Genres

Elliott Smith’s best album, Either/Or, is 20 years old now, and it’s safe to assume that a whole new generation who got hip to it through Frank Ocean’s 2016 album Blond could use a primer on Smith’s music (“Seigfried” quotes Smith’s “A Fond Farewell,” and Smith is named as a contributor in the accompanying Boys Don’t Cry magazine/liner notes). But when you want to explore the music of Elliott Smith, you have to decide which road you want to head down.After moving to Portland, Oregon from Texas in his teens to live with his psychiatrist dad, Smith formed the rock band Heatmiser in the early ‘90s before going solo with a stark acoustic approach, creating wondrous worlds in dank houses. He played acoustic guitar perhaps more elegantly than anyone else in his era, mixing it with beautifully delivered yet emotionally messy vocals. The combination worked. His music became more layered and elaborate as recording locations shifted to L.A. and London, but his songs could always be reduced to voice and guitar. His music is often calming and church-like. Occasionally, it’s angry. It has a reputation for being sad.In some ways, Smith’s trajectory paralleled Kurt Cobain’s. They were both brilliant male feminist rockers from the Pacific Northwest. Both also abused drugs and committed suicide. And they’re both canonized today as scraggly fallen angels, which is like a cartoon version of who they really were. What’s most important is that, in both cases, the music transcends their tragic backstories. And with Smith, there’s more than enough—there are four sides to the story.VOICE AND GUITAR(See playlist at top right)Click here to follow this playlist on SpotifyThis is how Elliott Smith started, and it’s where you should too. Voice and guitar were his building blocks: Early Smith albums were recorded on one microphone in a basement, and when your essential skills are of such high quality, that’s all you need. His lo-fi canon consists of Elliott Smith (good), Roman Candle (great), and Either/Or (masterpiece). But Smith would return to stripped-down recordings all the way to the end, and one of his best is “Everything Reminds Me Of Her,” from 2000’s Figure 8.About that voice: You’ll notice it sound heathery; it’s the soft side of the human voice. Listen to “Say Yes” and hear how his approach can sound vulnerable and sweet and then powerful with overdubbing—Smith was a master at tracking his own voice. On “Angeles,” hear how he uses a quiet tone but can also summon a battered toughness. Smith was also a great actor.About that guitar: He played rhythm well but was especially skilled at coming up with lead lines, figures he would repeat throughout a song. Notice how the intro on “No Name #1” foreshadows the verse in a folksy way. This is Smith, the guitarist, showing off his great songwriting skills. On “Everything Reminds Me Of Her,” the opening figure is delicately bent, something to stare at. This is Smith, the guitarist, as an ornamental player, who is great at adding curlicues and embellishments.EXPLORING THE SPACE

Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify“Miss Misery” (on our first playlist) was nominated for an Oscar, which Smith lost to Celine Dion. Smith signed to a major label and his music opened up, incorporating many more instruments. He always played drums, bass, piano, and guitar—often, he was the only player on his albums—and the full range of his skills can be heard on 1998’s XO.“Baby Britain” recasted Smith as a solid piano man with a certain barroom jauntiness, while “Bled White” introduced a new, fuller sound, with multiple guitars and keyboards. He indulges in his George Martin and Brian Wilson fantasies with the wall of vocals in “I Didn’t Understand,” one of his prettiest recordings.STUDIO DECADENCE

Click here to follow this playlist on SpotifyBy 2000, Smith was living in L.A., doing drugs irresponsibly and eating ice cream for every meal. On Figure 8, the music is lovely and less heartbreaking than before, but the songs seem more like formal exercises with wild instrumentation and arrangements than statements from the gut. The harpsichord on “Junk Bond Trader” and the cinematic plod of “Happiness/The Gondola Man” suggest that Smith would make a great film scorer, as does “Everything Means Nothing To Me,” which thrillingly descends into a blown-out drum loop. Smith emulates Brian Wilson here, mental instability and all.POSTHUMOUS RELEASES

Click here to follow this playlist on SpotifyAfter he took his own life in 2003, we got the unfinished From a Basement on a Hill, which shows that the experimentation on Figure 8 was only the beginning. He was plotting his Pet Sounds, and it’s just as messy and smart as his finest work, but also kind of… not. We don’t need “Ostrich & Chirping,” but we do need “A Fond Farewell”—proof that Smith could still turn out an “Elliott Smith song” no matter what. We also got New Moon, a polar opposite kind of recording, lo-fi, humble, and intermittently excellent, particularly “Whatever (Folk Song In C).”After he died, we learned that Smith was prone to vacillating between these two modes: bare and lush. And we learned that his music went through a lot of iterations before he felt like he nailed it. In retrospect, he did.

