A playlist of songs that intrigued me from Sunday to Saturday. Week of 26 Dec 2021 to 1 Jan 2022.

WILT_2021-52

1. Three Sisters – Wednesday
2. Gary’s – Wednesday
3. Ghost of a Dog – Wednesday
4. “Quotations” – Water From Your Eyes
5. My Lights Kiss Your Thoughts Every Waking Moment – Lucy Gooch
6. Possibility – Pavel Milyakov, Yana Pavlova
7. Doomseeer – True Widow
8. İsyan Manifestosu – Gaye Su Akyol
9. Macchina – Sungazer
10. Lunar – Sungazer
11. A Song With No Words – Sungazer, Aberdeen
12. Dread Are the Controller – Linval Thompson
13. This Life Makes Me Wonder – Delroy Wilson

Hyperlink to Spotify playlist: WILT_2021-52

Notes

We made it. Fifty two entries of faithful weekly publication of my music listening notes, as well as some personal reflections every week.

I also published a short reflective of the music I discovered in 2021 that you can read here.

This has been a very rewarding process for me as a way to catalogue 2021 through the lens of music discovery. I remember starting the year being bored of American and British-centric guitar-based rock music and its sub-genres, and after an entire year, I am no longer anxious of this previously identity-shifting anecdote, because music discovery is an organic, and personal journey that never really ends. Ultimately, this process has bolstered my belief that while human beings do many questionable things to hurt one another, we are able to transcend, or even tap into something primal, to create a glorious and beautiful medium of expression, and that is music. If you pause to listen to another culture’s mode of expression, you might find that we have similar desires for ourselves, to better the self and our surroundings. To question the things we do not understand, to either have faith and hope, or explore the dismal abyss of our despair. I do not know what the answers are, but it is human to question the cosmos both in space-time, and within our souls.

The final week of 2021’s WILT starts with some of the indie-fuzz courtesy of Wednesday. Three Sisters starts of with an ultra-fuzzy guitar riff that makes me wish I were enjoying the energy at a club gig all over again. Gary’s features an interesting guitar arrangement that somehow creates a fuzzy country music vibe. Ghost of a Dog is an absolute blast of lyrics. It might be a metaphor for something, or it could be literal, but either way, this simple piece of songwriting is emotionally compelling.

“Quotations” has such a beautiful and ethereal arrangement, and it truly astounds me how some artists see or hear the world. A looping vocal sample, with some pizzicato strings confidently fill the first half of the song, before the a foundations gets laid in the second half. It’s short, but so haunting and hopeful at the same time.

Time stretches on My Eyes Kiss Your Thoughts Every Waking Moment, and you can’t help but be pulled into the singularity created by Lucy Gooch’s tremendous performance and instrumentation.

I think it’s a bass saxaphone on Possibility? And it’s absolutely gorgeous as a solo accompaniment to the song.

Things slow down, darken, and take a bit of a tumble with Doomseer. I find it absolutely fitting to follow up Possibility with Doomseer. The sludgy groove of the song puts in an contrast to the whimsicality of the previous song, and roots it down harshly with a by the numbers no-wave rock groove. However, because they are in very similar registers, the impact felt is gloriously seismic and earth shattering.

From the crushing depths, the Turkish-tinged psychedelic-rock of Gaye Su Akyol’s İsyan Manifestosu lifts us out effortlessly and establishes a new tempo and energy to swim freely in a clear blue ocean, the sun’s warmth still penetrating two meters into the water.

The next block of music comes courtesy of Sungazer, a band I came to know from YouTuber, Adam Neely, as it is one of his music projects. He was sharing about some music found on Sungazer’s new album, Perihelion, by exploring how concepts like time signatures, instrumentation, and musical arrangement create “gnarly grooves”.

Macchina, Lunar, and A Song With No Words are all songs that combine beautiful, progressive and tasteful melodies with some brain-crunching time-measures and arrangements to create some very vivid musical ideas and statements. It’s a little hi-fi in tone, but still a stellar proclamation of progressive jazz.

Finally, the final playlist of 2021 closes with highlights from a recommended album by my good friend, Thomas. He brought to my attention a compilation of reggae songs compiled by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood titled Jonny Greenwood Is the Controller. The first featured track is Dread Are the Controller by Linval Thompson. It’s pretty standard as far as a reggae groove goes, but there is something unmistakably rebellious, or defiant in the lyrical art and performance. I felt energised, invigorated to not bow to the pressures and burdens that hope of a new year sometimes place on us.

And then we close with This Life Makes Me Wonder by Delroy Wilson. The frenetic guitar playing is not what I expect from most reggae, but it goes so well with painting a hopeful energy to the externalised contemplation of where the future can potentially take us.

So maybe that’s how I will go in 2022. There are some unknowns, but I’ve been blessed, as much as I know where I’ve been lacking, but I still look forward to new discoveries, and new experiences. I expect growth in some form, and spending time on the people and things that I enjoy.

Happy new year everybody. Thank you for taking this journey with me and I look forward to 2022 with you.