Numeric Driftwood IV

"Hints of Lilac Light"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

At this point, Numeric Driftwood plays in my room nearly constantly: I turn it on shortly after dinner, and it plays until after I get out of the shower the next morning.  It soothes me to sleep at night, and greets me in the morning.  Given that I’m hearing it so often, I figured it only made sense to expand it a bit more.  So here’s a fourth volume of relaxing, sleepytime music.

This is a pretty decent volume in terms of returning artists, if I do say so myself.  Of the three artists who appeared on all three of the previous volumes, only two are back:¹ Angels of Venice and Kitaro.  AoV are here with their seventh appearance on this mix, another track off Forever After² called “Wildflowers.” While all AoV is harp-focussed (harpist Carol Tatum is the founder and only constant member, after all), this one is particularly so: the opening harp solo is about a minute-and-a-half long, backed only by subtle birdsong, and even when the other instruments come in, they’re very much in the background.  It’s a very pretty, soothing piece.  For Kitaro, for his fifth appearance here I finally stray from my favorite album of his, India, to the second album of his that I ever bought: Astral Voyage.  Well, technically, I bought them both at the same time, but it very quickly became apparent to me that India was the superior offering.  But Astral Voyage has a few gems, and “By the Seaside” is one.  As you might imagine from a song called “Seaside” on an album called Astral, this song is a strange hybrid of sitting by the ocean and flying through space, but somehow Kitaro makes it work, which is really just a testament to his fifty years’ experience.  Plus it makes a beautifully seamless transition into “Ocean and Tambura,” by second-time returning artist Anugama.  This song is just what it says on the tin: the calming sound of ocean waves, backed by the subtle strains of a tambura, which is a “drone” instrument.³  At over 8 minutes, this track isn’t as long as “Shaku Sunset” from last volume, but it’s pretty long; happily, that’s irrelevant when the point of the music is to help you drift off to sleep anyway.  

For other other returning artists, Enya and Skydance are back: we missed them last volume, but they now return to provide a welcome Celtic injection into the mainly Far Easter festivities thus far.  Both previous Enya tracks were instrumentals off my favorite album of hers, Shepherd Moons, so I thought I expand my scope a bit here as well.  “Watermark” is the title track off her sophomore album; while Watermark isn’t quite as good as Shepherd Moons, it does contain the amazing “Orinoco Flow,” as well as this pretty, slightly-longer-than-bridge-length instrumental, which flows nicely into “Wildflowers.” For Skyedance, I follow the exact same pattern: while Way Out to Hope Street will always be my favorite of theirs, their follow-up Labyrinth contains this beautiful gem “The Other Side of Sorrow,” which focusses more on Alasdair Fraser’s fiddle than Eric Rigler’s pipes.⁴

And everyone else here is fresh.  Kim Robertson is another harpist, and her music is often described as Celtic, though I find her amazing album Wood, Fire & Gold to be a bit more than that.  I can’t now remember how I discovered her, but “Anamchara” is just the most beautiful, soothing piece you can imagine, with harp backed by strings and some soft, wordless vocals.  Canadian Mychael Danna is perhaps best known as the composer for Life of Pi; with his brother Jeff (also a film and television composer), they produced a couple of albums for Hearts of Space records, and you may recall that’s the label of the show that inspired my modern mixes.⁵  To be sure, HoS is where I first heard excerpts from this album, titled A Celtic Tale: The Legend of Deirdre; “Loch Etive” is a peaceful Celtic instrumental that flows very nicely into Skyedance.