At the time of this writing, the primary Spotify playlist by Four Tet (a.k.a UK producer/DJ Kieran Hebden) spans 599 songs and runs over 51 hours. By the time you read these words, it will have probably grown. Over the past few months, it seemed to serve primarily as a vehicle for Hebden to build anticipation for his ninth long-player, New Energy. At one point, the title of the playlist—typically an evolving string of emojis—was recently updated to include the album’s release date (Sept. 29), and he’s been adding tracks from the record as they’ve been released, mixing them in with songs from peers (Bicep), inspirations (Sly Stone), and aliases (um, 00110100 01010100, which is the artist page stub where an album of Four Tet b-sides resides in Spotify).Prior to that, the playlist garnered a bit of back in January, when Hebden used it to compile songs by artists from countries impacted by Donald Trump’s travel ban, including Syrian-born singer Omar Souleyman, whose album To Syria, With Love was produced by Hebden. "Its basically a place for me to share things Im listening to, and is becoming a good personal archive of music Ive enjoyed," Hebden told NPR about his playlist at the time.That’s about as coherent a definition as you could need or want. The playlist isn’t a mix and it’s not designed to be; while it flows together in parts, it’s capricious by design. It works reasonably well if you listen to it on shuffle, though expect to be taken down some pretty dark alleys, such as “3” by noise unit Pita (a.k.a. Austria’s Peter Rehberg, who runs the Mego label), which is a boss tune and a personal favorite of this author, but likely to clear a room with its jet-engine feedback shrieking. That “3” is flanked here by everything from Joni Mitchell to CAN to Coltrane to Autechre to Burial to Radiohead to HAIM to Prince to Seefeel... well, the sprawl is precisely the point. (It’s two whole days worth of music, after all.)DJ mixes are a dime-a-dozen, and it’s not hard to find plenty by Four Tet out there in the ether. (This Tokyo set from Dec. ‘13 is particularly smokin’.) What’s much more rare to find is such a comprehensive compendium of all the sounds that go into an artist’s aesthetic. For a veteran like Hebden, an experimental cosmonaut who’s as likely to fold 2-step garage into his music as he is ‘70s jazz fusion or Nigerian funk (or...Selena Gomez), a standard 15-track playlist simply wouldn’t capture the breadth of his tastes. Hell, 10 of those wouldn’t. At 599 tracks and counting, this mix is at least beginning to come close.

