So lately, Matthew’s been asking me what kind of playlist I want to make for the blog. And with the exception of a couple that I’ve been working on, the creative demons have not been tormenting me effectively lately. So when Matthew asked me “what have you been listening to while you’re working?” I was honest. And the end result is this, an almost several days–long playlist of footage from The Weather Channel as it existed in the 90s, with most of its commercials intact.
Unlike our previous Weather-related YouTube playlist, there’s nothing to learn or to gleam here, just one really prevalent ad for the Virginia Tourist Board that will be forever stuck in your head.
She said “come with me to Virginia, you just might fall in love…”
what’s the long-ass german word for posting something knowing i’m never gonna be famous enough to get shit for not fully researching the political opinions or actions of every single artist featured in a free jazz, jazz fusion, & avant garde jazz playlist i jokingly titled this jazz kills fascists anyway acab
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.
a frosty work music playlist for when it’s too cold to get out of bed, gently building in energy as you wake up at a rather reasonable pace, never getting too crazy.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
