Category: Deep House

Focus

Finally, Sammie’s back with a new playlist. Except the playlist isn’t new at all! It’s very old, actually. Sammie’s back with a new very old playlist, finally.

This playlist predates Trash Garbage. In fact, Sammie sharing it with Matthew is what spawned the earliest conversations of “what if we had a blog that just published the kind of playlists we wanted but couldn’t ever find.” How could we, Bloggers, keep you from this important Trash Garbage Lore?

This 5-hour playlist has gotten Sammie through many a workday and many a work project. It’s ambient electronic, with almost no vocals to speak of, but just enough light percussion to keep your brain engaged. The songs were chosen for the playlist by queuing up a bunch of albums and then, if I was able to work through a period of time, I picked a couple of the most pleasing to keep as future background noise. Hopefully it helps you focus like it has helped me.

extremely cursed speedrun energy

hello friendos time for cozy strem! 😀

this is a loud, noisy, possibly too distracting to be a work music playlist work music playlist. like you need to have more focus today than you’d get from pulling up youtube, but you also don’t exactly need to tackle new problems for that matter. the nightmare youngest sibling of agdqlike and I Hide Down In My Corner Because I Like My Corner. the playlist that made me add hyperpop and drone to the categories list. the playlist version of a speedrun of metroid prime that you immediately had to hit pause on because you got too busy and then had three cups of coffee. a day where you feel like you’re drowning in email and the only way out is through and you need to be enveloped in music mirroring this frenzy and the frenzy may or may not be real. is the game cursed is the speedrun cursed are you cursed these are not the important questions just vibe for a bit.

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)

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.

agdqlike

seeking to fill the void left in the wake of another completed SGDQ? great news: trash garbage is here to provide! this one is a semi-high-energy background noise featuring words that don’t make much sense, just like GDQ speedruns.

this is the more chaotic sister playlist of our twitch streams playlist. a similar concept of work music characterized by the presence of human voices throughout (but not vocals, mostly), but rowdier and less polished. if i can’t really get into twitch streams is the analogue of half-watching a stranger play video games, agdqlike is the analogue of half-watching a crowd watch a stranger play video games. it’s not a video game music playlist, that shit’d be unlistenable.

materia system

Full disclosure I know nothing about Final Fantasy.

Materia System: The Trash Garbage Playlist, serves a multifaceted, possibly contradictory purpose of grounding you (it is gentle, and all songs prominently feature strings) while enabling dissociation (it weaves in songs from video game or movie soundtracks, indulging an escapist mood in a work playlist that knows you’d rather not think about work).

Materia System: The Character Growth System Featured in Final Fantasy VII in Which Skills and Abilities Are Tied to Items Rather Than Characters, serves a multifaceted, possibly contradictory purpose of providing structure (progression is simple, you feel like a genius when you figure out complementary combinations) while enabling flexibility (materia can be swapped between characters at any point, ironically establishing that the characters in the character growth system are only of secondary importance).

This suggests the name “Materia System” is a carefully chosen name enigmatically serving as a concise, metaphorical explanation for its purpose as a playlist, but honestly I was just mildly hungover and wished I were playing Final Fantasy VII or watching a movie I’d seen a dozen times instead of working. I swear Tim Rogers wrote or uttered the phrase “the elegance of the materia system” at some point in time, but I cannot find it now that I am sharing this playlist that I arbitrarily named based on that phrase which may or may not exist lodged in my brain.

Anyway, leave a comment about how you’re mad that One-Winged Angel isn’t in this playlist or whatever.

i can’t really get into twitch streams

sounds like: chill work vibes, a lightly chatty friend you can just put in the corner of your screen and not really pay attention to, a parasocial relationship

my romantic notion of a twitch stream may be more simply just a virtual approximation of a coffee shop (remember those? oh, covid), of working or reading while surrounded by the light conversation and arbitrary behavior of strangers. it doesn’t appear that this is what twitch actually is (since in practice lots of streamers do talk “with” you, reading and reacting to the chat), but this playlist is a musical adaptation of the atmosphere i was hoping for. one of the more literal playlists, the thesis here is slower/chiller work music characterized by the presence of human voices throughout. not vocals (with one or two exceptions), but exploring other ways that voices are used as instruments and woven into music.

pairs well with work that’s going to take a minute, watching someone not totally know where they’re going in dark souls, tuesdays

Downloading GBA ROMs at 1AM on a Thursday

A playlist for when you’re in high school, it’s way after you should have already gone to sleep in the middle of the week, but you just got news that the Mother 3 fan translation patch is out. You know you don’t have time to start it, but you can make time to at least take off the shrink wrap, in a sense. You can boot it up for like thirty seconds after all this anticipation and rest in the warm welcome of its cute family sprites and reassuring, looping soundtrack.

This one is loop-heavy electronic music that gradually fades into ambient, suitable for relaxing work music or for gently nudging you to maybe just go to sleep already.