2015 was the year of live music for us. We covered eight festivals. I don’t think I’ve been to that many before in my life.
Hip hop seemed to make a return on here. That’s what we started on, but hit a major dip from 2010 to 2013. It started back up in 2014 with Kendrick Lamar, and predecessors have been poppin’ up all over the place since. Some with possibly more potential than Kendrick himself. One at the top of this list.
Other genres in electronic dominated the year even more. We got out a good amount of Kawaii in the first half, but future & trap took over the second. And of course house has been most dominate. Going from the deeper, heavier side and splitting into future & chill house near the end, as well as the funkier side of house music to jack to.
The amount of new singers seems to have dipped compared to past years, but the quality hasn’t. Anderson Paak, Madelyn Grant, Liz Vice & Joey Dosik to name out of the dozen others with clear personalities in their voices.
We’ve collected 29 tracks in total and a list of our 12 musicians with the most potential. Plus our biggest accomplishments of the year below that, the playlists. We put together 35 in total! That’s up from 25 last year.
You should also dance to last year’s list.
We’ve had two deep house lists so far, one two, but this one got too big so we split it in two.
First half is on the lighter side of deep house. Most the music deals in Love and the shit parts of it. Reminds me a lot of our Horizontal Disco playlist, but a little deeper with the house.
The other half is on a much heavier side of bass that’s a bit better for dancing. Late night raging that is. Both are good for dancing, depending on your mood.
Let me know how you’d order these differently if you had the chance.
We first found the horizontal disco name on Zimmer’s Galapagos. And although we categorized Galapagos under the tropical house playlist, Zimmer’s sound definitely circles around the theme we’re going for here. Malinchak, however, is the exact sound we think of.
Horizontal disco is meant for late night discoing on the floor and is on the lighter side of deep house. I just like relaxing to it late night though.
Touch Sensitive always helps make an entrance. Whether it was Le Youth at the Rickshaw last year or Flight Facilities at the Regency a week ago, I always walk in when he’s playing his best on the bass. And he always makes me feel like a badass while doing it (which doesn’t happen much).
I did wonder how much of his set was script and how much he winged it, but I don’t think I made that too clear on Twitter. Thanks Touch for indulging in my drunkin ramblings.
Our favorite female vocalists of 2014 had a part two and this was going to be it. But so many of them were downtempo electronic, so we decided to make something more specific out of it, and brought in some older tracks.
Our electro relaxations has been our most popular playlist to date, other than the beats to blaze to, and we always wanted to include female vocals over the relaxations. And here it finally is…
[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/24274265" params="color=000000&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%" height="20" iframe="true" /]
Sometimes it’s more about the creativity than the quality in a remix. Some of these aren’t perfect, but they show a lot of potential. And that’s another good reason for remixing, to get producers just starting out vocals actually worth making something new out of.
This is our biggest remix playlist yet. We tried hard to remove as much as we could, I mean that’s our job, but let me tell you it’s just as hard, if not harder, removing tracks from a playlist than adding them in (as we mentioned in our how to playlist music article).
[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/169905040" params="color=000000&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%" height="20" iframe="true" /]
Like the iPhone every year, this is our best playlist yet! It really is.
House has been my obsession for the past few years and my favorite kind is the mid-tempo, upbeat summertime jams. Which may or may not turn out to be called Tropical House. Or Summer House. Or Horizontal Disco. It’s up in the air really.
A few tracks do stereotypically incorporate the steel drums, but we did cover more ground than that. We also decided this should be more comprehensive than our usual playlists because we wanted to get all the trop house personas in one place. There are quite a few interesting characters.
We’re finally getting our favorite musicians of 2012 out there. Remixes & heavy sampling have made up most of the other best music of 2012, but the rest of these are all originals (at least for the most part).
I also decided to change it from 2012’s best musicians to the most promising. They may be our favorite musicians of 2012, but they’re probably all new to you – except Frank, Madeon & Miike maybe.
Also remember, not every one of these may be your favorite style, but you’ll definitely find a few you’ll enjoy for a good while.
[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/66170642" iframe="false" params="player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=292929" height="18" /]
I’m use to more fun-loving jingles from Flight Facilities and even though this took some time to sink in, I’m sure glad FF switched it up and even better, pulled it off. One thing that lives on from the past is their fiiine selection in vocalists. I don’t know many other musicians that consistently pair up with such pristine lady vocals.
[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/66170642" iframe="false" params="player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=292929" height="18"]