Shfl Update, June 23

New recommendations from Zev Kane, Phil Freeman, Alex Riggs, Megan Iacobini de Fazio, Jeff Treppel, Sean Wood, and Nate Patrin

Reviews

Alex Riggs on Leonard Cohen, Okkervil River, Perfume Genius, Benji Hughes, Peter Gabriel, Tim Heidecker and Richard Dawson

Zev Kane with a great set of Haydn string quartets interspersed with Scottish folk music, which totally works, and the Ragazze Quartet playing Dvořák and Schulhoff

Summer music from Phil Freeman — including Slave, Earth, Wind & Fire, Bootsy’s Rubber Band, The Bar-Kays and the Ohio Players

Missing Persons, Black Death, King's X, Sentenced, YOB, God Forbid and Ho99o9 from Jeff Treppel

Sean Wood on Johanna Beyer and a lovely droney cello record

Four 70’s stunners from Nate Patrin, including what might be my favorite album of all time, Todd Rundgren’s Something/Anything?

Megan Iacobini de Fazio with music by RROBIN, Hamlet Minassian, Praed, Maistah Aphrica and Les Mamans du Congo — Armenian Pop Music is pretty great

Miscellanea

Nate Patrin’s been writing about a bunch of pre-1977 music lately — but check out this list (chronologically ordered even!) of his post-1977 favorites

Features

One of the aspects of Shfl that I like best that I don’t think people use much is the artist pages. A few things about these pages that you may not know:

Related Artists

These mostly come from Discogs and Wikipedia, I just added bi-directional links. It just makes sense to have a link to Fred Wesley on James Brown’s page, for example. But traversing these links can be pretty informative and/or amusing — for example:

• James Brown → Bootsy Collins → Funkadelic → Bernie Worrell → Throwing Muses. Apparently Worrell played on Hunkpapa

• Taylor Swift → Big Red Machine → The National → Bryce Dessner → Ryuichi Sakamoto. Dessner and Sakamoto both contributed to the Revenant soundtrack.

• The Smiths → Johnny Marr → Billie Eilish → Denzel Curry. Marr and Eilish collaborated on the No Time To Die soundtrack and Eilish shows up on Sirens, off TA1300

Anyway, you get the idea. Fun!

Ranking

Mostly on Shfl randomness is the whole deal. But some of the lists are ranked — artist lists, for example, are ranked roughly by popularity (a number I generate that is a combination of the number of recommendations I’ve gathered for that album and the Spotify ‘popularity’ number, which you can get from their API). This isn’t like super-accurate or anything, the number of recs I have for any one album can be pretty random itself and the Spotify number is biased towards recency, but I find it useful if there’s an artist I’ve not heard of and I’d like to know what it is that people are really into. Also, the little blue stars on the upper right hand corner of the album cover indicates that somebody’s written about that album for Shfl — these also bump up the popularity number.

Links

The little info button (the i in a circle icon) kinda hides all of the links that I’ve accumulated for any given artist (to Wikipedia, Discogs, Spotify, Bandcamp, Apple Music…), which can be pretty extensive — Madlib’s page, for example. There’s also a button there under each subheading for YouTube, which just points to a YouTube search. Mildly useful!