Most of the other new artists are invading from Shadowfall Equinox, most notably Black Tape for a Blue Girl (while uncharacteristically—and surprisingly, given the name—non-sombre track “With a Million Tears” is their first appearance here, they’ve appeared six times on five of the six SfE volumes) and Kevin Keller (one of the artists showcased in the Hearts of Space program Shadowfall II that directly inspired SfE, Keller’s spare piano track “The Lost Father” is just a touch melancholy, but still pretty relaxing).  Another pianist I’ve drawn from for Shadowfall Equinox⁶ is Ruben Garcia; he’s only appeared on SfE twice,⁷ but his mellow piano track “90 Degrees at 7 A.M.” works very nicely here, especially coming directly off the Keller track.  In fact, I seem to have inadvertently created a whole Shadowfall Equinox block:⁸ after the opening pair of ocean-inspired new age tracks, we go into the wind-and-birdsong backed darkwave of “With a Million Tears,” then to Rapoon,⁹ who is normally sort of ethno-ambient, but “Noord” is actually pretty darkwave itself, and thence to the pianists—the Keller is very spare, the Garcia is as well, if a bit synthy, and then on to Tim Story, with a perfect balance of piano and synth in “Scene and Artifact”¹⁰—and then circling back around to the darkwave with some Love Spirals Downwards and their very ambient “Waiting for the Sunrise,”¹¹ and finally fetching up at Julianna Barwick,¹² whose looped and overlaid wordless vocal tracks make something which is tough to categorize, but probably closest to ambient, and who here gives us “Offing,” an echoey track with some angelic voices, and that drops us right into the Celtic centerpiece of the Dannas, Skyedance, and Enya.  Quite a run!

Numeric Driftwood IV
[ Hints of Lilac Light ]

“By the Seaside” by Kitaro, off Astral Voyage
“Ocean and Tambura” by Anugama, off The Lightness of Being [Compilation]
“With a Million Tears” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off Mesmerized by the Sirens
“Noord” by Rapoon, off Cidar
“The Lost Father” by Kevin Keller, off Nocturnes
“90 Degrees at 7 A.M.” by Ruben Garcia, off I Can Feel the Heat Closing In
“Scene and Artifact” by Tim Story, off Threads
“Waiting for the Sunrise” by Love Spirals Downwards, off Idylls [Reissue]
“Offing” by Julianna Barwick, off Nepenthe
“Loch Etive” by Mychael Danna & Jeff Danna, off A Celtic Tale: The Legend of Deirdre
“The Other Side of Sorrow” by Skyedance, off Labyrinth
“Watermark” by Enya, off Watermark
“Wildflowers” by Angels of Venice, off Forever After
“A Gentle Dissolve” by Thievery Corporation, off The Cosmic Game
“Anamchara” by Kim Robertson, off Wood, Fire & Gold
“Stretch Out Your Arms” by Devics, off The Stars at Saint Andrea
“5 More Minutes” by Meaghan Smith, off The Cricket's Orchestra

Total:  17 tracks,  69:28

That only leaves us with the three moderately unexpected tracks.  Thievery Corporation have popped up all over these mixes, from Smokelit Flashback III to Zephyrous Aquamarine I with several stops in between, but you might not expect to hear their Caribbean-flavoured electroworld on a mix of sleepytime music.  And, indeed, “A Gentle Dissolve” almost didn’t make the cut here: it’s got a noticeable electronic beat and even some brass.  But, at the end of the day, the gentle, almost hypnotic synth trills and washes convinced me that it deserved its spot here, close to the closing.

And, speaking of the closing, that brings us to the two closing vocal tracks.  This is a tradition that started with Numeric Driftwood II, and I decided it worked here as well.  For the penultimate song, I chose a Devics track that was less dreampop and more slow and mellow.  (Whether you find it creepy or not probably depends on how closely you listen to the lyrics ...)  Devics of course we’ve seen on Smokelit Flashback,¹³ twice on Darkling Embrace, and once on Dreamscape Perturbation (and that ought to give some idea of where most of their music falls), but also on Shadowfall Equinox III and Porchwell Firetime I.  So “Stretch Out Your Arms” is a bit atypical, but they’re eclectic enough to make it work.

And we wrap up the festivities with normally quite upbeat Meaghan Smith, another artist who’s been all over these mixes: Salsatic Vibrato V, Moonside by Riverlight I and II, Slithy Toves I, and Sirenexiv Cola I.  The closer for her excellent album The Cricket’s Orchestra is “5 More Minutes,” a soft little ballad in which a child begs for a little more time to enjoy the evening.  It’s a beautiful closer, both on her album and on this volume, plus it provides the titles for both as well: “hints of lilac light” is one of the most poetic descriptions of a dusky, twilit sky that I think I’ve ever heard.  A really special closer for this one.