Four Tet (nee Kieran Hebden) has said that he wants his music to tell the story of his life, and his tracks do occupy the same psychic space as a certain class of Instagram pictures: the sun-dappled portrait taken on a mountaintop, or the early morning shot of the steam rising off an alpine lake. These are the sort of moments that are too slippery to adequately capture in a caption, though, invariably, we try. A lot of musicians spend their career chasing a sound, and while Hebden does have a certain sonic palette -- one that is inordinately taken up by anything that chimes -- the listener gets the distinct impression that, more than anything, the British producer is in search of a feeling.This is true of the work he does on remixes. Hebden is not only one of the most prolific remixers of his generation, but also one of the most catholic. He’s remixed Riri as well as the Australian avante-electro-jazz quartet Tangents. And while his remixes generally correspond to the stylistic shifts and whims of his own work, there are times when they precede his own transformations, seemingly blurring the subject and object. In many ways, these remixes provide an alternative history of Hebden’s own music.One thing you’ll notice is that while Hebden’s sound is unmistakable, he rarely transforms the tracks he remixes, at least not entirely. There is an occasional bit of brinksmanship with the source material -- for Bonobo’s early track, Pick Up, Hebden takes the originals dusty breakbeats and adds a stuttering, polyrhythmic pounce; and the fact that he would remix half of Madlib’s Madviliany album feels somewhere between an homage and a dare -- but, for the most part, Hebden’s remixes are retellings of the original, albeit a bit refractured. Hebden latches onto a specific idea, melody, vocal line, or beat in the source material, and tweaks that according to his own muse. He’ll add a bit of electronic swirl to the spacial post-rock of The Drift, draw out the pinging keys of Matthew Dear’s “Deserter,” or tuck a thumping disco beat and skronky sax line beneath Nenah Cherry’s after hours swinger “Dream Baby Dream,” though, ultimately, the focus of that remix remains on Cherry’s smokey voice. Similarly, his remix of The XX’s 2002 “Angels” adopts the original’s chimy key drops and maintains the vibe of post-coliatal emotional surrender, but Hebden flips the melody and adds in airey textures that make the track more tender than sensual. It feels as if two artists are viewing the same scene -- lovers, naked, intertwined, near daybreak -- and coming to slightly different, though complimentary conclusions. Hebden is also very savvy when it comes to selecting the tracks he remixes. It’s easy to understand why Radiohead commissioned him to remix “Scatterbrain” from the band’s 2003 album, Hail to the Thief. With its spare, hypnotic guitar figure at its core, the original sounds like a daydream -- albeit a particularly dark one -- and in many ways it matches with the more pastoral, delicate electronic music that Four Tet was making at the time. But Hebden has mentioned that he very quickly came to resent the folktronica tag that critics and fans applied to his 2003 album Rounds, and he quickly pivoted to a new sound. This remix could be a early indication of that transformation His remix takes the track into an entirely different direction.Thom Yorke’s vocals are sliced and reprocessed, and paired with a jittery drum pattern and (towards the end) atonal, skronky sax outburst, which hints at the IDM-tinted free jazz experiments of Hebden’s middle period work.As Hebden’s own sound evolved, from the more acoustic/organic work of Rounds to the dancefloor-ready tracks of his later work, his remix work gained a fuller, more bass-heavy sound. A great example of this is his remix for Scandinavian nu-disco DJ/producer Todd Terje. The track starts out with a swell of chiming synths (of course), and the motif pops up repeatedly through the track, but the song soon settles into a four-on-the-floor dance groove, giving the track an immediacy that balances out Hebden’s more delicate tendencies. In some ways, Hebden’s work as a remix is just as satisfying as his own solo work. Yes, the latter feels more high-stakes and substantial, but his remixes are oftentimes more playful and experimental, as if Hebden is testing out ideas and aesthetic masks. Yes, to an extent, the payoff for these are his full length albums, but, as with many things in life, the journey is oftentimes more fascinating than the destination.

This is our track of the day. Be sure to subscribe to The Best Songs of 2018 (So Far)for regular updates."Opal - Four Tet Remix," Bicep What It IsConsidering that Belfast DJ duo Bicep took their name from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Pumping Iron, there music isn’t nearly as cheeky as you’d expect. The tracks bounce between Chicago house and Italo-disco and have a nice sheen that belies a mid-period Detroit influence. They’re also quite well known for their influential blog, Feel My Bicep, which is a destination site for fans of underground electronic music. What It Sounds LikeThe original “Opal,” from Bicep’s self-titled 2017 album, is a sludgy chunk of flangy, metallic synth sounds and downtempo drums that is surprisingly melodic for the duo. Four Tet doesn’t tinker too much with the formula. As is his wont, Four Tet adds whirring ambient textures and isolates the track’s melody, adding a layer of distortion that draws out the tracks blurry qualities. The track takes a minute to build, but, by the end, it’s vintage Four Tet: both transcendent and completely ephemeral. Suggested Playlist PlacementHedonist Hangover Music.

This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at the far-reaching, decades-long impact of disco. Curious about disco and want to learn more? Go here to sign up. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. They’ll thank you. We thank you.If you need to funk up your day but quick, heres your ticket: The French-born DJ François Kevorkian, a longtime New Yorker and legendary resident of Paradise Garage and Studio 54, has put together a list of more than 100 of his favorite "danceable and funky" records—nearly 12 hours in all. Covering disco, soul, electro-funk, and styles much further afield, the playlist ignores genre distinctions in order to focus on the all-important feel of funk: Thus we get Ian Dury, King Sunny Ade, Wally Badarou, and Can alongside Bar-Kays, Bootsy Collins, and James Brown. His selections are nicely balanced between oldies-but-goodies and the kinds of obscurities that only fanatical crate-diggers are likely to know. And while you could dance to all of it, the mix of tempos and moods—from snapping electronic cadences to deep-in-the-pocket live grooves—makes the playlist just as well suited to working, working out, and road-tripping. Consider your mind freed; the rest is up to you.

