Towards the Within — A Musical Odyssey

One of many plans I have with migrating from my previous site to this new site, one was to begin a musical odyssey of sorts that I would call Towards the Within. The focus of this series is introduce myself to entirely new musical experiences. I hope to encounter new sounds and bands during my experiment. As I do so, I will share the more interesting discoveries with you in a series of posts.

Establishing the trailhead

I deciding that I wanted to avoid having too heavy of a hand in determining the direction of my musical exploration. Instead, I would only determine the trailhead at which I would enter a new wilderness. After which, I would let the algorithms of the internet guide me. Part of those initial guardrails would be set based on my mood of the month.

This month, my mood happens to be international music mixed with non-english darkwave. I added a dash of some traditional influences as well to drive the music in a folksy direction. YouTube’s has a “Create a Radio Station” feature where you can set up some basic parameters, then seed it with an artist list. Doing just that, I set the radio to high artist variety with a high discovery ratio.

And now I’ll wait to see what there is to see as I wander into the wilds…

For all I know this is likely be a short-lived experiment, but I wanted explore and share with you some of the more interesting finds in the hopes it will uncover something latent and obscured by shadow.

The inputs

The bands I selected for my inputs included: Kælan Mikla (Icelandic Darkwave), Molchat Doma (Belarusian Post-Punk), She Past Away (Turkish Post-Punk), Elin Kåven (Sámi songwriter/singer), Heilung (Northern European experimental folk) and Dead Can Dance (Australian darkwave and world music).

Because Dead Can Dance is arguably one of the first bands to mix dark-wave and world music in the post-punk era, I decided to name this exploration into the woods after one of their songs, “Towards the Within”, which also happens to be the name of their first live album.

In future installments, I plan to have more commentary about the discoveries I make. For now, however, I will let Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry, the two artists that make up Dead Can Dance speak for themselves. Take a listen and weigh in below.

Towards the Within — Dead Can Dance