Conference of the Birds for Sept. 24, 2026

I also gather with friends to listen to music and collaboratively create a playlist on a weekly basis. My friend Joe's project Conference of the Birds started in April 2020—another pandemic project!—and I started hanging out with the group that June. Some of the people involved were volunteers at WNUR-FM in Evanston, Ill., but not everyone. Regardless, we all love music and listen pretty widely. Everyone brings a different implicit favorite or go-to genre to the turntables: world music, jazz, hip-hop, electronica, and so on.

Here's what we listened to last week. If you'd like to listen to the playlist on Spotify, you can do so.

For the collaborative listening sessions, we use a service called Hangout FM. It offers its own music discovery tools, and you can import Spotify playlists to your queue. Once people step up as DJs, the service cycles through the DJs' queues, rotating through the DJs after each song. We rearrange our queues based on what the others are playing, doing our best to follow up on, build on, or totally disrupt the flow continued by the preceding song.

Hangout FM also offers a chat function during the sessions, so we all spend the two hours catching up on each other's lives, sharing information about the musicians and recordings we're playing, and making cornball quips. There are a lot of cornball quips.

The end result is a lot of fun. And the process getting there is even more fun.

File under: Social Music.