About Musica

Musical Taste

This archive reflects an eclectic but coherent listening journey that resists easy categorization. The common thread isn't genre—it's intentionality, craft, and emotional resonance.

What you'll find here spans:

• Spiritual Jazz — Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra: music as meditation and transcendence
• 90s Alternative/Indie — Beck, Tindersticks, genre-defying experimentation with emotional depth
• Contemporary Classical & Experimental — Maxime Denuc's rave-baroque fusion, Rafael Toral's live electronics
• Baroque Pop Revival — Princess Chelsea, Lee Hazlewood influences, retro aesthetics with modern production
• R&B & African Fusion — SAULT, politically conscious music with deep roots in Black musical lineages
• Film Soundtracks — Daniel Lopatin/OPN, sonic anachronism and cinematic atmospheres
• Unconventional Pop — Billie Eilish, production-as-art, challenging mainstream expectations

The unifying principle: music that rewards deep listening. Not background noise, but active engagement with sound, context, and meaning.

Why This Project Exists

This started as a personal knowledge base—a way to capture thoughts about albums before they faded. Last.fm provides quantified data (what I listened to, when, how often), but it can't capture qualitative understanding (why it mattered, what it meant, how it connected to other music).

The goal is to bridge data and meaning:

• Last.fm tracks what I listen to → This archive explores why it matters
• Streaming gives instant access → These essays demand slow, deliberate engagement
• Algorithms recommend based on similarity → This writing finds unexpected connections

It's also an experiment in public learning. By publishing drafts alongside finished essays, the process becomes visible—not just polished outcomes, but the messy work of understanding music deeply.

Built with Claude Code

This entire site was collaboratively designed and built using Claude Code, Anthropic's agentic CLI tool for software development.

How we worked together:

• Vision → Implementation — I described the desired aesthetic (Vinyl Classic: deep black, warm gold, jazz record sleeves) and structure (Curated Portal homepage, Timeline view, Album Grid), and Claude translated that into working code
• Content Migration — Claude added frontmatter to all markdown files, extracting metadata from filenames (Artist - Album - Year - Date format) and structuring content collections
• Rapid Iteration — Real-time feedback loop: I'd say "make the homepage more magazine-style" or "add a Timeline view," and Claude would implement immediately, showing results in the dev server
• Technical Decisions — Claude recommended Astro for markdown-first content sites, configured content collections to read from existing folder structures, and implemented the Vinyl Classic color scheme with dark/light mode support
• Problem Solving — When issues arose (README.md files breaking validation, date formatting errors), Claude debugged and fixed them autonomously

The result: a fully custom, production-ready static site in a single collaborative session, going from concept to deployment-ready code.

Connect

This is a personal project, but I'm always interested in hearing from fellow music obsessives, writers, and anyone who believes in deep listening.

→ Last.fm: xcoil