Welcome to our 5th annual wordless year-in-review! This little covid baby, spawned in 2020’s dark spring, can now run and dance and hop on one foot.
TL;DR: each year we curate a playlist of ~100 songs of wordless music from that year's adds to our long-running main playlist (often with inspiration from friends on our collaborative playlist). This blog sums it all up – mostly for our own enjoyment but also our newsletter. This year, we have
2 new collaborator playlists
1 holiday-themed playlist, because we’re insane
Updated genre mixes
Our 2024 mix
New playlists
Two old friends & heavy-hitter music guys blessed us with their own 100-song wordless playlists:
Ty’s mix and write-up is a rock-forward genre-crossing odyssey, going the distance from Debussy and Duke Ellington to ZZ Top and Black Sabbath, with strolls through cumbia, acoustic, ambient, and more. Beyond having had the real-life version of Jack Black’s character’s job in School of Rock, Ty’s a veteran of the Denver music scene, from The Knew to Peruvian rock band Don Chicharrón – who found their way onto our playlist a few years back – to his solo work and recent instrumental music. Check it all out.
Colin’s mix and write-up is a high-concept mélange kicking off with no less than 13 wordless Phish covers of Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra. (Have we lost you already?) Then it wanders through classical, jazz, blues, rock – and more Phish. Colin’s a freelance writer and longtime music journalist who’s written for the likes of Rolling Stone and Pitchfork (r.i.p.), whose 2012 piece about instrumental music more or less inspired this project. Go ahead, friends, give it a whirl: let Colin change your mind about Phish.
Along with Mike’s and Ayla’s last year, these collaborator mixes have brought us tons of joy and pumped new lifeblood into this project. Check them out, stay tuned for more, drop songs onto our collaborative playlist*, and reach out if you want to make a 100-song mix! Sharing, as they say, is caring.
We also made our first-ever wordless holiday mix, a short and festive-but-not-too-festive playlist of instrumental classics, holiday covers, and some weirder selections.
Our best of wordless 2023
Like past years our 2023 mix is just our favorite 100 songs, new and old, that we added to our main playlist throughout the year.** Here's a visual smattering of the album art highlights:
Since classifying genres is increasingly tricky (though our genre mixes dutifully attempt the task for instrumental, electronic, post-rock, beats, and "other"), this year we’ll use a straightforward (though still deeply imperfect) baseball-themed metric using Spotify’s “monthly listener” stats.
At the top is the major league of wordless, and we'll pick 500,000+ monthly listeners as an arbitrary benchmark. Our 2023 mix has new music from stars like Sigur Rós, Andrew Bird, Rodrigo y Gabriela, RJD2, and Yussef Dayes, as well as from less obvious major leaguers like Balmorhea, ford., Richard Houghten, and Weval – and "new to us" songs by majors like Hermanos Gutiérrez, Maribou State, and The Field Tapes.
The wordless minor leagues, classified arbitrarily at 100,000+ monthly listeners, are niche but still garner large and devoted followings. New minor-leaguer music on our 2023 mix includes some of our all-time wordless favorites like the Album Leaf, Explosions in the Sky, El Ten Eleven, GoGo Penguin, Hidden Orchestra, il:lo, Mammal Hands, and Tom Day – and "new to us" music from minor leaguers like Aukai, Fabiano do Nascimento, Svaneborg Kardyb, and Tom Ashbrook.
And yet the wordless draft leagues are where the magic happens, where you’ll find the future stars, critics' darlings, and passion players. Our 2023 mix features draft-league acts like Nashville bluegrass artist Lindsey Lou (99k monthly), LA jazz composer Sam Wilkes (98k), Brooklyn guitarist Rachika Nayar (71k), Swedish saxophonist Bear Garden (47k), Vermont cellist Takénobu (42k monthly), Pitchfork-darling Blue Lake (33k), Paris/London multi-instrumentalist Akusmi (30k), the UK’s Tara Clerkin Trio (25k), Germany's Conic Rose (16k), Virginia banjoist Adam Hurt (11k), and Pennsylvania's Cumulus Frisbee (8k). Alas, navigating smaller acts like these (for us at least!) is almost impossible without Spotify's algorithms, love 'em or hate 'em.
If we had to pick, our favorite "actually new" wordless albums in 2023 were Mammal Hands’s Gift from the Trees and GoGo Penguin’s Everything Is Going to Be OK, and our favorite “new to us” discoveries were probably Akusmi and Tom Ashbrook – the latter surely a reflection of our age as we wander ever so slightly towards the “gentle piano nocturnes” corner of the club…
We also added several "new to us" wordless songs by wordy artists (i.e. acts not known for their wordlessness) – including Allen Toussaint, Jamie xx, Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers, M. Ward, and Toro y Moi. (And while it's not on our mix, did you catch André 3000’s flute album?) For more in this category, check out Ty’s and Colin’s mixes for wordless songs by Oasis, Pink Floyd, Van Halen, The War on Drugs, Yo La Tengo, J Dilla, and more.
Thanks for reading and listening. Happy new year, and happy wordless.
* Wordless collaborate has cracked the 700-song mark! Thanks to Mike, Ayla, and Fortune Dweller as well as Colin, Erick, Jjj, Matt, Ty, and Yashan. Keep ‘em coming!
** Our main playlist, after nearly a decade of monthly updates, has just over 1,000 songs. (Sort by “recently added” to see our latest additions.)
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