POTW (2019/13): Ryan's Roadtrip

Ryan’s Roadtrip, this week’s Playlist of the Week, is the personal favourite tracks of Ryan Doherty, an independent artist who lives in Birmingham, England. Ryan is a fantastic guitarist and you can hear several of his recordings in the playlist, notably For Another Way with its haunting gravelly vocal and beautifully layered guitars.

Ryan’s Roadtrip mostly comprises classic tracks from the mainstream, however, and covers grunge, rock, blues, britpop, triphop, electronica and pop (with the odd curveball thrown in). The emphasis is firmly towards guitar-oriented rock music (noting that Marillion occupies approximately 10% of this playlist’s tracks) but there are also tracks from Enigma, Massive Attack and Gabrielle Aplin, which balance out the mix. It’s a good list for playing in the car, as the name suggests!

Rating: 15 (there are a couple of tracks designated ‘explicit’ in this list).

Playlist of the Week (2018/22)

This week’s POTW is Elegant Electronic Music, compiled by Roz RK, aka Resonanz Kreis. In this playlist, RK has pulled together a great collection of tracks from across the world of electronica, encompassing genres as diverse as chillhop, EBM, ambient, synthwave and plenty of tracks that I couldn’t quite assign to a particular genre*.   Some of the tracks make for more challenging listening, but overall this is a good playlist to put on whilst you get on with a few hours of work, as it feels rather like a film soundtrack.

Roz is an electronic artist based in Northern Italy and Resonanz Kreis is a solo project that has been going for about 20 years, but is a relatively recent discovery for me, via the loose network of independent musicians in contact on social media. Resonanz Kreis’s best work has an uncluttered simplicity with hints of classic electronica from such artists as Kraftwerk, Jean-Michel Jarre and Enigma. I’d especially recommend My Silence if you like tracks by Enigma, or T.F.L.D. if you like a slightly more experimental sound, like this one by the Flying Lizards.

 

*Disclaimer: I’m pretty rubbish with genres: the electronica scene is always coming up with new genre names and their meanings shift over time. If I tried to keep up 100%, I’d not have any time left for making music!

Playlist of the Week (2018/12)

This week’s POTW comes from Russell Suereth. Russ creates spiritual new age music and you can best hear his work via another playlist of his, Enigma and Russell Suereth.

Russ’s Freshly Picked Selections playlist is an eclectic mixed bag, as far as genres are concerned, but the common theme throughout these songs is that Russ has championed unsigned artists.

Disclaimer: there are a few songs in this list with the ‘explicit’ label. If that is likely to cause offence, please do use the skip button when these come up!