Listening Diary 10

Syrian Jazz, British Cloud Rap, Internet Pop, and much more!

Hello hello. This letter contains ten songs that I enjoyed listening to recently, presented exclusively for paying subscribers. In the past I sent these letters out on the first and 15th of the month, but I decided to change the format. In the interest of keeping the quantity of songs consistent so that you get your money’s worth with each post, going forward I’ll send out Listening Diaries once I’ve hit 10 songs. I expect that this will still add up to about two letters a month, but hey, maybe you’ll get something extra every now and then.

Speaking of extra… I spent part of last week building an absolutely massive playlist of heavy metal songs, over 300 in total and adding up to 30 hours of music, organized chronologically and selected based on a needlessly specific personal criteria. Why did I do this? Partially to send to my friend Ryo Miyauchi as a metal history 101 crash course, partially as a distraction from writing the next issue of Drumming Upstream lol. Ryo is a prodigious playlist maker himself, and runs the excellent newsletter This Side of Japan. If you too would like to listen to a preposterous amount of heavy metal, you can listen to the playlist below:

Finally, I’ll be playing drums for Shalom on February 19th at Purgatory. Purgatory is one of the cooler venues in Brooklyn these days, so if you’re willing to make the long commute I can guarantee that you are going to have a good time. Get tickets here!

Now onto the tunes…