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…”
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!)
Recently, Matthew asked if I was ready to do a new Trash Garbage playlist, which was a nice question of him to ask. The back half of 2021 is apparently full of ~*life changes*~ for me, and because of that I’ve been the less active half of the blog lately.
I haven’t been listening to much music lately. When Matthew asked what I’ve been listening to, I answered honestly, which was that I was mostly watching weird direct-to-video or made-for-TV documentaries about severe weather, as just some kind of background noise. I mentioned I had a playlist of these and half-jokingly suggested I run that as the next playlist, to which Matthew responded enthusiastically.
So here’s 11 documentaries from the 1970s to the early 2000s, all of which detailing some aspect of severe weather, mostly tornadoes (blame my midwestern upbringing). I have no idea if this will actually resonate with anyone, but hopefully it does, because – and I know we throw this term around loosely here – “non-spotify playlist” and “non-music playlist” are both very trash garbage. Consider this first one to be a preview/mission statement/threat of future experiments to come.