Next time, let’s return to the gaming table.

⇐ Numeric Driftwood III

Numeric Driftwood V ⇒

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1 Satori may show up again one day, but I used every track off his excellent For Relaxation, and I just haven’t gotten another of his albums yet.

2 The previous track from this album was “Starshine Lullabye” which appeared way back on volume I.

3 Other drone instruments include the bagpipes and the shawm.  Also the kazoo.

4 Honestly, if Eric is in there somewhere, I can’t really make him out.

5 And, in particular, Shadowfall Equinox.

6 And who also had a track on the aforementioned Shadowfall II.

7 Specifically, on volumes IV and V.

8 Or maybe I did it vertently and then forgot about it.

9 We first saw Rapoon, and discussed a bit about his origins, on Shadowfall Equinox IV.

10 We first met Tim on Shadowfall Equinox II and then saw him again on Shadowfall Equinox IV.

11 We first encountered LSD on Shadowfall Equinox I, but we’ve also seen them on Smokelit Flashback V, Rose-Coloured Brainpan II, and Candy Apple Shimmer.

12 We’ve actually only heard Julianna so far on Incanto Liturgica, though I’ve no doubt she’ll eventually show up on SfE.

13 Volumes IV, V, and VI.

A bit of a cliché, but true nonetheless

While I’m not in general fond of “man it sucks getting old” posts, I do have to say that, of late, I definitely have been feeling my age.  Nothing major in the health department, really ... just your standard quantity of aches and pains that inevitably come with the wearing out of joints and the brittleness of bones.  There’s nothing to be done about it, per se, but I’m not sure I really need to do anything about it.  Overall, I’m fairly lucky, so I feel a bit ungrateful whining about the advancing years.  As they say, it’s better than the alternative.  Still, ...

Getting old does kinda suck.  Sometimes.

Whither Animals?

I’ve spoken many times on this blog of my love of animals and my opinions on ”pets.” But lately I’ve started to think about a trend that is happening in our society.

When I was young, I went to countless zoos, and circuses, and animal parks, and aquariums, and marine mammal shows.  Much of what I knew and learned about animals, I learned from those experiences: sometimes directly, sometimes because I was inspired to seek out knowledge after seeing some animal or other in person.  I would never trade away those memories.

However, it’s completely fair to point out that many of the animals I took such pleasure in watching and learning about were miserable.  Today, the circuses are completely gone,^* thanks to numerous articles; marine mammal shows will soon disappear for good, thanks to documentaries such as Blackfish; and societal changes mean that even zoos are on the decline, according to many sources.  And I’m not saying any of these things are bad.  Certainly the terrible treatment of animals in circuses and marine mammals in parks such as SeaWorld makes me believe that such places do more harm than good.  I’m sure all those marshmallows we fed the hippo in Homosassa Springs weren’t very good for his digestion (although, miraculously, he appears to still be alive as I write this).  As for zoos ...

When I was young, there was a book at my grandparents’ house called How the Animals Get to the Zoo.  Published a few years before I was born, I assume it was bought for me, though I can’t remember specifically being given it as a gift.  I do remember that, even as a child, I was more horrified than fascinated at the examples given in this book, which ranged from throwing nets on zebras from a helicopter to taking ostriches down with bolas.  Also plenty of spring traps and tranquilizer darts and other very disturbing imagery.  So I am not insensitive to the idea that zoos are not always good for animals.

Still ...

My youngest child has never seen a circus, and she almost certainly never will.  She’s never seen a marine mammal show, and, while it’s possible that she might one day, it’s pretty unlikely (certainly it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll ever take her to one).  She’s been to a few zoos and aquariums, and maybe an animal park or two (or maybe not; I can’t think of a specific visit), but there’s no doubt that she has far less real-life experience of animals than I did.  Of course, there’s more instantly availble video of animals than I could have ever dreamed of as a child; YouTube alone allows me to show her any animal I happen to mention within minutes, if not seconds; if we ever idly wonder “what sounds does a <fill in animal here> make?” then it’s a simple Google search to turn up a soundfile or video that will settle the question.  But is it the same?  I can’t help but wonder.

