firefly was always bad

spicy hot jams for working on your spicy hot takes

imo this is a good one for the last hour of a workday when you’ve emotionally hit a wall and need to rally and by rally i mean reflect on the relationship between the frictions of life and the value of life

sometimes we were wrong about things

version history

[June 27, 2022] the live version on spotify has swapped in some currently available instrumental pillows tunes to try to match the OG’s energy, added a few other songs throughout to address the gap created by how that goal is not, in fact, possible. it feels fucked to act like a tv show is the bad thing in June 2022 in, say, america, but here we are. rage against the dying of the light for ~63 minutes.

[Nov 24, 2021] the OG version of this playlist with a buncha good good pillows instrumentals from FLCL, which are in a constant state of on/off spotify. can be temporarily enjoyed via youtube, until something inevitably goes wrong there too.

high dex low int build

some work music tunes for having no attention span, not checking twitter, daydreaming of starting a new drunk no pants 1 point to intellect playthrough, not checking twitter

i started writing a Thing here about the loss of the preservation as a possibility and the complications that poses for curation but sammie suggested that most people probably just accept ephemerality as the internet so nvm this is a playlist for getting back into your groove when you’ve been distracted by something unfixable

(title is based on a joke made by Kreal on twitter that I can’t find because it’s been like 3 years anyway you should watch Kreal Tube it’s good)

a desire for a frontier space

It’s the promise of the frontier. That feeling of excitement when you see the wide world spread out around you, that desire to escape into it, to live in a space of expansiveness and freedom: this is a desire for the frontier. And the desire to live on the frontier goes hand in hand with a desire to seize a piece of it for yourself—to better your condition (as our nation once “bettered” its own condition) through territorial expansion. Open world games almost always take place in frontier spaces of one kind or another …

In the Western, writes Jane Tompkins, “the desert flatters the human figure by making it seem dominant and unique, dark against light, vertical against horizontal, solid against plane, detail against blankness.” …

The frontier is a potent dream. That’s why we keep dreaming it: in video games, in movies, in political rhetoric, in the collective unconscious of the American mind. … All progression is stasis. All expansion erodes the soul. You can ride out to the edge of the world, but to reach it is to realize that you’re trapped

Matt Margini, Red Dead Redemption (Boss Fight Books, 2020)

I barely remember why I highlighted this excerpt from a book I read about a game I’ve never played that so stuck with me that I curated a playlist around a quote from it that, as it turns out, I pulled together from different parts of it. Maybe it’s because I read this book during the early days of the pandemic, in an apartment I had just moved into and instantly could not leave, feeling a variety of displacements and thus drawn towards a disassembling of a fantasy, of the world, of cultural construction, of agency, particularly to a fantasy about going somewhere.

Revisiting my highlights on my Kindle now, I am drawn to 1) what a poorly designed device this thing is, speaking about the stasis of progress, this ubiquitously dominant eReader that I keep hitting the button to bookmark a page instead of the button to pull up my highlights, and 2) another quote that seems somewhat plausibly why “a desire for a frontier space” stuck in my head as a mystery explained but not untangled, that “what makes [the cowboy] desirable is also that he doesn’t seem to desire anything—and seems, in fact, to be actively pursuing pain and discomfort … Yet he doesn’t seem encumbered by it all; just the opposite, he seems purified by it … he seems to have achieved contentment in the conditions of terminal, unending discontent.” I can imagine that, with the fallibility of memory, I conflated this quote with the first, the latter as something of a response to the former’s call.

In this stoicism that appears demanded of a frontier space, there’s something of (brace yourself) Camus’s (I’m sorry) theory of the absurd (hear me out), described in The Myth of Sisyphus (just like two more sentences I’m sorry) by observing that “The world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.” Timed rather ironically just prior to the pandemic, there was a bit of Western revival culturally that others have unpacked similarly, albeit also without evoking Camus, at least by name:

But “yeehaw” as it’s used was never meant to translate to the real world, or signal anything beyond absurdity. “Yeehaw” exists in a liminal space, bound to and beyond the divisions imagined between blue and red states. Even as cultural and social forces alternately champion plugging all the way into our AI futures or unplugging and going back to a rarefied, more “honest” way of life, most people will never have the means to actually change any aspect of their living situation. Maybe I’ll get that cat cowboy hat; maybe I won’t. But my American dream has borders, and for everyone except a select demographic in America, it always has.

