The Thesis Project is the mother lode of beautiful music

jonahpwll

I've mentioned music from Thesis Project in various posts on this site, but it's getting to where I'm listening to so much of it, I want to give it its own thread, and start highlighting all of the gorgeous music I'm listening to.

Thesis Project is a series of collaborations between musicians often slotted under genres like ambient, minimalist, folk, and classical.  I imagine reviewers often use the word 'cinematic' to describe their music.

Many of the recordings are comprised of only 3-5 tracks, and durations clocking in around the 20 minute mark.  Some of the recordings, however, are compilations of various sorts, where an "album" might consist of four tracks of twenty minutes each and built around a certain theme.  There are also some themes built around single moments of music.  Honestly, I haven't researched this, and just going by what I've encountered so far and various emails I receive.  I am still in the early stages of discovery of Thesis Project.  What I am certain about is that this is some of the most gorgeous, and consistently compelling music I've encountered from any one single source.  It's a rare thing.  It's when you look back upon a year of Hubro Music or ECM Records releases and realize the breadth and beauty of what you've heard.

I believe the series is meant to be a vinyl-release thing.  But there are a couple CD options, and, obviously, digital files, too.

Here's a link to their Bandcamp page.  I am going to occasionally post something about a recording that I like.

https://thesisproject.bandcamp.com/

jonahpwll

Probably the best place to start is with the two compilation albums that Thesis Project released a little ways back.  They each capture one track each of the different collaborations to that point, and provide as an excellent introduction to what there is out there to find.  It's also one of the few offerings that also has a CD option (the series is meant to be a vinyl+DL thing).

Thesis Collected 01: https://thesisproject.bandcamp.com/album/thesis-collected-01

Thesis Collected 02:  https://thesisproject.bandcamp.com/album/thesis-collected-02

I know sometimes there's a hesitancy to purchase a compilation album when there's a chance you'll just wind up buying some of the music it sources from, but in this instance, it's totally worth it.  These comps really provided invaluable guidance on which projects and recordings to check out next.  Plus, I listen to these comps all the time.  So much of this Thesis Project music is beautiful and the kind of music that speaks to the spirit of playlists and mixtapes.  It's been a nice convenience to have them already mixed up like this. And they're sequenced nicely.  There's only a few spots where I was like, eh, those tracks shouldn't have been back-to-back.

This video collects snippets from four of the tracks.

-Sophie Hutchings & Julia Kent

-Aaron Martin & Tilman Robinson

-Andrew Hargreaves & Andrew Johnson

-Kyle Bobby Dunn & Anjou

rostasi

Thanks for the introduction.
My question: when you buy the downloads,
are they as poorly tagged as what they look like
when I look at their page, i.e. the artists names appearing twice?

jonahpwll

Yeah, you gotta do some cleanup work with the tagging on the compilations.  I think what happens there is that the originals have a title like this:

THESIS 11- Aaron Martin & Tilman Robinson

by Aaron Martin, Tilman Robinson

And maybe the intention was to also include the Thesis# but instead kept the artist names instead, thus accidentally duplicating them.  Not sure, really.  In the end, I would up editing the metadata to suit my own purposes, so that it would be easy to keep the music bundled in the way most suitable to my playlists, etc, so that the comps didn't get mixed in with the original albums.  Or something like that.  Because of my site and the endless stream of digital promos I receive, it's difficult to keep separate the different ways I add/edit metadata from downloaded albums, and why I did the things I did.