Louie Zong - Aquarium City

• Bandcamp

• Spotify

• Apple Music

Louie Zong is a genius. He makes those charming singing ghost videos that my kids are obsessed over, and has done work on We Bare Bears, among other animation projects. He has TONS of music on his bandcamp and his work just oozes joy and charm. I can’t get enough of his stuff and I love the smooth jazz of city pop.

DOMi & JD BECK - NOT TiGHT

• Spotify

• Apple Music

If you haven’t seen their revelatory Tiny Desk Concert, you should definitely check it out. But the thing is that these two are super technical jazz virtuosos on piano and drums respectively. This is mostly hardcore stuff, with insane runs on bass and piano (which DOMi often plays with one hand each on different keyboards) and crazy polyrhythms. Occasionally, some famous friends sing or rap on top, and that’s nice too. There’s a few moments, especially in tracks like Space Mountain, where this becomes almost drum’n’bass music.

Lars Lucy 8Legions

• Bandcamp

• Spotify

• Apple Music

Slightly off-kilter collabs between a jazz musician and his programmed electromechanical collaborators. Yeah, it’s weird, check out their Instagram. But the music comes out as mostly very technical, slightly glitchy jazz and it rules.

qumcl - Egyptology

• Bandcamp

I’m subscribed to Fantasy Audio Magazine, which is a tape zine that releases new music every month. A lot of it is dungeon synth or dungeon-adjacent (it’s great background music for D&D sessions) but occasionally they venture out and bring back great unheard stuff. This is a short album of super solid, dark and spacey drum’n’bass with occasional Donnie Darko audio clips.

Thanks for reading!