Lilian Min, “What we yee about when we yeehaw”. The Outline (2019)

Despite my humblebrag that I’ve read Camus, I don’t have anything smart to say about any of this. This playlist isn’t somehow a deconstruction of the western or the American dream or colonialism. It’s merely a playlist of a specific flavor of alt country/indie folk, not exactly a subgenre of what remains one of the big “I listen to everything but” genres, but some specific sadness with a bit of grunge or blues rock somewhere in its genetics, where a country song is the body and a searing electric guitar the papercut. A desire for a frontier space formed just as much by vaguely being aware that For A Few Dollars More is a spaghetti Western as it is by the rush of rapid fire reflexes and gunshot precision required to see everything on the Valley level from Pokemon Snap (which oddly evokes a lot of moods here at Trash Garbage), the song from which, yeah, I bet a few people my age could plausibly mix up with the theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. What a fun nostalgia combo that is, the nostalgia for a childhood video game with this one specific level whose theme of the desert, of the frontier, has always widely, intrinsically asked “a nostalgia for what?”

There’s a lot of Neko Case in this playlist. There’s early Dire Straits. There are specific selections from the catalogues of Big Thief and The Mountain Goats that belong to this particular soundscape depending on what the guitars are up to. There’s one song by Jessica Lea Mayfield that I distinctly remember listening to in college catching a bus from downtown back to my dorm calling it an early night while the people I was with were on their way to another club, feeling somehow like the world was all ahead of me though this was objectively a melodramatic moment in which to think so, not the least of which because the English city of Norwich is decidedly not a frontier space. That said, a frontier space seems to be more so what we believe it has promised us.

There’s a lot of Neko Case in this playlist.

Dance Dance Revolution

Recently I have had a problem where I want to listen to all the terrible DDR music of my youth, but every playlist is literally just the licenses from the PS2 games, so instead of like… Boys, by Smile.dk, it’s like Temperature by Sean Paul, which is NOT what I’m looking for. I have now remedied the situation. For the world.

This is, perhaps obviously but we’ll get to that, a playlist of music featured on the critically acclaimed music game Dance Dance Revolution. I had pretty specific criteria for this, and I feel obligated to explain it, because hell hath no fury like a bemani nerd who feels the need to correct someone.

First, the songs present on a version of a DDR game are not consistent between versions. The Japanese versions of the game were released on PlayStation and Arcade versions initially, and the songlists between the two are largely consistent. However, America is a much different story. The song licenses that are often present on a DDR game are not present in their American PlayStation counterparts, which can result in deviation from the arcade list. If you grew up playing DDR Extreme (2002) or DDRMAX (2001) on your PS2 and at one point were delighted during a family vacation to find an arcade cabinet with a similar name, you were probably disappointed to find that none of the songs that you remembered from your PlayStation 2 version were present. Song lists on the US PlayStation 2 versions tended to be tremendously cut down because of this whole deal with the licenses. So you loaded up, excited to play UK garage legend Spin Spin Sugar (Armand’s Dark Garage Remix)* and instead found a bunch of completely unapproachable eurodance versions of 80s pop songs. Fun trick!

(Then you just played Butterfly, by Smile.dk 3 songs in a row. Don’t lie, I know that’s what you did.)

So, to finally explain what exactly is going on here, this playlist is every song from DDR 1st Mix (1998) (that’s the one just called “Dance Dance Revolution” [1998]) to DDR 8th Mix (that’s the one you likely remember as DDR Extreme [2002].) Additionally/unfortunately/capitalismly, this playlist only contains the songs available on Spotify, which means that this is missing every single Konami original song from the series, which means this is sadly not the first Trash Garbage Playlist to feature MAX 300. The final criteria for curating this playlist was an attempt to put the full-length, actual version of the song that appeared in DDR. Sometimes this is the original song, but usually this is a Eurodance cover of it. So if you remember a song that’s present on DDR (eg, “We Will Rock You”) that’s not present in this playlist, it’s likely because I could not find the version used in DDR on Spotify as of May 20, 2022.

