Anyone who’s made a playlist (or, if you’re old school, a mixtape) knows there’s an art to it. Curation and sequencing is everything. For Rob in High Fidelity, “you gotta kick it off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you gotta take it up a notch. But you don’t want to blow your wad, so then you’ve gotta cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules.” The folks at Tiny Mix Tapes were masters of the art as well; for the “The Automatic Mix Tapes Generator,” the blog’s writers put together playlists from prompts submitted by readers, like “It is raining for the whole day” or “I’m gay, and no one knows, and I’ve been in love with one of my closest friends for years.” One writer gave some of her rules to Esquire in 2007: some I like are “Avoid Obscurity for Obscurity’s Sake,” “Themes Are Fun; Kitsch Is Bad,” and “Happy Doesn’t Have to Equal Fast.”
I have two broad rules: it has to have a Seamless Flow track to track, and it has to Go Somewhere, i.e. start in one place and go somewhere else by the end. This playlist goes from a bright summer evening to a cool summer night.
- “Tudo O Que Você Podia Ser” – Milton Nascimento & Lô Borges, Clube da Esquina
- “Ce matin-là (From “L’uomo in più”)” – Air, Moon Safari
- “Wetlands” – Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, EARS
- “Moonshake” – CAN, Future Days
- “The Flower Called Nowhere” – Stereolab, Dots and Loops
- “Walking and Falling” – Laurie Anderson, Big Science
- “New Grass” – Talk Talk, Laughing Stock
- “Possibly Maybe” – Björk, Post
- “Night Falls on Hoboken” – Yo La Tengo, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
I also like my playlists to feel personal and hand-crafted—as opposed to the contextless, sanitized feel of playlists only made to satisfy a desire for a certain ~vibe~ of background music. I.e. Spotify’s “Get Turnt” (presented by Sprite®) or Amazon Music’s “Acoustic Chill Radio Station.” There’s nothing wrong with wanting uncontroversial background music—I make playlists purely for ambience all the time—but the more playlists like these (or algorithmically generated personal mixes, which essentially function as music recommendation echo chambers) become our primary mode of musical discovery, the more music as a culture and art form will become stale and risk-averse. I want to cultivate smaller, more organic modes of listening—modes that encourage authentic community-building and the distribution of compelling, original music, music which may or may not have a place on a playlist like “Get Turnt” or “Acoustic Chill.” Even when I’m just looking for a ~vibe~ to put on in the background, I would rather have a playlist made by a friend than a streaming platform’s attempt to appeal to the preferences of millions of people.
The songs on this playlist are not by any means difficult to find, but they all found a place here through my personal listening. I pull tracks from artists and/or albums I love (or from artists/albums I want to explore further) and try to avoid generic filler. My discovery of these artists/albums is not always through what I might call an “organic” mode of listening (I found the Air album Moon Safari through YouTube Music’s “An All-Night Smoke,” one of the few streaming platform playlists I genuinely like), but I make no claims to purity in my musical exploration. All I wish to say is that over time, I’ve developed a personal love of all of the music on this playlist, and that personal love is what I want to share with others—not just the songs and their vibe.
Image: Album art for Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s EARS, Salihah Moore, 2016.