Dutch DJ and producer (and fan of sci-fi-centric spoonerisms) San Holo has a new album coming out on 21st May, the follow-up to Album1, his 2018 debut. The second album has the title of bb u ok? (Album2) and it runs to 20 tracks.
As part of the long set up for it, Counter Records/Ninja Tune has created a special messaging service that will generate a bespoke mood-based playlist based around how you respond to a series of questions via an online text message simulator.
The first question is “bb u ok?” (conveniently the title of the lead single from the album) and you have two emoji options to choose from – one full of love and the other sad. It then follows up by asking you what the weather is like (giving you a choice of a sun emoji or a rain cloud emoji).
From your response to that, it offers up a song clip and asks how it makes you feel. Through a series of subsequent questions (e.g. if you have checked in on a friend recently, if you’d prefer pizza to coffee, if you would rather sing or play an instrument, if you would rather party or chill) it eventually creates a playlist based on your responses, including San Holo tracks alongside other artists.
It then gives you the option to save the playlists to one of three streaming services – Apple Music, Spotify and Deezer. (As a side note, it’s nice to see artists catering for users of other services apart from The Big Two.) We got a nice 12-track compilation, called Bless Boost, with acts like Chet Porter, DROELOE, Moore Kismet and Duskus alongside a few San Holo tracks. Within a few days of launching, Ninja Tune says there were 4k+ “chats” with San and 2k+ playlist saves to Spotify.
Ninja adds that the playlist will be expanded as more tracks are released leading into the album in May. What is especially good is that the playlists are short and to the point. It is the most interesting playlist curation initiative we’ve seen since Khruangbin’s AirKhruang website back in 2018 which made a playlist that lasted as long as any hypothetical flight you picked and drew music from the countries under the flight path.
