PhilsFavouriteBands

Quora Answer : What's your favourite music from the last 10 years?

Apr 25, 2020

Hands down, my favourite new artist of the last 10 years is Sofia Reta / Hilde

SOFIA RETA / Hilde on BandCamp.

It's hard to know what the hell they are. But they are a total genius. Such extreme emotion and creativity.

YouTube doesn't do them justice, check out the BandCamp for some of the best stuff. But here's a taste.

I've also really liked (in no particular order) :

Jameszoo

Arrington de Dionyso

Lucky Dragons

Vektroid / Macintosh Plus

LifeMod

F9, by LifeMod

Maribou State

Thundercat

Red Axes

L'Imp\xc3\xa9ratrice \xe2\x99\x95

Tyler, the Creator

Hudson Mohawk

Igorrr

King Krule

Dorian Electra

Connan Mockasin

Gazelle Twin

Euglossine

Sasakure UK

Kali Uchis

Dam Funk

And a bunch of underground / experimental artists who I release on my netlabel

Some of my older favourite artists who are still doing great work in the last 10 years and making stunning records :

Momus

Current 93

William D Drake (keyboardist of Cardiacs)

Quora Answer : What's your favorite band?

Oct 3, 2010

It's complicated! And how much time do you have?

Here are some people I call my favourite bands :

Momus (the criminally underrated genius lyricist / tune-smith / pervert-intellectual)

,

,

Current 93 (Apocalyptic (ex?)-Satanist, heretical Christian mystic who basically invented neo-folk by cross-breeding dark electronica, pretty acoustic guitar and heavy metal.)

Tom Waits (Who everyone knows)

. (

In practice, I've hardly listened to any of them in the last year or two. Probably it's 5 years since I sat down and listened to Tom Waits. I've had one session of listening to a lot of Momus this year. And although I bought the new Current 93 album I haven't listened to it all the way through in one sitting yet.

(Having said that, listening to them again now, they're fantastic!)

Update : LastFM ( http://www.last.fm/user/mentufacturer/library ) tells me that these days, it's all vapourwave, all the time. My new favourite artist is Vektroid. Who is also Macintosh Plus and a bunch of other aliases.

Quora Answer : Can you share your playlist here? What are your most played songs?

Jan 30, 2020

Last FM has a reasonable, if slightly out of date, summary. It's better on artists than individual tracks.

mentufacturer's top artists

mentufacturer's top tracks

It's basically right that Momus and Current 93 are my two favourite artists of all time.

It's slightly underestimating Sofia Reta / Hilde as my favourite artist of the last decade or so. Vektroid, Lucky Dragons, LifeMod I've been passionate about when connected to LastFM in the last few years too.

Cardiacs and William D Drake should be higher. Particularly Revere Reach is definitely the album I've most listened to all the way through this year. And somehow LastFM hasn't picked that up.

But the kind of all-time playlists or even recent, doesn't quite capture the bursty nature of my listening.

The LastFM tracks it has picked up were big with me several years ago. The Gayngs and Threshold Houseboy's Choir were indeed massive for me in about 2011 or 2012.

But normally it's like .. a couple of weeks of 80s synthpop. Then maybe suddenly I'm onto Alice Coltrane and cosmic free jazz. Or maybe trap. Or a particular folk album. Or prog rock.

This week, I'm basically obsessed with Eurhythmics' There Must Be an Angel. And some fairly well known Kate Bush hits from the 80s. But that's not a long term thing, it's a "this week's obsession" thing.

Quora Answer : If you grew up in the late 80s/early 90s, what was the first rap song you heard as a kid that had an impact on you?

Jun 25, 2020

I liked electronic music in the early 80s, which was hard to find except on some pirate radio stations in the UK. So I found early hip-hop (or "electro" as we called it) through looking for stuff with drum machines and obviously electronic synth sounds.

I can't say the very first of these tracks I heard, but some of the earliest that made an impression on me and that I could (later) identify were

Newcleus - Jam On It

UTFO - Leader of the Pack

Herbie Hancock - Rockit

I think it was only when I was an adult in the 90s that I actually definitively heard things like Rappers Delight, Planet Rock etc. and knew what they were. Somehow I recognised the music to Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" but I don't remember hearing the actual rap until well into the 90s.

Although I liked this stuff when it came on the radio, I wasn't part of any group of fans. It was still something kind of alien and unknown. With my friends at school we were more into the harder side of electropop, the emerging "European Body Music" (bands like Gary Numan, Depeche Mode, Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb ... basically stuff around Mute Records)

The first hip-hop tunes that really made me feel "I want to go out and buy this and start listening to this music" was, on one hand, De La Soul. Three Feet High And Rising was the first hip-hop album I bought.

And on the other, listening to John Peel play these Gang Starr tunes on his show :

I think it was these Gang Starr tunes more than anything else that turned me from thinking of electropop / electrogoth as the peak of radical, cutting edge technological music, into someone who thought that hip-hop was the real cutting edge and really exciting music to listen to. Plus acid house was happening which also changed my musical world quite drastically.

Quora Answer : Apart from Gary Numan, who are your favourite electronic music artists?

Jan 11

70s :

Tangerine Dream

Jean-Michel Jarre

TONTO's Exploding Head Band

Mort Gartensen

Tomita

Lee "Scratch" Perry

Kraftwerk

Brian Eno

Klaus Shulze

Giorgio Moroder

Patrick Cowley

Riuichi Sakamoto / Yellow Magic Orchestra

80s :

Depeche Mode

Vince Clark (Yazoo / Erasure)

Soft Cell

Yello

Pet Shop Boys

Blancmange

Morton Sherman Bellucci

Many innovators of House, Acid and Techno

90s :

808 State

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The Future Sound of London

KLF

The Black Dog

Plaid

Andrew Weatherall

Plone

Spring Heel Jack

Omni Trio / Rob Haigh

Portishead

Moloko / Mark Brydon

Super Collider

Various hip-hop, jungle and ragga producers

00s:

Boards of Canada

Tim "Love" Lee

Nortec Collective

Susumu Yokota

Coil (yes music back to the 80s, but the 00s is when I really started listening ... mainly to their 90s and 00s music)

Moon Wiring Club

Belbury Poly (and various Ghostbox artists)

Burial

The Bug / Kevin Martin

Kode 9 (various Hyperdub artists)

10s :

Vektroid (and various other vaporwave / distroid artists)

Sofia Reta / Hilde

JJ Brine

Euglossine

Jameszoo

Various trap, footwork and global bass producers

Everyone on my experimental music netlabel : Dionysian Industrial Complex and ... er .... me : Mentufacturer