Now we can start discussing the weird stuff. Nothing was weird up to this point. Things are about to get weird starting now.

Early versions of DDR used a numbering system where they just referred to themselves as “Nth Mix”, with occasional subtitles if there was a different version of the game (eg, 3rd Mix [1999] had 2 versions released specifically for the Korean Market, and 2nd Mix [1999] had a curious version called Substream where it could be linked with a beatmania IIDX [1999] cabinet, and beatmania and DDR players could play songs at the same time. I have always wanted to try this, somewhere, but I don’t think the stars will ever align to enable this.) Later versions of DDR would feature subtitles (DDR 6th Mix going by DDRMAX, 7th Mix going by DDRMAX2) and by the release of SuperNOVA [2006] (the sequel to DDR Extreme aka 8th Mix), they dropped the numbering scheme altogether and just referenced each game by title, which means that Dance Dance Revolution X (2008) is the 11th game in the series, bugging me to no end.

Nothing has bugged me up until this point. We are now getting to the– actually, no, the Spotify stuff bugs me. But, you know. Back to the fun.

The very specific criteria for this Trash Garbage–curated DDR playlist include, naturally, two-tone legends The Specials, who were inexplicably selected for the first version of Dance Dance Revolution with the song “Little Bitch”. Interestingly, this was one of the more difficult songs in the game at the time of release. Pick it up!

It’s also worth mentioning that most of the licenses that came on the DDR arcade version were from a series of compilation albums known as Dancemania, a Japan-only release that featured eurodance or eurobeat remixes of popular songs. This should further explain why most of this was not available in non-Japanese Spotify regions until recently. Even still, most of this music is not present as part of Dancemania compilations, but instead manifests on this streaming site in a way that I find endlessly amusing: because most of these songs are well known pop songs covered in a eurodance style that’s about 130 beats per minute, it makes them absolute perfect fodder to run a spin class or similar group exercise class to, which means that an overwhelming number of these are attributed to albums like “ULTIMATE WORKOUT JAMS TO SWEAT TO 54”.

I should also mention that because this is only the arcade version’s licenses, none of the PS2 songs appear here, which means that I was surprised a couple times with “I didn’t know that made it to the arcade version.” Chiefly surprising among these was Duran Duran’s “The Reflex”.

In conclusion, I do not endorse capitalism, even though in a way capitalism is what made the curation nightmare that is this playlist fun. You’re having fun, right?

wrapping up the work week

the other end of checking your work email on monday morning. a lot of genres, but it’s all friday. less of a getting coffee and drilling down to work playlist and more of a soaking up the morning light and the last cup of coffee of the work week playlist. yesterday was thursday. today, it is friday.

Tsuki No Koibumi – Gender Experts 4/12 Mix

we got a brand new person with a brand new thing over here! Our friend Aster is back doing live DJ sets (in front of people!) and Sammie and Matthew decided these are pretty trash garbage, so when Aster’s particularly pleased with how these sets turned out, we’re posting them here. For you!

now that we’ve introduced this brand new person, the rest of this copy will be in our usual vague first-person. don’t get confused.


i had wanted to spend 2020 really investing in music after getting my student loans paid off and instead the pandemic hit and music without a live context felt so pointless. first time djing in front of people since before the pandemic, so this mix payed a lot of homage to porter robinson’s secret sky 2020 mix; out of all of the virtual events that year, i had that one on repeat quite a lot. that mix definitely helped to pull me back from that mindset.

