Finding Forgotten Music
For the past few days, I’ve been trying to remember the name of a particular artist that I’ve forgotten.
I knew what the music sounded like: chill, subtle piano, on the melancholy side, with occasional strings, winds, and nature sounds; it was the kind of music that makes the perfect late-afternoon workday soundtrack. I even knew what the album cover looked like: it had trees on it. I wasn’t sure what kind of trees they were, but I remembered it was a black and white photo, and it was quite dark, as if taken with the flash on in the middle of the night.
I also had the vague recollection that owls had something to do with it, but I wasn’t sure about that.
The music was on the tip of my ear, so to speak. I would have been able to approximate some of the music on the piano if you’d asked, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember enough to search the internet and actually listen to it. Because this was an artist with pretty modest notoriety making a very niche kind of music I discovered by accident on Spotify and listened to heavily for about a week in 2017, it would be difficult to find it by a simple Google search. To further complicate things, this was an instrumental artist, so there were no lyrics I could look up for reference.
That didn’t stop me from trying:
- trees music
- trees album cover
- chill piano nature music
- chill indie ambient piano artist
- ambient piano artist trees
- nature ambient music trees
- owls trees music artist
You can imagine how successful that was.
I figured that I might have discovered them on a playlist curated by Spotify, so I went back through a few of the chill-focused playlists to which I subscribe. Turns out the one I frequented the most had been renamed, then ultimately deleted by the service. I found a user-created playlist that tried their best to replicate it, but none of the tracks or artists there jogged my memory; the same was true of the playlists Calm Before the Storm, Lush Lofi, Chill Tracks, Chill Piano, and Deep Focus.
I made a post to the subreddit r/tipofmytongue, a place specifically made for people trying to remember something they’ve forgotten. No luck there either.
Ultimately, I ended up throwing up a final prayer to Gnoosic.com, a music discovery service that recommends artists based on artists you like.
- I entered three artists and composers that sound kind of like them: Max Richter, Helios, and Library Tapes.
- The service recommended Moon Ate the Dark.
- I found their music on Spotify, which is indeed pretty similar.
- I explored their “Fans Also Like” section to find related artists.
And there they were.
The artist is named Brambles, which explains the tree association. Sure enough, it was a dark, tree-focused album cover, although maybe with fewer trees than I remembered. One of their tracks is named “Such Owls as You”, so even the owls were part of it.
So here’s the artist that took me two days of brainstorming to find. Their music is just as much of a warm blanket as I remembered.
