Category: Trip Hop

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.

junction system

a weirder, purposefully contrarian take on materia system that maybe overthought being “different” a little too hard. you have to read “junction system” in thorhighheels’s voice.

another work music playlist with the 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). except this time sometimes people are singing or it’s a godspeed you! black emperor song that’s approximately 4 days long.

i’ve only played some of final fantasy viii so sorry if i left out A Banger but i sure as shit scoured spotify for an appropriate cover of the triple triad music because i at least knew that much.

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.

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.

film noir detective pikachu

The longer and nerdier version of Dark Alley Jazz. We like short tightly edited things over here at trash garbage, but the room we found for an exception this time was, apparently, what if Detective Pikachu just really leaned into it. (I love Detective Pikachu.)

This is exactly what it looks like. Just shy of five hours of smoldering, dangerous, moody jazz, weaving video game music covers in with “real” jazz from the staples like Miles Davis and the new groundbreakers like Nubya Garcia. Put it on around your extended family and trick them into thinking you’re sophisticated.

a sunday morning where you wake up and it’s raining

gentle jazz and jazz-like things. jazz like [you know what jazz is] [insofar as anyone knows what jazz is]. jazz-like things like trip hop, lo-fi hip-hop beats to relax/study to, the last david bowie album, and whatever the hell pyramid song is.

honestly this one is pretty self-explanatory however you can listen to it when it’s not raining if you would like

Animal Crackers and Bodega Coffee

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:

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.