"Ambient music should accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." āĀ Brian Eno Christmas falls on a Monday this year, which means many of us have had to put in a full work week. At approximately 5pm today, we'll suddenly need to turn on our holiday brain ā RELAX! we'll scream at ourselves. What better to induce a Xanax-like state of absent-minded ā yet still holiday-related āĀ bliss than corporate muzak? Whatever holiday-related ambience you're trying to cultivate or salvage, this may just be the absolutely perfect soundtrack ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQKlEkKXBzQ
Forget lofi beats. This album featuring artists like Enya is the perfect chill music to work to. The old commercial with the artistsā names scrolling up the screen really takes me back.
(Yes, it's finally time. After 10+ years of on-and-off use, I finally left for good a few weeks ago and am here to evangelize. We need you thinking healthily. Besides, this website exists now!) ... I get it, it used to be fun. I was there for over ten years until recently. We used to get a dish of the hottest Conversation from the most in-the-know and influential writers, thinkers, and critics. But Iām telling you that Elā¢n has won āĀ X.com is markedly different from Twitter; that place is gone forever and this new Thing is changing you along with it and you need to GTFO of there right now. The default tone of ādiscourseā on X.com has necrotized into a haughty, patronizing, and unbearable mode of unilateral Quote Tweets delivered via the For You feed ā they really should just call it your trough. You inject this slop straight into your bloodstream (because it's what you've always done); it then metastasizes and destroys your very concept of what it means to engage critically with the world. You think you know more because you're seeing more words about more things from more people that write more words about more things but really you're just getting angrier, you're just getting more used to pithy dunks and reductionism, you're just scrolling more, you're getting pumped up full of hot air and floating away from anything of real-world consequence ... rhetoric may be dead but your critical heart doesn't have to die with it. Please leave the site. Itās no longer worth your time and you will be shocked how much more clearly you will think about the same things. After all, you care about them, donāt you? Itās not like youāll stop thinking about them.
about a year ago a friend of mine was going around asking people what they felt to be the "most romantic" song, and this was my gut response. There's just something so sweet about the scene at play here... nothing dramatic is happening, it's just a moment of stillness (thru movement?) in a relationship āĀ maybe it's even just a friendship āĀ that defines the baseline of what romance at its best should feel like. I find Arthur's good at that
"So how did we get here? How did shoegaze, a genre short on hooks, memorable riffs, and magnetic personalities, thatās carried on as a niche strain of indie music since the initial wave of āgazers receded from the limelight in the mid-ā90s, suddenly become a defining sound for Gen-Z rock fans?" Important and fascinating cover of a very real phenomenon. Part of what I found most fascinating is the compositional aspects of this new wave, which sees The Kids employing recording techniques more typically associated with pop songwriting āĀ toplining to a "band" track created by a separate producer. https://www.stereogum.com/2245469/tiktok-has-made-shoegaze-bigger-than-ever/columns/sounding-board