WHAT: chill trance anime lo-fi breakbeats to text your crush to
WHEN: april 12, 2022
WHERE: recorded at metro in brooklyn
WHY: TO TEXT YOUR CRUSH

DRONEBALL

every year, I tell myself, ok, this is the year I get into baseball again. sometimes I just forget. sometimes a pandemic happens. sometimes there’s a shutdown because you can’t just enjoy baseball, some capitalists have to fuck everyone’s day up to make line go up.

which is to say the origin of this playlist was in the early, banana bread era of the pandemic, working from home unable to and/or too sad to focus, simultaneously putting on a youtube playlist of someone playing a baseball video game on very low volume and one of the 24/7 lo-fi chillhop studybeats playlists at the same time. I also lit a candle. it was a great vibe. it was an oddly comforting combination that I’ve occasionally revisited and decided, ok, time for a multimedia Trash Garbage project. this is DRONEBALL.

this playlist is Fine on its own, but ideally you’d pair it with a baseball game in a small window in the corner of your second monitor. the game can be real, live, archival, video game footage, whatever, the game doesn’t really matter much, much like the lo-fi chillhop beats. it’s an oddly coherent combination.

lo-fi chillhop beats to study slash relax to is certainly an odd duck to curate, since it’s kind of a genre that exists purely as background music for an algorithm to interchangeably endlessly compile, but also idk I’m not a classist I like some lo-fi chillhop beats to study slash relax to. this playlist is partly curated by letting this playlist run until The Algorithm took over and kept playing the same kind of interchangeable music, and occasionally I’d add a few of those that struck me as having that particular quality of being good but not “noticeable”. this playlist is also partly curated from a handful of artists I actually like! this playlist is also partly curated from trying to mostly stay clear of covers because it’s supposed to be non-distracting but yeah I figured a 3-hour playlist can have a few moments where you actually look up because something intriguing happened to happen, just like baseball itself, now thinking about it. again, it’s an oddly coherent combination. there are also a few decidedly not chillhop, higher energy, maybe actually just hip hip-influenced jazz tracks in here, because, look, everyone gets bored after a few hours of a baseball game. you have to adjust your mission statement if your work music playlist makes you start to fall asleep.

some of the playlist also comes from an Official Spotify Playlist that was at one point in time, I swear to god, incoherently titled “Lo-Fi Absentee Ballot”. it was the most Trash Garbage thing that could ever happen. sammie and I still talk about that time spotify itself out–trash garbage’d us.

you do not have to use this particular playlist of baseball games to pair with the DRONEBALL playlist, but it’s a starting point. think of it as the preset in a character creator. watch any baseball you want to. watch whatever game happens to be live and vibe. that said, as alluded to earlier, fuck the MLB, fuck capitalism, you can find streams of live baseball games. can we link to a pirate stream here? yeah why not that’s pretty trash garbage. we’re anticapitalism over here.

to reiterate, the components of this Multimedia Trash Garbage experience are:

  • this Trash Garbage–curated spotify playlist of lo-fi chillhop
  • this Trash Garbage–curated youtube playlist of baseball, set to a lower volume where you can kind of make out the chatter through the music, but the sounds of the game and the reaction of the crowd cut through (not required, can use any baseball game, doesn’t have to be a “good” one, in fact the less consequential the better)
  • there are no Trash Garbage–curated candles but if I may recommend Werther & Grey’s The Black Death, Burke & Hare Co’s Cemetery Gates, or Anecdote Candles’ Flannel & Fedoras (not required, can use any candle or no candle) (this single bullet point makes this the most ampersands to appear in a trash garbage post to date! wow!)

invoking the late-night creative golden hour

A playlist for anyone who gets their best work done around 10:30 pm, but has a day job.

Despite being wildly genre-agnostic, the vibe is pretty consistently mellow, warm, but a little melancholy throughout. All of these songs live in a world that’s mostly gone to bed for the day and has thus gotten pretty quiet. It’s not a late-night playlist that’s going to eventually lull you to sleep, but rather one that’s content to stay up with you for a little while. And if you put it on in the middle of the day, it’ll pretend it’s the nighttime with you.

HEADHEADHEADHEAD

this is a playlist of talking heads, radiohead, portishead, and blonde redhead

it is called HEADHEADHEADHEAD

obviously this started as a joke but it turned out surprisingly cohesive, even to me, who blindly thought this would probably work. it’s very moody groovy, and they all play nicely with each other (which does mean that Your favorite radiohead song probably got cut, sorry). it is by dumb necessity our longest playlist, because I decided each of them got exactly 25 songs. these are, without exaggeration, all in my top 10 favorite bands, and all of them have HEAD in their name, and I thought that was pretty trash garbage. you may not put it on shuffle.

tell us who is your favorite head in the comments.