Monthly Timbre (November 2025)

November 30, 2025   |   by oemb1905

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Series: Monthly Timbre, November 2025
Author: Jonathan Haack, DBA Haack’s Networking
Theme: Falsetto Cream Cheese

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Overview

I honestly don’t know if I can sustain this, but I’ll certainly try. What’s that? I plan to post monthly recaps of my MusicBrainz listening history. Each month, I will share a different album collage based on the top albums from that month, along with a name/theme of the monthly vibe. This is partly because although a very early adopter of MusicBrainz, until recently, it felt like the proverbial “red-headed step child” of Last.FM. Now, to be clear, I migrated off Last.FM in 2017 and ported the entire listen history into MusicBrainz and deleted my account at that time. Neverthless, MusicBrainz lacked helpful insights, connections to other users, representations – and therefore reflections – of one’s listening history and state of mind. Well, it now has all of that … and it just improves daily it seems. At least for the first year – if I can sustain this – I plan to use the Art Creator with the monthly Album Grid generator. Alright, here’s the last month:

Examples:

• Gazebo, I Like Chopin: Midnight Cocktail
• Lime, A Brand New Day: Closer to You
• Jessie Ware, What’s Your Pleasure: Save a Kiss
• Lil’ Boosie, Incarcerated: Better Not Fight
• Sylvester, Too Hot To Sleep: Can’t You See
• Ascii.Disko, Ascii.Disko: Photos
• Mates of States, Mountaintops: Sway
• The Rentals, Q36: Conspiracy
• Miss Kittin, I Com: Dub About Me
• David Bowie, Pin Ups: Here Comes the Night
• Annie Lennox, Diva: Why
• Sly & The Family Stone: If You Want Me to Stay
• Tesla Boy, Андропов: Ватикан

Considerations

The question asks itself: what’s the theme of the last month? Well, it was a mix. The collection itself really is a reflection of the hard work of curating albums on the new Navidrome instance. What’s that? It’s a website that uses the subsonic API to share music. You can self-host with it and I run this on my own server at Brown Rice Data Center in Taos, NM. But I digress … what about the music and what that says? Right, a reflection of me curating. So, like I was saying, I’ve spent the last month using Kid3 and Picard to clean up ID3/4 tags on albums, to ensure they populate into the player. Many of the albums above are ones that were appearing as 3-5 different albums, so I had to clean their tags to get them to appear/render correctly. I won’t get into how … just Matrix me if you want to learn up on that. Other albums, for example, Gazebo and Tesla Boy, reflect me catching up on my favorite genre and artist, so those were not listens that were amplified by busy work, but rather holistic inquiries that emerged from this time period. I’m very happy to see Lime’s last proper studio album listed above. It’s actually one of their best works, but was late in the 80s and a hard market. They divorced that year lol, and never wrote together again. All the later works were Denis LePaige with other backing singers. That was a fun side-quest I got on while curating and listening, answers to questions spanning over a decade.

Rationale for Theme: Definitely a strong Italo Disco and/or Electronica vibe, but Boosie (lol), David Bowie’s cover album, and … Annie Lennox’s first solo album kind of push on that a bit. We are gonna call this vibe falsetto cream cheese.

Jonathan Haack
A Notorious Slips Production