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.
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)
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
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.
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.
I’ve been in a perpetual process of self-discovery for about the last decade. I sat in a course I was taking at the time in college, reading an article about the experience of transgender and nonbinary people in Japan, and at that moment something clicked in my head, and I’ve spent the better part of 10 years trying to deny it with various success.
And if you have ever tried to do coursework while also dealing with the revelation that you are likely not the gender you were assigned at birth, it is not easy!
I’ve never been a particularly self-aware person, and so my feelings about anything about myself have been hard to say so far, making this a weird and hard post to write. I’ve been on a journey of self-discovery lately, and like most of the things in my life it’s led me precisely nowhere.
Okay, that’s not necessarily true. It’s led me somewhere, which is a place I didn’t really think I’d be at and, if I’m being honest, which I’m being with strangers on the internet for some reason, it’s a particularly scary one. I don’t like existing in a way where I stand out, I don’t like existing in a way where I feel the need to explain myself. I am nervous just writing this blog post knowing that someone could, with knowledge of my partner in playlists here, pretty easily determine who I am in Real Lifeâ„¢. I don’t like this because it feels like, in a world where most people have the answers to these questions, I still don’t, and even if I do have those answers, the reality is one that opens me up to a life of rejection, hate, and struggle.
But the thought of living a life as a lie is harder one, and the thought that maybe if things are kinda tough for me, they might be easier for someone else like me one day is certainly a nice one.
I don’t have the answers yet. But I feel like I’m getting closer.
Anyways, here is Gender Euphoria, a playlist I made for the moments where I can see a future where I’m comfortable looking in the mirror. They’re still pretty rare, but they feel wonderful when they happen, and I want to share that with you all. This is actually an extremely personal playlist as it’s one that’s sat on my own spotify account for a long time (with some exceptions. My personal one has “Man, I Feel Like a Woman” by Shania Twain on it, and I was NOT going to subject you all to that). But with the one day my cloaking field deactivates being tomorrow [ed. note after checking the date and doubling checking how long this draft has been in my inbox: whoops], I wanted to share with you all a playlist that imagines a slightly better tomorrow, and to share with everyone out there feeling a similar way a moment in time where maybe things feel a little better.
Some of these songs are a little less than euphoric but part of my specific euphoria is imagining a world where I feel like celebrating my journey so here we are.
Also, this playlist currently has the second most Carly Rae Jepsen of any Trash Garbage playlist and if you are wondering why, I have prepared a helpful guide:
Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation depicts a character who decides what she really needs, at the deepest levels in her soul of souls, is to just take a nap for a year. Her early attempts at the medication experiments required to do so leave her in intermittent and disorienting states of consciousness, begrudgingly awake, waiting for sleep to return in an emotional cocoon of old movies, animal crackers, and, paradoxically, shitty coffee from the bodega downstairs. It’s a hell of a mood. I truly can’t decide if I’ve had afternoons that felt more like this in the office before the pandemic or working from home during it. (It is not after the pandemic. It is still a pandemic.) (I sort of assume that sentence will always be accurate. It will never not be the pandemic now.)
A hazy playlist blend of work music, sometimes instrumental, sometimes incomprehensible. Ranges from the experimental free jazz of Harriet Tubman to the experimental noise pop of Sleigh Bells. Ranges from the soothing wisps of Grizzly Bear to soothing shoegaze of Broken Social Scene. There are two Grimes songs, and I’m sorry.
A playlist for this vibe:
I literally want nothing more than to sit in a diner and be drinking endless burnt coffee
In the early 2000s, there was this feeling – which has been well documented by many peoplemuch smarter than me – that the technological changes of the 90s would result in us all rapidly ascending into some sort of world slightly better than our own. (ed. note: hilarious)
This also informed a visual and audio aesthetic that particularly permeated games and tech ads of the time, of which (at the risk of sounding like an Ernest Cline protagonist) I was a voracious consumer. Once you’ve played as much beatmania IIDX as I have, there’s a certain kind of sound that just feels instantly comfy and familiar. Luckily, because it’s 2021, there are plenty of people who’ve grown up in the exact same boat as me, except they’re also musically gifted.
These songs are reminiscent of this time, this feeling, and this pre-rapid ascendance. Enjoy our slightly better world!
Matthew and I probably first seriously discussed music in the context of a series of extremely small house parties I DJed in high school. At the time I was full of adolescent rage and so mostly I played Drum and Bass, but it was an extremely cool experience that I think about recreating a lot.
I put together a fun theoretical little DJ set of the house type music from 100% Silk and Not Not Fun I’ve been listening to lately, as well as artists from the last couple of years like Anthony Naples and Octo Octa. Pretend you’re in a suburban basement rave attended in the single digits and enjoy.
