Related Recs

🤠

Moved to Nashville at age 25, sought friendship

I came out of the pandemic period with my life totally destabilized in pretty much every way it could have been and I found myself back in my hometown needing some direction or purpose to either make it work or move somewhere else. I got a music degree for undergrad so I was interested in the music business and I decided to apply for my MBA, Belmont in Nashville was the first to get back to me and with a full ride scholarship so the decision to move was pretty easy. Since moving it hasn't always been smooth sailing, and most of my hardship in moving stems from the degree to which I'm isolated from others. I think the worst thing anyone can do when moving is be alone. Obviously figure out your housing/work situation first, but then the next step is actually quite urgent: FIND COMMUNITY. Moving across the country in your 20s is something people often do alone, and if you're moving to a new city where you don't know anyone, chances are you might live alone or with roommates. But to feel truly integrated into any place you NEED multiple social support structures. You can't rely on your roommate/romantic partner to be everything for you in life if those are your closest relationships. Find people who do the things you enjoy having in life and show up to their stuff, keep showing up, meet people, do things with those people outside of where you met them, build that web of connections and support. Community can be based around hobbies, political ideologies, spirituality, special interests, creative expression, physical activity, honestly it's probably best to have a community for as many of these as possible if you can. In this capitalist hellworld it's so easy to be atomized and find yourself isolated by the very routines and habits that are required to achieve baseline survival, so it's crucial to act in opposition to these forces whenever possible. Do the things you care about with the people who you will come to care about and then you will have built a home for yourself no matter where you live.

@royallmonarch

Feb 9, 2025

🍎

take the INITIATIVE

As someone who’s moved to 5 different cities as an adult, go out and do things that sounds cool! A few tips that have steadied me in NYC and other moves: - the friends you know already have their lives in place. It doesn’t mean they don’t want to hang, it just means they shouldn’t be your life line to events and socialization - if you work a computer job, volunteer! NYC has so many cool volunteer opportunities. HousingWorks Bookstore and Cafe is mostly run by volunteers. You’ll meet people with similar interests and have a shared obligation. Ever felt like it’s hard to make friends outside work/school? Volunteering is a great hack for adults - have a hobby you can do in public - even if it’s just reading a book. similar to my rec on how to go to bars alone, it’s going to help you feel like you belong in a space rather than waiting for things to come to you - set a budget. the housing market sucks, you may spend half your pay check on rent. Know what you want to spend that fun money on and those budget lines you’re trying to hold tight

@vin

Feb 21, 2024

🫂

Continuity

First off, ditch the misogynistic crowd like the plague (I’m sure you already know this!). Secondly, every pre-existing friendship group feels out of reach until you become part of it. People naturally will gravitate towards people they’ve known longer and are close with. The only way to become more part of a group is to be with them more. This is true of any friendship or friendship group. The more you show up to it, the more it becomes a solid friendship. When you find a person or a group you get on with, keep meeting up with them. Don’t be embarrassed to ask, everyone was new once! And sometimes you don’t even have to ask, if there’s a specific event they always attend, become a regular, just hang out! Friendship doesn’t just happen like we often think it does, it requires being in the same places, and putting in the same effort repeatedly. friendship seemed easier at school, but that’s because you were in the same place with the same people everyday. Obviously keep an eye out for people or groups who are clearly just not wanting to reciprocate that energy and look for people who are open to it! I struggle with this too, especially as someone who can’t get out all the time, but my most recent example is my friend Ant runs a little acoustic night every wednesday, so I’m starting to go every Wednesday to talk to him behind the bar, and to be around our mutual friends who arent necessarily my friends yet but become more so everything I’m there. royallmonarch has a great rec about community when trying to make a city a home that I’ll try to share in the comments cause it wont seem to let me do it here!

@mouse

Apr 7, 2024

Top Recs from @royallmonarch

🌊

WATCHING MOVING WATER

just sit still and listen. drink it in.

