I've been interested in music for about as far back as I can remember, but I play mostly for my own enjoyment these days. In the interest of preserving pseudonymity, I'm not linking to my past music projects; those are all well over a decade old at this point anyway. My current project is mumble and sigh.
Other peoples' music
I don't believe in "better" or "worse" music, exactly; I think it's reasonable to consider your own experience of the music, along with the impacts of and values embodied by the people behind the music, by its production and distribution model, and by the music itself. I don't think it's reasonable to try to make some kind of objective measure by which to judge music's quality, so I try to avoid statements that might seem to enforce that sort of idea. These projects are ones I enjoy or have enjoyed; I make no statement regarding whether they're "good" or "bad."
As my own experience of music projects, as I suspect is usual, is inextricable from the contexts and relationships through which I experienced them, I've tried to include that information in my descriptions below.
Now
Here are some of the bands and artists I enjoy listening to these days. I've tried to put what I imagine are the less well-known projects first, as they could do with the extra exposure. I'll add to it as I remember to.
tymkrs: Field recordings and chiptunes. Introduced to this artist via the linked album, The Great Off and On Again, via Gemini.
Sleeping Witch and Saturn: Indie, new wave, garage rock. Reminds me in turns of Talking Heads and the Pixies. I began listening to them during a period where I was trying to reorient my relationship to music. I'd gotten stuck in a rut where I was only seeking out music to use as background noise to aid my focus.
Paul Baribeau: A folk artist in the same vein as Kimya Dawson. They've collaborated in the past, which is how I know about him. I began listening to him in my 20s, when I was an energetic and optimistic person. "10 Things" was emblematic of that time for me. Now it's more like "I Miss that Band."
Waveshaper: A well-known retrowave artist from Sweden. I think I started liking him mostly because of the nostalgic power of the computer booting sounds in 33Mhz, 66Mhz, and 100Mhz. An artist whose music has reliably helped me focus many evenings these recent years.
Levellers: A folk rock band with a self-described "left-wing view of politics." Their songs generally express socialist and anarcho-primitivist themes. A friend of mine introduced me to their music in college via the track "What a Beautiful Day," which immediately became part of my heavily played "sunny days" playlist.
Kimya Dawson: A folk artist with some good songs about addiction and recovery, about all the assorted bullshit that comes with living under capitalism, about hope for somehow making better future, and about the despair that comes with seeing how awfully things are going. Popularized by the Juno soundtrack. Found her music in my 20s as I was peeling back years of religious and political indoctrination and realigning my explicit beliefs with my actual moral sense. I'm not sure exactly how to describe how their music aligned with that experience without sounding reductive, so I'll just say it did and leave it there. Their music has grown with me. I appreciate the roughness of it as encouragement for everyone to share their scrappy fiddles, as Lu Wilson puts it.
I've also begun listening to MiniDiscs from Japan. It's a fun way to expose myself to unfamiliar music curated by other human beings for their own consumption, like a sort of musical candidness.
Past
I want to eventually list all the projects that I've enjoyed enough to recognize and remember their names, but I've not got the time to begin this section this evening, so watch that RSS feed if you want to see that kind of silliness.