Autoaudiography: A Music Experiment

I used to get a lot of new music off of a Livejournal community called audiography. Every week they’d have a theme and people would post links to YouTube or other (mostly) free ways of hearing music that fit the theme. Sometimes the theme was a genre, sometimes a feeling, sometimes an image.

It was how I found the Decemberists, the Dresden Dolls, Sufjan Stevens, Rilo Kiley, Neko Case and a whole host of my other longtime favorites–and it’s mostly dead.

Audiography died off a long time ago, well before LJ traffic began to decline. The mods stopped posting themes and people stopped posting tracks. It had a resurgence in August and September last year–and immediately I discovered Florence + the Machine, Mumford and Sons, and First Aid Kit. (Ok, I am late on discovering those. But Audiography used to be my ticket to Knowing About Music Things! I am lost without them!)

I miss it. I listen to so much music–I need to have music on to write so my days are often filled with music from waking to sleeping. I like Pandora but I often miss what X song was called, and Spotify and Rdio can feel overwhelming. I’d try to revive Audiography myself except that I’m not a mod and can’t post themes.

But what I DO have is MAH OWN BLOG. So I am inaugurating Autoaudiography–my own one-blog version of the late great communal music pond.

I’ll post a theme every Monday, to loosely coincide with Twitter’s Music Monday hashtag. In the comments, post your favorite songs that fit the theme. Use (legit, legal, and free) links to Youtube videos (feel free to embed) or other sources for music that will not get me in trouble. Look through the comments for new music–I’ll repost my three favorites along with the new theme at the end of the week. Hopefully we can all find awesome new music, support musicians, and recapture some of that old awesomeness.

This week’s theme, thanks to the insomnia post that made me think about this and start listening to Florence again, is Night.

The title or artist can contain the word or related words, or the song can just make you think of nighttime, sleep, the moon, etc. Any connection to the theme is fine, it’s a loose sort of thing. Any genre is welcome, and, departing from Audiography rules, if you have songs of your own writing/singing/playing, by all means post them! Just keep it legal and non-piratical, please.

I’ll go first, on the off chance there’s someone else who hasn’t heard this song and seen this gorgeous video (which is kind of what I think that mask scene in Eyes Wide Shut might have been if that movie weren’t mainly about white people not feeling things) that has been my night-time companion the last few 3 ams:

So, what have you been listening to lately?