No Filler Music Podcast - Arms & Sleepers - Black Paris 86

Episode Date: January 11, 2021

When the duo behind Arms and Sleepers sits down to make music together, they typically turn to movies for inspiration. That was the goal for their 2006 debut record Black Paris 86 after all: to make a soundtrack for an imaginary film. The music is both dark and mysterious, but also warm and beautiful. Blending exceptional drumbeats and killer bass lines with glockenspiels and toy pianos, Arms and Sleepers create a truly unique sound. Join us as we chat about this hidden gem in the ambient downtempo genre. Tracklist: Arms & Sleepers - Arms/Sleepers Arms & Sleepers - Mission To Prague Arms & Sleepers - Lausanneut Arms & Sleepers - Butterflycatcher Arms & Sleepers - Rooftops/Lanterns The List Exists - Film Noir Love Story This show is part of the Pantheon Podcast network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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In store online at Sephora. I don't think people have patience for a lot of instrumental music. I mean, I listen to a lot of instrumental music, but sometimes I want to hear a quick, catchy pop song, but I'm okay with listening to both, and I think a lot of people only pick one. They don't have patience to listen to the other, and it's too bad because there's so many great artists

that are making instrumental music that are not getting much recognition at all, and they really should. So it'd be nice if people had more patience, but I don't think they do. And welcome to No Filler, the music podcast dedicated to sharing the often overlooked hidden gyms that fill the space between the singles on our favorite records. My name is Quentin.

I've got my brother, Travis, with me as always. And happy New Year, Jeff. First episode of 2021. You remember last year when we were like, man, we're really in the future now, 2020. This is going to be it. So many great things ahead. Yeah. What happened last year, man?

I mean, it's just like the craziest whirlwind of a year. You know what I mean? In so many different ways. That's the funny thing. It's like it's not like it was only the pandemic. There was all the social unrest, you know, in the summer. And like, you know, I think there was something else that happened. Oh, yeah, a fucking election happened.

the most like, you know, fucking contested and like drawn out. We're still dealing with it because it's, you know, it's not January 20th yet, you know. Right. We're still dealing with the fuckery. Lots of change ahead, man. Yeah. But, you know, I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful for 2020.

We got the vaccine, man. You know, I'll be getting that shot into my arm here in a few months, probably along with everybody else. And then. Oh, yeah, dude. Hopefully by the end of the year, dude, I'll be looking up at a state. seeing some live music. I'm hoping by the end of the year, the Taman Pollock concert that my wife and I bought tickets for

has been rescheduled for September. So I've got my fingers crossed here that by September, the vast majority of citizens will have been vaccinated by then. And we can feel comfortable going to live shows and all that good stuff. That is my resolution for the new year is to go see a live concert again by the end of 2021. I think it's going to happen.

I'm hopeful, dude. These vaccines are giving me help. Anyway, yeah, dude, 2020, the last few episodes we've been recapping our favorite tracks from 2020. We did an episode last week on our listener favorites. Some of you wrote us on Twitter, told us what your favorite tracks were. we reached out to some previous guests that we've had on the show. That was fun. It was cool to jam out to some tunes that we didn't pick.

So at this point, we have some Spotify playlists available if you're interested that, you know, essentially I think we have two different playlist. One was our favorites and then our listener favorites. You can find those on the website, perhaps. I don't know. I haven't put them up yet, but I will put them up at some point. Lots of good music last year, man. Yeah. We talked about this too, that like we had some musical moments and albums and stuff that would not have existed had it not been for the pandemic and the state of, you know, the globe. So yeah, going into 2021, I got nothing but hope. And yeah, we're going to kick off our year here.

with a return to electronic music cue. I'm excited. And I think we need to do it a little bit more justice than me did last year. Yeah, we barely scratched the surface. And I feel like we're going to barely scratch the surface again, because obviously we're all about rock and roll, specifically indie rock from the 2010s. You know what I mean?

That's our wheelhouse, a good portion of the albums that we've talked about so far in the 150 plus episodes, have sort of been in that vein. But we also love every flavor just about of electronic music. Yeah. And we've done what, four episodes, maybe, five? I think, yeah, proper electronic episodes, maybe five or six. So the voice that you heard in our little intro is one half of this act that we're going to talk about today. They go by arms and sleepers.

