Eclectic Music I Like

I used to write random Music I Like posts that included whatever I discovered each week. Then I started thinking of themes and started draft posts for each idea, dropping bands in until I had enough to publish. I like having themes, but with more than 20 draft music posts going at any given time, I still find music I like that doesn’t really fit with any categories I have in mind. Sometimes I just want to share my latest finds. So here’s an eclectic collection of music I like.

Lo Pan

Lo Pan (no hyphen, it does make a difference) showed up on the Bandcamp Daily in a tag-hopping post. Their album Midgar takes seven tracks from the soundtrack to the video game Final Fantasy VII and reworks them as retro-futuristic synthpop. FFVII holds a special place in my heart as the only video game I ever beat. That means its soundtrack holds a special place in my brain, what with having listened to it for something more than 100 hours of game play. And on Midgar, it sounds better than ever.

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Aeon Winds

Is blackened prog a thing? On Stormveiled (a title that brings Stardust‘s Stormhold and inexplicably Tad Williams’ Memory Sorrow Thorn books) that’s what Aeon Winds sounds like to me. It’s a surprisingly successful combination, since neither of those genres usually rise to the top of my list. The first time I heard it, I meant to listen to one track just to check it out. Then I forgot to stop and finished the whole thing, the way I do with a really good book. It’s not just the title of Stormveiled that leads my mind to scifi places. I mean, a lot of metal has a scifi theme, but this album feels like reading high fantasy. And coming from me, that is high praise.

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Yellow Eyes

Rare Field Ceiling, the newest album from Yellow Eyes, is black metal. I usually only like black metal when it is either blended with something else or extremely atmospheric. Yellow Eyes is neither of these things, but Rare Field Ceiling got its hooks into me anyway. Yellow Eyes is based in Brooklyn but they are known for incorporating field recordings of chimes, dogs, and choirs from Siberia. That is my kind of thing, but it’s not what grabbed me about this album. Rare Field Ceiling is that rare thing in black metal – an engaging album with interesting riffs and dynamics that never stray into monotony.

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lakis tsirkinidis

I would never have discovered lakis tsirkinidis without a tag-hopping post on the Bandcamp Daily. “Electronic demos from Greece” is not a regular search term for me. But there are so many things I love about Eleusis.

A Greek electronica artist would seem to have no connection to me. But I feel strangely connected to this one, a left-handed hematologist who was born four days after me. We nearly share a birthday, and I’m left-handed, and I worked in science while loving the arts.

But mostly I love the music. Especially the track Mt. Sinai, where the synth sounds like banjo. But that track and the others have so much structure and interest, especially compared to the endless repetitions of most electronica. Every one feels like an emotional journey.

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3TEETH

I hardly ever listen to industrial music anymore, but it was my go-to heavy music throughout much of the 90s when metal seemed to have died. Nowadays, industrial is the genre wallowing at its nadir, but there are still some interesting projects to be found. One of these is 3TEETH. They have a Bandcamp page, but the album that I discovered, Metawar, was released by Century Media, so it isn’t posted there. Here’s a video off that album instead:

And just for fun, here is their cover of “Pumped Up Kicks,” which I might actually like better than the original.