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.
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.
songs for staring at your computer in deep focus on something you can sink your teeth into but arenât exactly enthusiastic about and you know itâs gonna take all afternoon so you need to put your headphones on and sink in
songs for maybe youâre also kinda angry or bummed out or hell even fired up you do you babe
songs to serve as a conduit for your wallowing into productivity shit yeah itâs time for the hustle grind
songs for deep dark white noise
not a mountain goats playlist, although the lyrics of âAmy AKA Spent Gladiator 1â could basically have been copy/pasted here and it would have evoked the same mood that iâm trying to capture here for this 3-hour, post-metal, dub techno, noise pop work playlist
So, my all-time favorite album is the soundtrack to SimCity 3000.
This sounds like a joke and I have no way to assure you it is not. So instead, Iâm going to talk about what I like about it and what I tried to do with this playlist. Also, I think I might talk about Trash Garbage a little, because itâs my blog and I get to put whatever I want here until Matthew removes it during copyediting.
The reason I want to talk about Trash Garbage a bit is that when I sat down to earnestly talk about why I had picked songs out for this playlist I had a fleeting thought of âwow, how unlike this blog this isâ. Which is true, but it doesnât mean that this is out of place. What I liked about Trash Garbage from the inception is that Matthew and I really never had any intention of what this should be. The bulk of our conversations about this blog essentially boil down to one of us saying âthis feels pretty Trash Garbageâ and the other going âI agree, post itâ. Itâs that sort of creative freedom thatâs actually enabled me to try doing some of this, which I would not have considered otherwise.
Bringing us back to the soundtrack to SimCity 3000, AKA my favorite album. Last year, I went through some personal hardships and needed something that didnât sound like anything else I was already listening to. I discovered this soundtrack. Iâm not really sure how; I think I had listened to other game soundtracks and this came up as related. (ed note but still fuck algorithms donât forget this.) I didnât know anything about SimCity (a thing that came up today, when I mentioned that I would post this, was Matthew saying âthe description should be like an in-game SimCity notification or something!â to which I responded âIâve never actually played SimCityâ), but somehow found myself charmed by a very optimistic and charming album full of music that I think perfectly matches the idea of what some people endeavor to achieve with ambient music, creating songs that are fundamentally interesting to focus on, but completely capable of blending into the background. I became fascinated with this album, and it started to score every workday, and then eventually started to become the soundtrack to the time I was spending at home.
But obviously at some point you just listen to an album enough that you crave a little variety, and I found myself in the strange position of wanting to listen not to the SimCity 3000 soundtrack, but to music that sounded like the SimCity 3000soundtrack. Upset I couldnât find those albums readily existing, I started to pull tracks that reminded me of it into a small playlist. Not only does this playlist contain music that simply sounds like SimCityâs soundtrack (âThe Sheriffâ, âThe Mirageâ) it also contains works that simply remind me of the plastic utopia of the Sims universe (all the James Ferraro that made it on here) and, finally, songs that the original composer, Jerry Martin, mentioned inspired him when he was composing this soundtrack (âZombieâ, âA Remark You Madeâ)
Itâs obvious that I recommend listening to the original soundtrack as well, but I also feel obligated to point out that Jerry Martin runs his own website where he occasionally makes high-quality downloads of this music available for free. So maybe check that out, if this is your kinda thing.