So that was the voice of Mirza Aramaic. And he was talking about how, you know, he feels that a lot of people don't have patience for instrumental music. They either like, you know, the more poppy, like really easily digestible, you know, four-minute track or whatever. Yeah. Or they like instrumental music and they have the patience for instrumental music. It's kind of a dig at like attention spans, right? Yeah. And it kind of comes across as high.

eyebrow. It does. And these guys are definitely highbrow. We're going to get into that in a little bit as far as like their approach to music and stuff. But I feel like we've talked about this before, Q. Yes. I was going to say when we covered Tosca, I feel like we were both trying not to sound pretentious. Yeah, because we were trying to describe like the type of music lover who listens to this kind of music. Yeah. These guys make the same type of electronic music. I guess they're best kind of described as. as down tempo, trip hop. Ambient for sure. Ambient. I'm in the ambient category, I think. So these guys formed in 2006 in Boston, Massachusetts. And their music, I'm going to let them describe it because I think it teased it up perfectly. They say, we wanted to kind of make a soundtrack to imaginary films, those that are in our

heads and put them on disc. I think this is how we view our music, as soundtracks to movies that don't exist. So that's a radio head song. Isn't that the name of a radio head song? Yeah, I think it's called like imaginary. Music for an imaginary film or something like that. Yeah, yeah. But no, we've talked about that.

That's a great way to describe it. Yeah, we've talked about that too, especially with down tempo. I think we talked about this with Eam and Tobin. Yeah, for sure. Bricholage is the record that we did. We're like, when I listen to. down tempo a lot of times. I'm imagining a scene in some movie.

Yeah. And that's what happens with, I think that's just because it's instrumental. Like you're not getting any visuals. Yeah, there's no lyrics. Yeah. There's no theme other than the mood that they're trying to convey. Right. But these guys are specifically doing that.

And they talk about their influence being anything from like, basically, the few interviews I've read, the first answer that they always give. to, hey, what are your influences? Like, when you guys sit down and make a song, like, what influences you? A lot of times they talk about movies. Like, they get inspired by this particular director named Pedro Almodivar, which I don't think I've ever seen any of his films. Is it a foreign director?

Yeah, he's a Spanish filmmaker. But beyond movies, they're influenced by going to a museum. like an art exhibit or literature or random personal experiences. Basically, they seem to be influenced primarily by art, like other forms of art. That's how these guys approach their music versus, you know, rock bands that are going to write about heartache and stuff like that. Personal experiences or stories. Right. These guys approach their music as art, and then they're for the most part influenced.

by other forms of art is what it seems like. And I think it's pretty fitting, especially this record that we're talking about today, which is called Black Paris 86. It's their first full-length record. Yeah, and the thing about this album is, like, through and through, from the album art, track to track, it just puts you in this headspace.

We say this a lot with music, but when it happens for, like, an album as a whole, that's when when it becomes really special. And this album is, I mean, the mood that it puts you in, it's just, it's ambient and dark. And dude, I think I think we should start off the first episode in 2021 with the word haunting. Yeah, well, let's try to find some better words to use. I'm going to dig deep for some synonyms here. But that was just a tiny little intro to these guys.

Let's play a song here. And then we can talk more about who these guys are. Because I think we've teed it up a little bit. It's better sometimes to just listen to the music. Yeah. So I don't know if we mentioned yet, but this album came out in 2007. And this is, we'll always be in my top 10 probably favorite electronic ambient albums for sure.

Yeah. Well, like this hit right around the time that we started. seeking out down tempo music, I think. Yeah. 2007. Dude, this is the fucking, this is the year, I think, that you were crashing on my floor, right? 2007?

Maybe if it wasn't 2007, it was 2008. Okay. But yeah, this is around the time that, like, you and I were heavy into Tosca and bands like Amitobin. I mean, artists that we've covered before on this, on this podcast. but like, you know, thievery corporation. What's another band? Another group that falls into that.

Like ones that people might be familiar with. I think a lot of people are familiar with Thevery Corporation. Well, I was going to say Cruder and Dorfmeister. Yeah, same, yeah. That's a deep dig, I feel like. That's the same. I mean, that's half of Tosca. Thievery Corporation is a good dig.