@royallmonarch

6d ago

📴

DETACH from the algo, become an active participant in your own curation, form relationships to music, track your patterns

I consume a lot of music regularly, and a huge part of keeping a fresh diet of new listens going is having enough sources of recommendations that aren’t an algorithm that either 1) reinforces your existing listening patterns, keeping you stagnant in your tastes, or 2) platforms whoever paid enough to push their product to the top, serving you something that may not inherently be of inferior quality, but may not align with your tastes, may not be exciting beyond just being a new release, and realigns your current listening habits to be more in line with what the average user on the platform is also listening to — which socially might have benefits but which creates a homogeneity of consumption that can become bland since you’re listening to something really just because it’s the next product on the assembly line to have its public moment and not because anything about the music actually captured your attention. the current landscape of streaming is designed to keep you at an all you can eat buffet where you take what’s served to you, and as a result a lot of us have forgotten how to look at a menu and order. so what does taking a more active role in your own music curation look like? for me, it’s meant not using streaming as a primary listening platform. I mostly use my local Apple Music library on my phone that I curate with the vestigial iTunes Library framework that’s still a part of Apple Music on my laptop. probably going to find an alternative soon since apple seems to be cutting integration progressively. I like this method because it forces me to choose what to sync to the limited storage space I have, forcing me to take inventory of what I actually listen to and what I can offload. the files I get are mostly from Bandcamp or Soulseek depending on whether it’s available for purchase or entirely unavailable online (as is the case for a lot of electronic music that was on vinyl only, which is where soulseek comes in clutch). I also have freedom here to change the ID3 tags to better sort and organize, rate, change track info, and track my own listening data. Bandcamp and other music purchasing platforms are great because 1) it reshapes my relationship to music away from consumerism and back towards curation. I have to pay actual money for this thing now if I want to use it, so i’m forced to consider its value (usually i’ll stream a release first to gauge my interest). 2) having to spend money helps me to course out my meals so to speak, as i’ll buy a few releases i’ve accumulated in my cart over the month and cash out on Bandcamp Friday when 100% of my money is actually getting to the artist (TOMORROW IS BANDCAMP FRIDAY BTW!!!), and between purchases I can actually chew and savor and digest my last orders, they don’t get swept up in the deluge of new releases. my plate is full until i’m done and then I order more. also for the times of the year like now when new music isn’t coming out as regularly I take time to find older music that I would normally overlook while keeping up with new drops. currently very into early 80s/late 70s music with early digital production, kinda stuff that would evolve into synthpop and dance music. so how do you know what to order? for me, I’m getting recs through trusted curation platforms. whether it’s bandcamp daily, y’all lovely folks here on PI.FYI, friends, or most importantly musicians who I follow on socials that share their tastes through posts, stories, playlists on steaming, interviews, etc. I like this last one especially because it’s kind of like a musical game of telephone. if I like an artist and they share their interests and influences it’s like every layer in this process is stretching my palate further from the sound that I was originally interested in and into a new territory that has some shared DNA but would never have been recommended to me by an algo because there’s no shared category or label between them, only the musical influence and interpretation of it made by the artist. as an example, I was a huge Skrillex stan, he signed KOAN Sound to his label, they collab with Asa who collabs with Sorrow, Sorrow takes huge influence from Burial, Burial makes some ambient adjacent stuff and takes huge influence from 90s rave music and drum and bass and 2000s rnb, now i’m listening to Brandy - All in Me, William Basinski, Aphex Twin, none on whom would get recommended by Spotify to me from Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites. LAST thing i’ll say — because in yappin about this i’m realizing how actually passionate about this subject I am: MAKE LISTS! playlists are cool, but they can flatten your music into vague categories of “vibes” and “aesthetics” and encourage picking one-off songs from artists that you never form an active audience relationship with. I make a practice of making my own year end lists of top 25 albums (plus some honorable recs and top individual songs) and keeping them in a notes doc that I regularly update and rearrange over the course of the year. this forces me to consider the actual relationship i’m forming with what i’ve ordered for myself. did I like it in the moment but it didn’t have staying power? is it slowly growing on me? it also encourages taking albums as a whole. maybe I liked one or two tracks a lot but the rest wasn't resonating. that’s ok! maybe I rank it lower but now i’ve actually taken time to consider it, it’s in my library, and maybe (quite a few cases for me) something I ranked like bottom 5 albums becomes a retroactive favorite from that year as my tastes evolve. also 25 albums to take with me from each year is really more than you'd think, i struggle sometimes to even find 25 that I formed a true connection with. I think the biggest thing the itunes era ruined that led into now is the single-ification of music, the ability to separate the hits from the deep cuts. albums are meant to be taken as a whole, and then once you've really sat with the whole you can find what actually stuck. even then I like to keep the whole around because soooo often i’ll write off a track that yeeeears later I come to love. trust the artist, they made it like they did for a reason. aaannyyyywayy TLDR: get recs organically, be more active in deciding your listening patterns, fr*cken pay artists yall, trust the artist embrace the album, really consider what you consume

@royallmonarch

Feb 29, 2024

🚲

GOING ON A SUMMER SUNSET BIKE RIDE

many treats to be had

@royallmonarch

4d ago