Category: Work Music

Weather Channel Playback for Mentally Ill Girls

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…”

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.

slice of life trashfire vibes

Hurting. Longing. Dancing to disco music.

A soundtrack to uneventful teenage days. Not the angsty side of youth, but the biding your time of youth. Music your cooler friends listen to that lodge in your head for processing, vibes from video games that incongruously feel like hanging out at the mall, something something identity. A cross between getting a ride from a friend so you don’t have to take the school bus and a Makoto Shinkai movie. Sort of works either as a playlist for work music or for waiting for everyone to arrive for book club.

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.

firefly was always bad

spicy hot jams for working on your spicy hot takes

imo this is a good one for the last hour of a workday when you’ve emotionally hit a wall and need to rally and by rally i mean reflect on the relationship between the frictions of life and the value of life

sometimes we were wrong about things

version history

[June 27, 2022] the live version on spotify has swapped in some currently available instrumental pillows tunes to try to match the OG’s energy, added a few other songs throughout to address the gap created by how that goal is not, in fact, possible. it feels fucked to act like a tv show is the bad thing in June 2022 in, say, america, but here we are. rage against the dying of the light for ~63 minutes.

[Nov 24, 2021] the OG version of this playlist with a buncha good good pillows instrumentals from FLCL, which are in a constant state of on/off spotify. can be temporarily enjoyed via youtube, until something inevitably goes wrong there too.

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)

wrapping up the work week

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.

Tsuki No Koibumi – Gender Experts 4/12 Mix

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