Maybe a massive attack. Bonobo, all of those kind of bands that kind of fall under that umbrella. Like this is when we were first starting to discover those guys. And I feel like arms and sleepers. Yeah, we never looked back. It's only kind of evolved beyond that, you know, going forward. But like this was kind of our intro to that. And this album always stood out to me as, you know.

Exceptional. They fall into a slightly, they do it in a slightly different way. But all right, let's just listen to the first track here. This song, I've always loved the drum intro in this. track, the way the drums. Oh, me too. Kind of flowing it out. And also the vocal, there's like some sort of vocal thing that happens

that has always reminded me of Tom York. Yes, dude. But anyway, let's listen to it. This song is called a mission to Prague. I totally love this song, man. Yeah, it's, it's, let's talk about layers, dude. But we, every

time we talk about, especially down tempo, we always talk about the layer, the building of the, of each layer, right. Like with this song, it's those dope-ass drums that start... It's one of my favorite drum beats

of all time. It's so simple, but amazing. So real quick, before we keep talking, let's just so we can know who to give proper credit to here. So Arms and Sleepers is two different

guys. It's Max Lewis and Merza Romick. Merza is the guy that we had that we had that clip the beginning. When we saw them live in Denton, I don't remember when that was. It must have been not that long after this. It was just them two. So one of those two guys was sitting behind the kit. Yeah. Yeah, so Max does the programming, uh, the beats and all that stuff, along with keyboards.

Merza, of course, also does keyboards, but he plays the bass as well. And he does the drawing or the drums. No, my, my guess is Max probably does the, that's probably what programming. Okay. So yeah, that really simple and effective loop drum beat, right, which is like a down tempo staple. Well, can I say as a drummer, Trev, that's not a simple beat. Well, maybe I guess I mean, okay, that's good to know because like I guess what I mean by simple is like it's just looped, right? Yeah. So there's not a lot going on, but you're saying that the actual beat itself is not easy. That would be hard to, well, for me, you know, at the level that I'm at as a drummer, it's a pretty complicated beat.

As far as the bass pedal and the finesse. I talk about finessing the hi-hat. He does it really well with that beat. But like I said, dude, when we saw them play live back, it had to be around this time. Yeah, they played a lot of this record. Probably 2008 or so, yeah. We saw him with Josh. And Denton. That was back when Josh was still living in Denton.

One of them was playing drums. It wasn't just sampled beats. There was an actual kit. I wonder if it was Max. But yeah, dude. And on top of that, so it's the repetitive drumbeat and the way that they pull the other instruments out and drop them back in throughout the song. And that, what is it? like it's a mandolin or some kind of like Japanese like coto stringed instrument yeah

I love that it gives it like a and you know with that with the album name black Paris 86 it gives it like a French kind of feeling the whole album has this feeling yeah yeah well so um this can't be true but I'm going to read it anyway this is the um the old archived release notes for this record on the expect candy record label website. So it says here, Arms and Sleepers started one night in the back of an ambulance in Cambridge. In an alleyway, a man was bleeding with a cassette player in hand, the play button still on.

What sounded like recordings of a gospel choir blared from the tin speaker, while down the street a jazz band could be heard. The man was dying. He dropped the cassette player on the cement and closed his eyes, the sound carrying through the air into his ears for one last time. Though this moment in time died with him, his cassette lived on and arms and sleepers was born. I mean, that didn't fucking happen, right?

What? Because, I mean, I guess they're saying, whoever, whatever, like, marketing person decided to write this to describe the band, wanted to paint this, like, imagery of, like, I don't know what the fuck he was thinking when he wrote this. So there's a, here's what that reads like to me. Max and Merza used to be EMTs. Yeah, maybe. Right. It's just goofy. I'm trying to think of what to of what we can pull from this that's relevant. Probably the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, whatever kind of instrument that was. You know what, you were talking about, what, whatever kind of instrument that was. It sounded kind of like a coto. Yeah.