Hey! My name is Frank Hannon and I am a singer/solo artist, as well as the lead guitarist for the multi-platinum band TESLA. Our biggest selling (and some would argue "best" album) was an album recorded live in concert, called Five Man Acoustical Jam. It was an honest and raw recording.As a kid growing up and discovering music on FM radio in the 1970s, there was a trend of live albums that would fuel my passion for rock n roll. By 1976, FM rock-radio stations were playing live recordings that were huge hits. Peter Frampton had the biggest live album of all time, while he also previously had success with a live album in 1971 with Humble Pies Performance: Rockin the Fillmore!The 70s decade would produce and capture some of the best recordings of the greatest concerts by legendary artists. The albums that captured the purest, most raw and honest performances are the ones that grabbed me the most. It was the sound of screaming electric guitars mixed with an enthusiastic audience that created the interplay that would inspire me to want to play music the rest of my life.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!After a four-year silence that ended with last year’s widely acclaimed Blond(e), Frank Ocean has greeted 2017 with renewed vigor. He has dropped two singles, “Chanel” and “Slide,” the latter a pairing with Calvin Harris and Quavo from Migos. He has also released a dynamic playlist, “Blonded,” that appears far more personal and revelatory than the artist-branded content that label publicists crank out for streaming services. The first installment, revealed on February 24, included Celine Dion and Teen Suicide alongside obvious nods like Prince and Nina Simone. His March 10 update ventured further afield with jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams, prog-pop enigma Todd Rundgren, and techno iconoclast Actress. “Blonded” aspires to the ideal of music consumption in the streaming era—now that we can listen to everything, we can consume anything (and switch things up when the mood strikes). It remains to be seen if Frank Ocean’s ideological generosity will eventually manifest in his music.

Frank Ocean is a great artist, but not a particularly gifted vocalist, at least not in the traditional sense. His range is rather limited, his phrasing is straightforward and voice is somewhat generic. His power lies in the risks he takes, as a musician, songwriter, and as a personality. There are few albums of the past decade as adventurous as Channel Orange, and there have been few celebrities who’ve navigated the media machine as seamlessly and eloquently as Ocean. Stripped of the context of his own music, his guest turns work best when he’s allowed to be himself; either in the prickly politics of “Church in the Wild” or on the laconic, SoCal anthem “Sunday.”

In March, prolific indie-pop maverick Greta Kline will release her third proper album as Frankie Cosmos, Vesell, via Sub Pop Records. Here, she reveals the songs she has on repeat, ad infinitum. “Here’s a handful of songs that I have listened to many many times, over and over again, and have yet to get sick of them.”—Frankie Cosmos

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist here.This playlist shouldn’t be interpreted as a best of 2016 mix. That would be insanely presumptuous of me. Rather, it needs to be considered a useful tool for anybody looking to explore just a fraction of the heavy, propulsive, and oftentimes weird beats forged on the outskirts of boring person normal culture. Simply press play and get blasted: there’s mangled hip-hop stutter (Prostitutes), aggro industrial fist-pumping (Orphx, M AX NOI MACH), meticulously sculpted hard techno (Cassegrain), dub-smeared throb (LACK), and pounding white noise that sounds like the next evolutionary step beyond Lightning Bolt and Death Grips (Dreamcrusher). You’re also going to encounter a few artists who are more rooted in rock than electronic tactics, yet make no mistake: they’re just as doggedly loyal to raw propulsion. The New York duo Uniform slayed 2016 with their vicious iteration of cyborg automation caked in gutter scum. Lost System, meanwhile, are pulsating synth-punk upstarts from West Michigan (a.k.a. DeVos country) chronicling Millennial alienation, while America flushes itself down the toilet. I’d wish you a happy new year, but we noth know that’s not going to happen.