PETA in particular is very much opposed to any sort of system where animals are kept for the entertainment of humans.  But, if humans never experience animals in any other context than as images on a screen, will they care about preserving them?  Sometimes I think that PETA is going to end up causing the eventual extinction of many species just because people won’t recognize them well enough to give a shit when they’re endangered.  There are always unintended consequences.

In fact, studying the Wikipedia page for “unintended consequnces” is quite instructive.  In China in the late 50s, sparrows were identified as pests who ate 4kg of rice grains per year—each.  So the government put sparrows in their “Four Pests” campaign, and millions of them were killed.  Of course, sparrows eat insects too.  By the 60s, “with no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned” ... and guess what locusts eat?  “The Chinese government eventually resorted to importing 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to replenish their population.” As for the “Four Pests,” sparrows were replaced with bedbugs: yet another insect that, as it turns out, the sparrows were keeping under control, until their near-extinction.

Then there’s the Great Plague of London.  “The means of transmission of the disease were not known but thinking they might be linked to the animals, the City Corporation ordered a cull of dogs and cats.  This decision may have affected the length of the epidemic since those animals could have helped keep in check the rat population carrying the fleas which transmitted the disease.” And then of course there are the classic biocontrol-gone-awry stories, such as the Australian cane toad, which was supposed to control the grey-backed cane beetle, and ended up killing countless pets and endangering anywhere from 70 to 100 other species.

I miss some of these methods of exhibiting animals, even as I feel glad that fewer animals are suffering because of their decline.  But those unintended consequences are always impossible to identify, except in hindsight.  Will my children even have the chance to fall in love with animals in the way I did?  I can’t say.  I do what I can—taking them to whatever places are left that I believe are treating their animals in an ethical manner, watching nature documentaries with them, introducing obscure animals into games of “20 Questions,” and never failing to stop what I’m doing to bring up a video on YouTube if I think it can add to a conversation—but I never know if it will be enough.  And I think it will be important for this next generation: important for them to think of animals as awe-inspiring, as fascinating, as worthy of preservation, just as I always have.  If they don’t, if animals are just “ho-hum” or “yeah, I guess they’re okay” or “I suppose they’re fine, but they don’t really impact me” ... if they don’t realize how interconnected everything is, and how those unintended consequences can start falling like dominoes, then it might be too late to change course by the time someone realizes things have gone too far.

So, maybe it’s better that we have fewer zoos, and circuses, and all that.  Maybe animals are better off.  But wouldn’t it be a strange twist of fate if animals ended up suffering more because we are systematically removing all the places where people who live in the city and the suburbs used to interact with them?  I hope that’s not what ends up happening.  But I don’t know.  And I think maybe I’m happy I wasn’t born 40 years later than I was.

__________

* Unless you count things like Cirque du Soleil.  Which, you know, I don’t.

Treading Water in the Cesspool

This really should be a long post week, but I’ve had a shit weekend.  Somtimes you just have to give yourself permission to take it easy, and not stress about arbitrary deadlines that you’ve set for yourself.  So I’m doing that thing I just said.

I can’t currently foresee any reason why there won’t be a longer post next week, but then again I’m kind of shit at predicting the future, so take that as you will.

Breezin' on through ...

Made some good progress on the $work project this week, so I’m going to take advantage of the short week this week to just blow you off entirely, dear reader.  Sorry about that!  Still, next week is only a week away, as per usual.  So, you got that going for you.

Dreamsea Lucidity I

"But You Dream About Islands and You Go to Them"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

Like nearly all new(ish)—or newly popular—subgenres, “lofi” means different things to different people.  In point of fact, lofi is neither new, nor limited to only what you can hear on YouTube if you do a search for it.  Wikipedia tells us that it’s just “a music or production quality in which elements usually regarded as imperfections in the context of a recording or performance are present, sometimes as a deliberate choice.” And that’s why you usually hear static or “scratchy record” sounds in lofi music videos.  But, if you think about it, that tells us nothing about the music itself: theoretically, one could just put some imperfections into any song and call it lofi.  So what type of music is what you will inevitably find tons of if you search YouTube for “lofi”?  Well, it’s a form of chill (a.k.a. “downtempo”) that is sometimes called chillwave or chillhop.¹  It’s basically trip-hop crossed with chill, mostly instrumental, and set to anime loops and labeled “music to study by.”