Traditional Japanese stringed instrument. They're an electronic band and this is usually the case with down tempo. It's electronic meaning it's like mixed and it's sampled into a computer and stuff. But it's these more organic instruments like stringed instruments and stuff like that that get mixed into it. So it has this really warm sound to it. Yeah. My favorite electronic music are. from the artists that blends the analog real instruments with the programmed keyboard stuff,

and then they just take those actual recorded instruments and loop them in a cool way. Yeah. But they keep it organic feeling where you don't necessarily, it doesn't necessarily feel like you're listening to an electronic looped song, you know? Right. And this album, I think, does it better than most in the genre. Want to play another song? Let's play another song before we keep talking here

because I've got some more things to say about this band but I don't want to spill all my beans here. Before we do that, let's take a quick break. All right, so here's our next track and this is going to sound more... A little more trip-pop. Yeah, a little bit glitchy. A little bit more electronica,

electronic-y if you will. I have to say this because it's important. This is another one of those albums where, And if you're listening to this podcast right now and you're not listening to it in headphones, first pause, grab yourself a good pair of headphones and come back and listen because this album begs to be listened to in headphones. Definitely. And also, especially this song. One more thing worth noting here, they had put out a couple of EPs, I think a few EPs before Black Parras 86 called Bliss was It in that dawn to be alive. That's a great EP, dude.

Yeah, it's just as good and it's got the same kind of vibes as this full length. All right, so let's just go to the very next track here on the record. This song is called Lausanne. Once again, all about that beat, man. That drumbeat that comes in, especially how they kind of tease out that piano part for so long before you get that really satisfying drum beat that comes in. You know what I mean? Yeah, and then on top of that, you've got a little break.

that happens, and then it all comes back in with that killer baseline. Yes, the bass line's great. All around, man, such a fantastic song. And this showcases their use of brass instruments as well. Yeah. Just all around, man. I think this song is a really good representation of, like, one half of the feeling and vibes that you're going to get from this album. It's a little bit more a beat, a little more structured, a little more jazzy.

Yeah. shit, man. And then when we jump to our next pick, dude, I feel like it's more dark. I mean, it all kind of has this dark vibe to it, which I love. For sure. So speaking of, this is interesting they're talking about here. This was an interview they did with headphone commute.com back in 2014. They were asked, your group's warm, ambient tones are unlike anything I've heard before.

How do you conceive of your compositions and how are arrangements usually fleshed out in the studio? And they say here, many songs begin with inspiration that comes from watching an exceptional touching film. So like I said earlier, that's usually how they answer this. We're like right off the bat, right? They say in the studio, things usually get started with a beat, which I feel like that's probably how most down tempo starts, right? A really good beat. He says, this usually really depends on what type of. of music we are working on. Sometimes new compositions will start on the acoustic guitar, even

though we don't have much guitar on our songs, other times on our roads. Often it's the beat that dominates, which is done in reason, and then parts are added to that. It really does vary a lot and depends on what kind of mood we are in personally. Dark, rainy days tend to result in more experimenting with pianos and acoustic instruments, while sunnier days are more about music software. Interesting. And then they also say here, our arsenal also includes Glock and Speals, tour pianos, analog synths, omnicords, melodicas, accordions,

and other fun little instruments like that. So yeah, that's what, like all that stuff goes into these songs, and that's why there's so much like texture and like they said, warmth in the music because they are actually using analog instruments too, like guitars, accordions, stuff like that. But yeah, so, you know, if what are he saying about, you know, darker, kind of moodyer music, it's going to be a piano. That last song had that very kind of beautiful piano lick that kind of runs through the whole song, you know. All right, let's move on to our next track here.

And Quentin, you said that this one is going to be more different than the last two tracks, right? For sure. This one might be, may have been conjured up during a song. sunny day, which is funny that they say that, because it's all, this all sounds like rainy day music to me. Yeah, I agree with you. This is a rainy day kind of album. Yeah. So this is the first song of Arms and Sleepers that I ever heard. Okay. Interesting. And you'll see why I was immediately intrigued and, you know, dove into this album as soon as I could get my hands on it. So this is a few tracks down on the album.

This song is called Butterfly Catcher. I just love the different movements that song has, you know? Yeah, and again, like using like brass instruments and stuff like that. Yeah, and the piano line really took a backseat in this one. It's much more like in the background. And, you know, it's just simple little. I don't even know if it's chords. It might just be one key, little melody.

