The Last.fm scrobbles for April are a worse signal than the play-counts in my head. The tracks I actually thought about most this month:
- A long-running rotation of one electronic record that I keep meaning to write about and keep not writing about. It’s the album equivalent of a chair I’ve been sitting in for two months and only just noticed I’m sitting in.
- An unscheduled drift back to mid-1970s prog — the kind that looks like nostalgia from the outside and feels like calibration from the inside. Whatever your reference points are, occasionally returning to them re-grounds the surrounding noise.
- One new release that earned a second pass. Most do not. The standard for “second pass” is whether anything in the first pass made me want to find out what the artist was thinking; almost never the music itself, almost always a structural decision somewhere on the record.
The Last.fm dashboard at /music/ shows the raw counts; this note is the version that reflects what actually mattered, which is not the same thing.