Now, a lot of what you can find on YouTube as “lofi” these days is pretty formulaic: one gets the sense that there’s just a generic lofi factory somewhere, churning these out over and over.  But there are standouts.  I discovered Finland’s Kupla because I kept listening to those 2-hour-long mixes of various lofi songs, and it seemed like every single time I would actually stop and say “oh, I like this one; wonder who that is?” it was them.  I discovered New Jersey’s Autumn Orange because they share with me a love of Critical Role, and they make lofi mixes for CR characters.  In fact, it’s the one he did for Caduceus Clay, Destiny and Dead People Tea that gives us our mix starter, “Islands (You Dream Of).” (And it’s the volume namer, too.)  Once I heard that, I was so intrigued by AO’s weaving in of quotes from the Critical Role crew and recontextualizing them to music, and giving them perhaps a heft I hadn’t originally ascribed to them ... well, I started to wonder if I could put together a mix that was a little bit dreamy, a little bit psychedlic, and maybe just a little bit deep.  Music that’s perhaps not trippy enough for Smokelit Flashback nor poppy enough for Candy Apple Shimmer.  In naming it, I went back to Clive Barker’s notion of the “dream-sea”: a place of dreams that is more real than dreams (a characteristic it shares with Robert Jordan’s Tel’aran’rhiod), which he names Quiddity.  This is music that sails along the dreamsea, but perhaps it also provides some moments of clarity ...

Of course, I don’t like to restrict my mixes too much in terms of musical subgenres and styles, so we’re going to broaden our scope out beyond lofi chillhop ... but let’s start there.  Besides the aforementiond Autumn Orange track, which really is the core that this volume is built around, I of course had to throw in some Kupla.  While almost all lofi these days is set to Miyazaki-style animation, Kupla really does seem to capture the feeling of background music from a Studio Ghibli film.  I love many of their pieces, but “Lavender” is one of my faves.  I had to restrain myself from using multiple tracks of theirs, but I figured I’d save something for future volumes.  So I went to Sweden for a track from Theo Aabel—I guess these Scandinavians are pretty good at this whole chillhop thing.²  Unlike Kupla, I don’t necessarily like everything Aabel does, but “Constellation” is pretty awesome.

From there, I started by branching out into general trip-hop and the more psychedelic forms of dreampop.  Old favorites Naomi³ are of course a good pick: “Heavy Little Lights” is possibly too long, but a real classic of this type of music.  And of course former Enigma producer Jens Gad⁴ can provide a perfect fit in his more upbeat moments, such as “Navajo.” British DJ Jakatta’s track “It Will Be” is a lovely piece of upbeat trip-hop⁵ that manages to make a voice delivering the time over and over interesting.  Finally, Morcheeba is a British trip-hop artist built around the smoky vocals of Skye Edwards; while I don’t dig all their tracks, some of them are just transcendant, and I think “Slow Down” is one of the best.  Here, it signals the winding down of the volume, where everything—from the title itself to the synth noises that sound like lonely winds—does that job perfectly.

To keep going even further afield, we can bring in a little electroworld with Carmen Rizzo;⁶ “Through the Sunlight” is an almost ambient piece that works nicely to bring the mood to a more mellow point after the first third.  We can drift through ambient with tracks from Keven Keller and Amethystium: the former, so far featured only on Shadowfall Equinox,⁷ provides a contemplative piano piece called “Hawi Moon”; the latter, so far only seen on Incanto Liturgica, gives us “Avalon,” which has a more mystical feeling.  And that brings us right to dreampop, where of course we first must sample the masters: the Cocteau Twins, whose “Fluffy Tufts”⁸ is a multi-layered track that provides just the right amount of dreaminess.  The next most logical choice is probably This Mortal Coil: “D.D. and E.” is a short bridge that takes us from the proper trip-hop of Naomi to the much lighter touch of Anugama, but it’s an excellent 48 seconds that just felt perfect for this mix.  And Kendra Smith, who was Hope Sandoval before Mazzy Star,⁹ has a number of psychedelic-adjacent albums, including the one I draw from here, Five Ways of Disappearing.  The real draw is “Drunken Boat,” which is both dreamy and evocative, both lyrically and musically, but her little bridge “Dirigible” serves as the perfect bridge from the trippy Jakatta track to the more buzzy Tashaki Miyaki selection.