And like they seem to do this like, they use this a lot where it sounds like a reversed, what's the word I'm looking for here, where it's like tape that's being around, I guess, or scrubbed backwards, scrubbed and reverse kind of thing. Yeah. And I also, like, it sounds like they sampled vocals to make that the bass melody for the song.

Do you get that? when you first press play, it sounds almost like vocals. Oh, yeah, definitely. Sounds like humming almost. Yeah. I love that stuff. Definitely, definitely. And that seems to be a theme throughout this whole album.

Like, you know, you think of this as an instrumental electronic album. There's vocals throughout the whole album, but they use them in such a way that it's really hard to understand what they're saying. Yeah. You know, in the songs where there is a for sure, like, dominant singing voice in the song, like they're saying, they are singing. It's in English, but it's really hard to pick out what they're saying. And it's just the way that they, the effects that they add onto the vocals, you know, and where it sits in the mix, it's really hard to understand what they're saying. And I think that's really cool.

I think it adds kind of this mysterious quality to the album. Yeah, well, I think we faded out there with like more of a defined kind of vocal track, I guess. It didn't sound like it was being, it wasn't like a vocal sample being used as a keyboard sound, right? It was more like a female singer. But they only worked with, you know, it was just them to in the studio. at least for this record. But anyway, yeah, the bottom line is like, this record has so much,

so much warmth and, like, analog quality to it. But it's just a couple of producers, basically music producers. And with the, especially with the brass instruments and stuff like that, it's no wonder that they kind of see themselves as making music for a soundtrack to a film

that doesn't exist, you know what I mean? They approach it like they are writing music for a film. And I would love to know the scene in their head that they're writing a song for. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like what film is Black Paris 86? You know what I mean? Like what film did they have in mind when they sat down to write this record?

You know, because I always have imagery in my head when I hear certain songs, especially this next one, our last track. This song is dope as fuck, man. I love this. And it's got such a different vibe than the rest of the stuff we played, which is I think a good thing. We're ending it on this one. This one sounds like a fucking heist film or something like that, man. Like an old school like heist. I always get images of like old cobblestone towns in France or something.

Yeah, I can see that. I can totally see that. Totally. Let's do it, man. Let's play the last track. All right. So let me just put this out there, Q. this song was used in one of my new dust mixtapes back in the day. I think it was used in my very first mixtape. If we could find a way to resurrect those and put those back out in the ether. I have all of mine, dude.

I pulled them from... Oh, from the server? From the server, yeah. I have all of mine. I think I may have some of mine, too. I don't know if I have all of them, but I have some of them. All right, so this song is called rooftops, lanterns. Exceptional musicians, man.

They really know how to craft a song in a powerful way. Yeah. It's so simple, dude. Right. But here's what I like about it. We talked about, hey, we're going to do some electronic music, you know, for the first few episodes of 2021. And this is our first album, right? That song right there could be done with, you know, a little, a tiny little jazz band or something like that.

Because, you know, that sounds like an upright bass, like you said, upright bass almost, piano and some brass instruments. That's it. But this is electronic music, you know, it's down tempo. I think I talked about this with when we did a, we were talking about math rock at some point in an episode. And I was saying that what I love about math rock is the fact that the drums always take center stage. right. Yeah, that must have been on our Mercury program episode. Yeah, probably.

Yeah. And yeah, the same with down tempo, I feel like, or trip hop. The drums is what has always drawn me to that kind of music because it's like almost like almost hip hop or, or, you know, rap drum beats and stuff like that. But with jazz behind it, you know. Yeah, and that beat was great because he was using. brushes, which I love the sound of brushes on a drum kit. That gives it that warm jazz feel, you know.

Yeah. And I love that they mentioned that they use reason, you know, only because, like, that's, when I dabbled with making electronic music, I used, I think I used reason. So I just, it always makes me happy to like, oh, you know, that is just the, the tool that people use to make music like this, you know? Anyway, it makes me feel like, hey, you know what, even I can do this. You just got to believe in yourself, brother. So here's another quote.

