I’m finally starting up a systematic process to discover and acquire new music. This was a long process in the making, and began about a year ago when I started weeding through my entire iTunes library and deleting and categorizing the music I already have. Now I am ready to start building on it.

I have several tools to help me remember what pieces I like best:

• 1. Notebook. I always carry it with me, and quickly jot down the name of the piece.
• 2. tobedownloaded.txt – A text file where I maintain a list of songs I like for downloading later. This is usually when I’m listening to online radios at home and the information is readily available.
• 3. Shazam (iPhone app). This one is awesome when I’m in a public place, like a coffeeshop or restaurant, because I can take out my phone and send a little snippet of the music to retrieve the title and artist (if it’s in the database). The best part is that the app can identify the song despite background noise, like people talking loudly in a restaurant.
• 4. Nabbit (iPhone app). This app is great for when I’m listening to the radio and want to make note of a song I’m listening to. I use this mainly when I’m listening to KJazz while I drive to and from work. My jazz collection is quite small, so I wish to expand it.

I then consolidate all my findings in tobedownloaded.txt and buy them off of iTunes.

Jazz is my main focus of the musical discovery efforts, but I will share my jazz findings in a later post. Today, I will talk of new pieces I’ve bought to add to my “chill” playlist – yes, you guessed it: a playlist of downbeat electronic music.

• Keston and Westdal – Vaccine: I admit it, I’m a sucker for string instruments in “songs.” This one has a light feel to it and makes me think of lemon sorbet.
• Xela – Japanese Whispers: This one reminds me of Pattern’s Patterns by Paul Lansky and granular synthesis methods I learned in electronic music class in college. I love how cleanly the phonemes are dissected out.
• Plaid – Light Rain: I like the little sounds in this one.
• Zero 7 – Destiny: I still can’t remember if I Shazam’d this track because I wanted it, or because I was testing out Shazam. Generic downbeat electronica chord progressions and sound. However, I kind of like the melodic line. After I bought the song, I was repulsed by a section of parallel fifths towards the end. Many of my favorite composers would have turned in their graves. Too bad I can’t get a refund, so I might as well keep it. It does fit in nicely with the playlist.
• Jon Hassell – Last Night the Moon Came: I Shazam’d this song during a modern dance performance I went to last night. The artist’s name sounded familiar. I then remembered that I saw Jon Hassell in concert in February 2009 in an electronic music concert. This fact was confirmed by taking a peek in my concert program collection; I’ve been saving programs from all the concerts I’ve gone to in the past decade in my file cabinet. HAH! See? I knew it’d be useful someday.

On another vein, I also recently downloaded Roy Harris’s Piano Quintet. I heard this on KUSC (our local classical music radio) on the way home from work on a rainy afternoon. I liked it so much that I sat in my car for fifteen minutes, waiting for it to finish so I could turn off the car and go home. This piece has just the kind of sonority that I like in modern chamber music.

There you go. Expert musical criticism from a person with a music major degree. Seriously, though, this is just a start. I’ll have more substantial musical purchases to blog about in future posts.