How to find good music — and more

There’s a cool little app that I’m increasingly a fan of. It’s also made by one of the more interesting people I’ve ever run across.

First off — the app. It’s for music. It’s called disco, and you can find it disco.grex.nyc. Here’s how it works:

1. Go to disco.grex.nyc, and sign up through your Spotify account.
2. Every week, on Spotify, you’ll get a playlist of someone’s favorite music.
3. Every week, on Spotify, someone else will get a playlist of *your* favorite music.

That’s it.

Greg, the man who built it, has a fascinating story.

He was one of the 14 people working at Instagram when it was acquired by Facebook. He was the only person who quit rather than work at Facebook. Instead, he relocated to New York.

Since then, he’s been building computerish art projects. Disco is one example, but there are a ton more.

When we met, he was about to publish Breaking The News, which was a series of three different ways to explore the audio of 5-minute NPR news updates in a fun and strange fashion. My favorite, “Don’t Play With Your News”, allows you to “refrigerator magnet” different words said by NPR hosts, and construct a sentence you can hear out loud. The NPR “studio voice” is so flat and stylized that different newscasters, speaking in different decades, can still have their bits of words glommed together to create something new. It’s fascinating.

He’s worked on many projects since. My favorite has been The Questions Game, where couples are sent a new set of three questions every week to try to answer together and bond. Kind of an extension of the famous 36 questions that might have lead you to becoming a couple in the first place. My partner and I used that to great effect while dating long-distance.

Greg is cool. He’s a living example that you can break away from bigCorp and use computers for art instead of commerce. That you can step off the treadmill but still be technical. And he keeps giving us gifts along the way.

In conclusion — sign up for Disco. I can’t wait to expand my musical horizons through getting a taste of yours.

(Adapted from this Facebook post)