Joe.Blog

Very proud to present SydneyMusic.net's selection of 30 locally-produced favourites from the year of 2023.

What an incredible city.

Playlist available on Apple Music, Spotify and TIDAL.

We did a 7 hour family holiday trip in a car without Bluetooth. Fortunately I’ve been preparing for this moment for my entire adult life, and here’s what I curated.

Funnest road trip in a long time!

What music is at risk of disappearing from memory due to the lack of any kind of permanent/physical artefact?

• Turnstile + Speed @ Enmore Theatre - by far the better of the two nights

• Cornelius + Shintaro Sakamoto + Honey 2 Honey @ The Forum, Melbourne

• Dust @ Enmore Theatre supporting Slowdive - what a moment

• The show where DZ Deathrays saw Doctor Robot for the first time (special mention to Tom Adamson also) @ The Lord Gladstone - or - Doctor Robot opening a free front bar show opening for DZ Deathrays' album launch @ Crowbar some time shortly afterwards

• Too Birds + Bayang (the Bushranger) absolutely torching the pop-up space in Martin Place @ SydFest 2023

• Believe debut show which absolutely blew my mind, what a privilege to have Laurence Pike and co in this city @ Church St Studios

• Blue Void ft. Marcus Whale and Jacques Emery @ Shades ... that's so Blue Void

• Collarbones + Bract x Bayang + California Girls @ Marrickville Bowlo - iconic, and a fitting farewell to a pivotal part of 2010s Sydney (also shoutout to Black Vanilla / BV at a creative space in an empty office building floor in Mascot, for the nostalgia)

• Feels Like Floating x Leaving Records' Listen To Music Outside In The Daylight Under A Tree ft. huge number of artists @ Elysian Park in LA

• Tangents + Microfiche @ 5 Eliza - pin drop. gorgeous.

• Kelela @ Metro Theatre - I think about this show a lot

• Bluetung + ilex @ Shades - sad that Mitch has returned to the south but it was wonderful having him as a local for a while and this show was a real highlight

Notable mentions to (no particular order) Loose Fit, Carnations, Perfect Actress, Potential, Bract, Sam Windley, Bridge Dog, Pleasure, LILPIXIE, Terrificus, Shady Nasty and Mannequin Radio who all played many phenomenal shows this year and that I take great joy in seeing every time

Every time I load SydneyMusic.net I get a small rush of glee, because it's *so* *fucking* *fast*.

That's not because of anything particularly special - it's about what it doesn't have: the website is designed to ship with zero JavaScript rendering in the client. It's completely static, generated at build, and any content change trigger a build.

Static Site Generation isn't super novel, but people typically use it alongside megabytes of front-end code. SydneyMusic doesn't have any of that: in fact it only has two lines of JavaScript. And they're not minified!

SydneyMusic.net is so much simpler than the gigantic, complex, dependency-laden monstrosities that are so common in today's constantly evolving technology world.

It also makes ecological sense: the environmental footprint can easily be made close to irrelevant because of its lack of "grind" in terms of compute. No ad tech, no data platforms, no analytics platforms, no grossly inefficient chatty REST calls chirping away in the background.

The maximum amount of traffic required for the audience we need to service (the population of Sydney), could probably be hosting on extremely minimal equipment, both in terms of computing and power requirements.

It's so elegant. I love it.

With that said, it needs to be acknowledged that SMn is an incredibly simple product by design - simplicity is a core principle of the project. A lot of products require more complexity (or do they?), but nonetheless I think this comparatively extreme example points towards the impact and effectiveness of the internet at its most elemental: HTML and CSS. And hyperlinks. (And yes, no algorithms)

Do we need to start thinking about how our engineering impacts the planet? I think so. In a cloud-native world we can call a single API and have an eye-watering amount of CPU (and GPU...) power provisioned within seconds. The minerals, metals and other natural resources that feed the cloud of today is abstracted behind elegant, simple, automatable code. We don't actually "feel" how much power our code demands.

In corporate environments, our cloud bills now run into the millions. And they're only increasing (and will accelerate with AI).

I fear we've got sloppy. A casual "npm install" on a boilerplate project, a keystroke or two, and suddenly you've got 100 dependencies. Have you profiled how much data a single webpage request pulls these days? Websites of today are optimised for speed, but not for efficiency.

For example: why are Electron projects so fucking slow? Why do we need supercomputers to use chat apps and talk to our friends? Could we save the planet by using less computing power?

I really, really think so. I strongly commend giving it a moment or two's thought.