranging musical tastes and its fun to follow the lead of others.
As I’ve been exploring electronic music, some of my go-to springboards for exploration are dj sets by artists I already enjoy. These are usually great listens themselves and also fun to explore the artists included in them. For example, Tycho does an annual “sunrise set” at burning man that is ~2hr long, its been fun to seek out what he includes there. Many of these show up on soundcloud or bandcamp.
There’s also an AMAZING set of mixtape albums in the “Late Night Tales” series, where a well known artist is asked to create a mixtape that they’d want to hear during the wee hours of the morning. There is SO MUCH great stuff on these that ranges from the well known to the totally obscure and has turned me on to too many new musical ideas to count.
My daughter came back from a concert at Remlinger farms, covered in mud and ecstatic about a new (to her) band. She couldn’t stop gushing about how talented they are.
I watched the People Vultures video and I was so distracted by how funny it was, I had to listen again without the visual. I liked it but what got me to dive in was hearing them play Ironlung on KEXP. I was blown away by the complexity of the song and the fact they were doing it live.
That KEXP video lead me down the rabbit hole, the albums were great but the live shows online were amazing! Gizz became the soundtrack to my life. No matter what mood I’m in there’s always something to match it.
She got us tickets to the Gorge for our anniversary, by Monday I had tickets to Vegas and booked a flight for my wife and I.
edit: just read kingcrowing’s post and yeah, that too: I got a few festivals in Europe I “trust” with new (to me) bands – Roadburn is the first that comes to mind, they even curate a playlist of “essential sounds”
The Devil and the Almighty Blues: suggested by a friend of mine from school days
Stoned Jesus: overheard conversation at Bearstone festival (Croatia) – which, on itself, is another of those places where “oh these guys are playing Bearstone, they must be good”: 1000 Mods and Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats found this way too
also didn’t mention before, but this forum is another sure-fire source (obviously). New Age Doom, for instance; can’t remember who mentioned them, but thank you
I have a long list called “Good unknown bands”, that list is really, really long. There are still dozerns, maybe hundreds of bands on it I still have to listen through their catalogue. I like what I heard from them so far, that’s why they landed on the list, but I have honestly no idea how people can have problems to find good music. It’s so easy to find nowadays. Back in the 80s all we had were music magazins (=mainstream), record shops and radio, later on in the 90s music TV. Most of the time you didn’t even know when a new album will be released until it got released.
Oh, yeah – I didn’t mean that music was hard to find. I was just curious about how other people found/tripped over things, compared to the haphazard way it happens to me.
It came to mind because under so many youtube videos you find sentences like “That was music, nowadays it’s all generic” or “Music like this does not exist anymore”. Sometimes I take the time to answer something like “If you really think this, you just don’t look for it enough, there are plenty of great bands around”.
Yeah, that’s one of the big up sides of the internet – being able to search out music (etc) that you like, that would never show up on mainstream radio or TV. It’s amazing how much I missed out on back when a few commercial radio stations were the only access to music exposure.
I found King Gizzard on yt – probably the only time I ever used it this way– because I wanted to find something like Acid Mothers Temple. The album was I’m in your mind.
Agreed, however the downside is being so overwhelmed that you can’t keep track, or remember what you found. I find albums/bands saved in my streaming service and I have zero clue where they came from. Or I’ll listen to a new act from a recommendation or algorithm and completely forget (or never even learn in the first place) who it is.
Yeah, that can definitely be a problem. I was feeling really overwhelmed by my own Bandcamp wishlist (261 albums?!?), and have been really cutting it back before I can face it again.