This is from, again, that the write-up on the record label, the Expect Candy release notes for Black Paris 86. It says here, listening to Black Paris 86 feels like sitting in a cinema, watching landscapes, beauty, and tragedy. Feeling warm and safe, while a hint of mystery seems to whisper that not everything is okay out there. The latter doesn't seem to be far-fetched when Romick talks about the band's name. For me, the meaning of arms and sleepers is the meaning of so much of the world today and in the past, and probably the future. While so many are fighting and killing, which is arms, others are ignoring it all.

the sleepers. So I think that's a great, that's a great way to describe their sound, and it's a great way to describe the feeling that you get when you listen to the record. Because, you know, it's got this like very, it sounds, you know, uneasy. Like you kind of almost feel uneasy sometimes when you're listening to this music. Uneasy, but at the same time. Comforted and stuff like that. There we go.

Probably because of the string instruments and stuff like that and the piano. Yeah. Stuff that sounds familiar. But then it's got like... It's the chords that they use that give you the uneasy kind of feeling. Yeah. And in that first track that we played,

Mission to Prague, there is that almost like, it feels like you're in a fucking like, tilt a whirl or something like that. The way that they kind of... There's a warbly effect to some of them. Yeah, yeah. Which really makes you feel like

something's not right. Yeah. Which is interesting because they're saying that the name of the band is like this, says here, this is Merzag. And he says, the sleepers,

are many of us that are either oblivious to this, meaning the arms, like the weapons of war and stuff. Yeah. Or choose to ignore it since we live in a world with fewer problems and plenty of prosperity. So that's a major issue, man. This year shook things up for a lot of people, you know, and comfort and prosperity. I don't think a lot of people will describe 2020 as comfort or prosperous at all.

But, you know, it's interesting because when you live, listen to this music that's like we were talking about like the the uneasiness but but comfort you know what I mean like where if you stop and pay attention for a little bit you'd be like oh this world is actually pretty fucked up there's a lot of issues yeah but let me just go back to you know watching Netflix you know or right let me just order something on Amazon and get that that instant fix or whatever it's easy to stay in in your little bubble yeah so that's black Paris 86 dude the whole album is worth listening to from start to finish.

We say that a lot, but absolutely with this album, this one is worth spending an evening with. Definitely. I want to say, too, that I haven't listened to a lot of their stuff, and they have so many records out now.

They've been doing this consistently ever since. Another favorite album of mine came out a few years later called The Organ Hearts. Yeah. You listen to that one? Yeah, yeah. There's some great songs on organ hearts. That's the thing, man.

If you listen to some of their newer stuff, their sound has changed quite a bit. Like, they're always evolving. I can't say that I'm as much a fan of their newer stuff. But there are gyms, like, to be found. You know what I mean? Like, if you listen to some of their newer stuff, there are sounds that kind of call back to this.

Yeah. It's funny because it seems like a lot of these albums have more of the upbeat electronic music that he kind of criticizes in that clip that we used for our intro. The poppy kind of stuff. Yeah. But hey, you know what? It's been, what, 13, 14 years since they released Black Parr's 86. So of course they're going to be evolving and experimenting with different sounds. It's better to experiment with a decade-long career.

Yeah, that just tells you like, you know, if you're a creative person, you're either going to change or you're going to, you know, it's the classic thing of like, do we want artists that we love to change and like challenge themselves and like and get better? Do we just want more of the same that we liked a decade plus ago? You know, it's the classic thing. I'd say to some degree, yeah, to some degree change is welcomed and encouraged. Yeah. It just has to be the same. It's got to have a. the same soul. That's what we love about spoon. They're always changing, but it's the same spoon that we, that we've always loved. Yeah. But yeah, you want to talk about like prolific. They've had three full-length records come out in 2020. So they've taken advantage of probably not touring and stuff like that, right? And if it's just two guys with their keyboards and stuff, now they have said that, that, you know, they collaborate with more musicians now where they call people into the studio and stuff like that. So I don't know if that's the case. I mean, it looks like on their latest

record, Corpus Die, they've got, I'm guessing, a vocalist on there, Sophia and Suea. So yeah, they've been working with other people. It's not just them, them too, making all of this music, but all the music that you heard today was just those two guys. But yeah, dude, I haven't really given these new albums a listen, so I might have to do that. I have to return off these mics, dude. There's a lot. There's a lot out there. Yeah. For two guys, they've been, if you go to their band camp and you look at all of their

