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It just rewires your brain to be a bit removed from the machine, a bit silly, taking a side-eye view of the world and your place at the fringe of productivity. I like this one from DJ Food with spliced-in bit of interviews with James.
Jan 22, 2024
Related Recs
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This piece of music is so heartbreaking in so many ways, it's like getting to know an old friend again then slowly hearing them fade into darkness.
But also listening to it while repeating the same monotonous tasks that you're forced to do daily, thinking the same thoughts, slowly wearing out your life force with every repetition? Really adds to it as an anti capitalist critique through ambient sound. stuck in traffic, doing the Big Shop, checking your emails.
Here's a good write up on William Basinski and the making of the tapes:
https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/william-basinski-september-11-disintegration-loops/
Feb 2, 2024
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this album is like adderall to me idk why but when I really need to get work done it gets me insanely focused
Jan 18, 2024
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Time is my arch nemesis. There’s all this ooga booga shit telling you that time is multidimensional, but in reality there’s a beginning and an end and it’s just one moment after another until you die. I can’t escape it, so I try my best to slow it down. One way is to play with the possibility of infinitude through music. I open Ableton, build a synth with Operator, draw out a chord, add an arpeggiator and set the style to Random Other, and press play. With eternal melodies that have no beginning or ending you can get stuck in the loop and feel the freedom of just middles.
Sep 13, 2022
Top Recs from @spkn
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Perfect for small, off-beat breaks in whatever playlist mood you're going for. The added bonus of eerie-sounding posh accents by older poets is always a treat. I recommend W.H. Auden's "The More Loving One" and anything by Virgina Woolf (OK, not a poet technically, but have you read The Waves? It's better than 80% of 'actual' poetry, really.)
Jan 22, 2024
A collection of essays about legends, real or fiction, who just couldn't be bothered to live within the matrix of their contemporary culture, actually written by someone who isn't secretly an agent for the status quo.
Jan 22, 2024
Anne Sexton is sadly, cruelly underrated. She was friends with Sylvia Plath and also chose to end her own life, so she often gets lumped into a kind of 'also ran' category of modern poetry. Like I said: a sad, cruel kind of underrated. Her 'Transformations' collection is a re-telling of classic and lesser known fairy tales with extra visceral spurts of blood, gutsy grins and verbally sweetened trauma. It's horrifying and tender, like a stranger offering you a damaged limb on the subway. (See image: a snippet from "The Maiden Without Hands".) There's an edition with a foreword by Kurt Vonnegut, but I haven't found that yet.
Feb 1, 2024