And, if you drive through dreampop long enough—especially if you cross back and forth into ambient a few times—you’ll eventually hit Enigma, and that’s the last stop before you’re truly into New Age.  I thought I’d give Enigma the last word on this volume: “The Dream of the Dolphin” is a short track from their sophomore album Cross of Changes, featuring Sandra Cretu’s breathy talksinging saying just a couple of lines, and it’s the perfect closer.  As for New Age, the vast majority of it is going to be way too mellow and downbeat for this mix, but I thought that Anugama’s “Tropical Morning” was an exception to that.  It’s entirely too long, really, but, as 8½ minute songs go, this one is pretty solid for not wearing out its welcome, so I basically made it the volume’s centerpiece.

Dreamsea Lucidity I
[ But You Dream About Islands and You Go to Them ]

“Serial Angels” by Miranda Sex Garden, off Fairytales of Slavery
“Ilomilo” by Billie Eilish, off When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
“Islands (You Dream Of)” by Autumn Orange, off Destiny and Dead People Tea
“Navajo” by Jens Gad, off Le Spa Sonique
“Constellation” by Theo Aabel, off Endless Memories
“Lavender” by Kupla, off Melody Mountain
“It Will Be” by Jakatta, off Visions
“Interlude: Dirigible” by Kendra Smith, off Five Ways of Disappearing
“Keep Me in Mind” by Tashaki Miyaki, off Tashaki Miyaki [EP]
“Outside” by the Primitives, off Pure
“Through the Sunlight” by Carmen Rizzo, off Ornament of an Imposter
“Heavy Little Lights” by Naomi, off Everyone Loves You
“D.D. and E.” by This Mortal Coil, off Blood
“Tropical Morning” by Anugama, off Jungle of Joy
“Hawi Moon” by Kevin Keller, off Nocturnes
“Almanac” by Widowspeak, off Almanac
“Fluffy Tufts” by Cocteau Twins, off Victorialand
“Drunken Boat” by Kendra Smith, off Five Ways of Disappearing
“Avalon” by Amethystium, off Odonata
“Slow Down” by Morcheeba, off Charango
“Everything Is On” by Asobi Seksu, off Citrus
“The Beautiful” by P.M. Dawn, off Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience
“The Dream of the Dolphin” by Enigma, off The Cross of Changes

Total:  23 tracks,  82:32

With all this chillhop and dreampop and ambient and even New Age, you might think there’s no room for anything a bit harder ... but you’d be wrong.  I’ve often said that Mazzy Star should be its own genre—or at least that we should have a name for what you get when you take shoegaze (arguably derived from dreampop in the first place) and feed it back into dreampop and get something really interesting.  I didn’t pick any actual Mazzy Star here, but I found a couple of artists that I think are Mazzy-Star-adjacent.  First and foremost, the most amazing Tashaki Miyaki, who I discovered via LittleBigPlanet and therefore have featured mostly on Paradoxically Sized World.¹⁰  “Keep Me in Mind” is one of those tracks that seems deceptively like just a pop song with some buzzy guitars, but it really grows into something bigger and more expansive the more you listen to it.  I think TM is probably the best of the Mazzy-Star-adjacent bands, although I know many have a fondness for Beach House.  Honestly, though, my second choice isn’t them: it’s Widowspeak, whose excellent “In the Pines” I used on Smokelit Flashback V.¹¹  For a long time I tried to transition directly from Keller to the Cocteaus, but it just didn’t work.  Finally I remembered that Widowspeak has a brilliant little bridge called “Almanac” that has the perfect dreamlike quality to make the connection.  Finally, Asobi Seksu (which is apparently Japanese for “sportfuck,” which was the band’s original name before they wokred out that no one was ever going to give them airplay with that moniker) is a bit more experimental in this space, which means that I often don’t care for the results.  Still, they have a good one every now and again, and I really thought that their bridge “Everything Is On” made the perfect step-down from Morcheeba to P.M. Dawn.