their EPs and their albums and stuff, it's, it's a lot, it's a lot to go through. So if you like these guys, you have hours and hours of music ahead of you to listen to. So, all right, Q, let's talk about something that we're doing a little bit differently in 2021. So, you know, about that. this time of an episode, we typically do what we call What You Heard, which is a segment where we each bring a different track of something that we heard since we last recorded. And it's just another way to get a couple more tunes on the show from, you know, likely, completely different sounding artist or genres from what the episode was about. So I was listening back to our, well,

what we called our 2019 Discoveries episode, which we put out with our year-end recap episodes for 2019, where it kind of felt like an extended what you heard segment. We each brought five tracks of just bands that we had discovered in 2019 that weren't necessarily new artists, you know what I mean? Bands or music from bands. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

And it was all over the place. That was a fun episode. It was a great episode. and we got the talk in and we decided what if we did a monthly What You Heard episode instead of tacking them on to the end of each episode and then we'll basically have three episodes where we talk about whatever the heck we want to talk about and then end the month with a what you heard you know we'll each bring a handful of tracks to the episode and talk about them and that's it yeah and you know we were talking about it you know I think this is

when it comes down to it, sharing music with people is, that's our fucking bread and butter, dude. It's a lifelong passion. That's the entire reason why we started this podcast. And I feel like going this route, I think it'll be fun. You know, if we are kind of sitting in a genre that you don't particularly care for, you know, and we're spending three weeks covering, you know, down tempo music or something, that you're just not into, skip those episodes, you know, or give them a listen if you don't like it,

then know that another week from then we're going to be just bringing a bunch of random songs, just kind of all over the place, kind of gives you a, you know, a fun episode to dive into and just listen to some random music with us. It's going to be fun, dude. I'm excited about it. And another thing I wanted to do is, and we've said this before,

we love hearing from our listeners. It's one of our favorite things in the world. And it would be fun to start sharing some listener picks for what you heard on those monthly episodes, you know. If you heard a song that you loved, give us a tweet and share it with us. You know, just say like, hey, heard this song the other day on the radio. You know, it's been in my head since I heard. heard it, share it with us and we'll play it on our What You Heard episode.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, think about it. Basically, at any moment, just drop us a tweet that says, hey, really cool song I just heard. And then if we, you know, if we like it, then we'll, we'll throw it into our What You Heard episode for that month. And we'll give you a shout out. And we'll talk about the song. Yeah. Pretty straightforward, right? There's some great songs on our listener episode, man. Some good stuff. I want to hear more. of it. Definitely. All right. So that's that. So if you're looking forward to hearing some What You Heard's, you're going to have to wait in a few more weeks, but we will have a What What You Heard extravaganza at the end of every month. Dude, and I've been sitting on quite a few

songs that I want to play, man, because we've been doing our year-end recap episodes the last month. I got a handful of good songs I want to share with you, man. So I'm excited to play you know, four or five of them in a couple weeks. Definitely, definitely. It's going to be a blast. Definitely. Yeah, so that's going to do it for us today. As always, you can find us on the Pantheon podcast music network.

That is the network for music lovers. And we are a part of it. It's a great group of music-centered podcasts. We're happy to be part of the family. That is Pantheon Podcasts.com. You can also find us on Twitter at No Filler Podcast. We are always on there just sharing clips of music and chatting with our listeners. So please give us a shout out.

Send us some song suggestions, things that you've been listening to lately and enjoying. Send us a tweet. You can also check out our website, No Filler Podcast.com. We've got all our show notes on there for every episode. You can play our episodes directly from the website. And that's that. We are going to close us out with a song from a post-rock group called The List Exists. This was a band that the Arms and Sleepers Boys was a part of before they started Arms and Sleepers.

I hope it's good, dude, because I haven't listened to it yet. It's going to be a first for both of us. It might be garbage. We'll see. Yeah. We're going to roll the dice here. We're going to see what happens here when we push play. It could be trash.

It could be trash. It's hard to find stuff on this band, but I found a compilation record from Acne Records, which was the record label that they were on. So there's one song on here from them. We're going to close us out with this. The song is called Film Noir Love Story. And that's going to do it for us today. Thank you, as always, for listening.

My name's Quentin. My name is Travis. y'all take care