There are many modes of writing about music, though I think it’s most frequent to read something that is, broadly speaking, criticism. I’ve snuck a couple personal essays in here, and even an urbanism syllabus of sorts, but criticism is mostly what you’re getting from this newsletter. Check this out, listen to this, I liked this. This definitely goes for most of the playlists I’ve shared: I put together some songs in a way that sounds good to me, I talk about some of the things I find notable about them, and maybe the overall idea I’m getting at.
This playlist fought me. I put the first songs on it last November, and have slowly dribbled more on there, changing up the sequencing, taking songs out, and honestly I still don’t quite feel like I got at what I was going for. After all that I’m not even sure I can work up a few hundred words on what it’s “about”, the playlist is the criticism. These songs are next to each other, they fit together in my head. I can’t figure out the exact throughline here, I can only gesture at certain features, but if you just listen, this song and then the next and the next, maybe a light will go on.
It seems to have something to do with the human voice, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to put Julianna Barwick on there, or something from Medulla by Björk, even though that is where my mind goes when I think of people really working with the possibilities of voice. There is some kinship with the hymns playlist I made a couple years back, though there’s only one artist in common between the two, and I specifically mentioned they were an awkward fit for the other one. This time I would say Yves Tumor is the odd one out, somewhat paradoxically by being more straightforward than anything else here. Spotify has a playlist called Virtual Reality that seems to be just one room over, where people are a little more interested in dancing, but several of the songs here have some sort of pulse, so it’s not that far removed.
Maybe it would help to at least point out the nucleus of the thing, the first songs that made me think there was something to be explored between them. K Á R Y Y N and Aphir both have this soundscape/spoken word thing going on, and both have descriptions on Spotify that sound like “artist statements”, art school shit. Music to be seen live in a space with seating and atypical projection equipment. It’s experimental in a particular way, not confrontational exactly, a détournement of more mainstream forms.
Not everyone on here has that same vibe, but there is this shared sense of theoretical play that runs through a lot of the songs. Listen to what you can do with a little thought. I don’t know, like I said, I’m having a hard time pinning down what’s happening here. Maybe you’ll have better luck.
Track listing
“Jerusalem”, NYX and Gazelle Twin, Deep England
“GOLDWING”, Billie Eilish, Happier Than Ever
“Lifetime”, Yves Tumor, Safe in the Hands of Love
“Reverie”, Arca, Arca
“Cradle - Patience Rework”, Lyra Pramuk and Ben Frost, Delta
“CYTOKINESIS”, K Á R Y Y N, The Quanta Series
“Innate Abstraction”, Cruel Diagonals, Disambiguation
“Detransitioning”, Uboa, The Origin of My Depression
“Allay”, Katie Gately, Loom
“Life Like”, Aphir and Alicia Sparkles, Dyscircadian
“Nitetime rainbows”, A Sunny Day in Glasgow, Ashes Grammar