And that brings us to the first of the really unlikely candidates.  P.M. Dawn was a band that I always thought of as merging rap and New Age, which is as unlikely a combination as you’re going to run across, and yet they not only make it work, they consistently make it work.  As I’ve noted with other such weird combinations (such as Dread Zeppelin or the Diablo Swing Orchestra), a lot of times such artists produce the occasional gem, but their output is very inconsistent.  Not so P.M. Dawn though: every song on their debut Of the Heart, Of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience is a winner, and I fell in love with the album after receiving it as a Christmas gift from my brother.  I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to work it into a mix, frankly, but then P.M. Dawn is one of those bands that has a unique sound that often doesn’t really fit it with anything other than itself.  But as soon as I started this mix, I knew that they deserved a place here, and I went with “The Beautiful,” which works perfectly as the penultimate song on the volume.

For pure alternapop, though, I didn’t think there was much that would work here.  Still, I thought there might be a Primitives track that might work, and “Outside” proved me right.  It’s slinky (which is why I used them on Slithy Toves), but also shimmery (which is why I used them on Candy Apple Shimmer), and overall fits the mood here perfectly.  I was perhaps stretching a bit further by including a Billie Eilish track, but I think once you hear “Ilomilo” (especially in context) you may understand why I chose this tune, which is both atypical of her music and yet quintessentially Eilish.  Finally, our opener is Miranda Sex Garden, who has been called everything from neoclassical to folk to goth, which only goes to demonstrate how hard they are to pigeonhole.  This is another band I’ve not yet used, primarily because there are only a few tracks of theirs I really like, and also the whole “hard to slot in” factor.  But “Serial Angels” is an excellent example of their dynamic, starting with gentle, almost inaudible notes that have a toy piano feel, which then build, and build some more, and then burst into drums and guitars and wordless vocal screams, and then drop back down to fade into Billie Eilish.  I think it works pretty well.

Next time, let’s drift away again.

__________

1 Apparently there’s some sort of subtle distinction between what counts as chillwave and what counts as chillhop; inasmuch as I understand the difference—which ain’t much inasmuch—I would say that what this mix features is more chillhop than chillwave.

2 And, don’t forget: some of the best trip-hop acts are from there as well, like Ugress and Röyksopp (both from Norway), and Trentemøller (from Denmark).

3 Seen primarily on Smokelit Flashback (volumes I and II), but also a couple of tracks on Cantosphere Eversion I and Bleeding Salvador I, one on Shadowfall Equinox V, and even one each on Rose-Coloured Brainpan I and Wisty Mysteria II.

4 Seen previously only on Shadowfall Equinox (volumes V and VI).

5 For a more downtempo track, see Shadowfall Equinox IV.

6 Seen on Smokelit Flashback IV and Shadowfall Equinox IV, as well as Rose-Coloured Brainpan II and Moonside by Riverlight II.

7 Specifically, volumes II, III, IV, V, and VI.

8 From my all-time favorite album of theirs, Victorialand.  For more on that, see Smokelit Flashback II.

9 By which I mean that she recorded with Dave Roback as Opal, which then morphed into Mazzy Star when she departed.

10 Specifically, volumes III and IV, but also once on Darkling Embrace I.

11 As well as another track on Dreamscape Perturbation I.

A productive week

This week I’ve made some serious progress on my $work project, so I’m pretty happy about that.  And I also completed my company performance evaluation, and that went pretty well too.  So, work-wise, I’m pretty set.  And the kids and I have gotten back to playing D&D on a semi-regular basis, so that’s nice too.  Overall, things are progressing fairly well.

Longer post next week.