WILT_2023-41

A playlist of songs that intrigued me from Sunday to Saturday. Week of 8 Oct 2023 to 14 Oct 2023.

1. This Is Why (Re: Foals) – Paramore, Foals
2. tangerine sky – emerger
3. Hands Up – Poppy Jean Crawford
4. The Abyss – KNOWER
5. It’s All Or Nothing Until It’s Everything – KNOWER
6. Do Hot Girls Like Chords – KNOWER
7. Aged Eyes – Alfa Mist, Kaya Thomas-Dyke
8. Forward – Alfa Mist
9. FLØW -WØLFY
10. YUM.ME – Mndsgn
11. When You’re Ugly (Instrumental) – Louis Cole
12. IX. Don’t Wait For It – The Growth Eternal
13. Pain and Pleasure (Live Session) – 令晴 Lynn
14. Saxoo – TBc
15. – The Growth Eternal
16. Vamos Pueblo – Pachakuti, young.vishnu
17. Fly-day Chinatown – 泰葉 (Yashua)
18. 宇宙 – メカファイター ’87 – EVADE FROM 宇宙
19. いつかゆられて遠い国 (Itsuka Yurarete Toi Kuni) – 山口美央子 Mioko Yamaguchi
20. The Visitor – Bicycle
21. Foundation – Spandau Ballet

Hyperlink to Spotify playlist: WILT_2023-41

Notes

I am typing this week’s notes out at the airport today and I am feeling a few different ways. This is a solo flight for me to attend a friend’s wedding in Bali. My wife had flown the day before as she was the maid-of-honour, and I had work duties to attend to as the event we are organising is two weeks away, so every business day counts.

On some level, this had always been a romantic notion for me, a writer on the move, writing in lounges and cafes as the world went by and penning down observations and insights into the unremarkable lives of the common soul. But in light of the recent start and escalations of conflicts in the Israel-Palestine theatre, I am suddenly confronted and gripped at how naive my world view can be in times of peace and complacency.

Being a Singapore citizen, I have had the experience of being conscripted for two and a half years, and did my National Service from the age of 18–21, as well as served as a reserve for another 10 years of my adult life. In that time, the lens I viewed National Service through was that it was an inconvenience and took time away from being a civilian and my personal responsibilities and pursuits. Back then, I also had less to lose and more how I wanted to live my life unfettered, which in hindsight now I perceive as naive, that the security to live my life should not have come at a personal cost. But over the time since I have left the service, I have also seen more of how different societies operate, see themselves, and also see others, and I have now come to an equilibrium that peace or security have a cost attached to them, and I do not know whether all of us can afford to pay that price.

I cannot imagine how it must be, to be a non-combatant and suddenly have your life upended by the will of governing powers to inflict pain and suffering on another group of people, as well as to drag surrounding demographics into this whirlwind of turmoil where our individual hopes and dreams ends up being lost in the mob consciousness of analysts trying to understand the will of a collective of people simplistically defined by which side of the line they stand behind. I do not know if there is any coming back from the tragedy where your loved ones are lost forever, and the life you had built lies in ruins as dirt running through your fingers.

So all that is one way that I am feeling, the other has to do with the stress between juggling our personal exigencies with our professional ones. Life has been happening very quickly for me since September and it will be this way till the end of my event at the start of November. I am not here to complain, but rather to provide some context behind why I thought this playlist was not going to happen this week. 

In between packing for the trip, I had also suffered a gastritis attack on Monday night that left me slight incapacitated on Tuesday and Wednesday. Also the dread of going back to a mountain of work soured my mood even more. By this point I was feeling rather dejected that nothing had come onto my radar, nor was I in any mood to listen to music or make any attempt to discover anything. It simply felt like a rut.

To my surprise, when I went back to work and decided I did actually add three songs last Sunday at the start of the new listening week. This Is Why (Re: Foals), tangerine sky, and Hands Up, all of which I added for being absolute indie pop/rock bangers. Then, I saw that Knower album, KNOWER FOREVER was recently released so I decided to check it out. It is surprisingly potent work focus music and I found myself getting into various flow states through Louis Cole’s stellar drumming that sort of sits in the mix like a man trapped in a box but drums nonetheless. It is a very therapeutic sound. The Abyss, It’s All Or Nothing Until It’s Everything, and Do Hot Girls Like Chords all feature top notch musicianship from the band and singers, and I think they’re one of the most interesting bands to listen to in this current period.

From there the rest of the inclusions just flowed. All brilliant yet short productions, but just amazing and intricate musical ideas. Of extra note for me would be ‌IX. Don’t Wait For It and ‌III. Rain Song for Five Bass Guitars by The Growth Eternal. As a bass player these compositions are engaging as they are entertaining, abstract and avant. Tone is celebrated, but so is narrative and structure.

Then comes Fly-day Chinatown by 泰葉 (Yashua) at the recommendation of a friend. I was making a joke about the song title and its lyrics to which my friend responded “It’s too late to re-record this absolute banger,” and I just thought that that’s exactly how we should leave this earth. What a great line. 

Two more Japanese funk pop “city music” numbers came calling, particularly いつかゆられて遠い国 (Itsuka Yurarete Toi Kuni) by 山口美央子 (Mioko Yamaguchi) for having such a great outro passage. 

The Visitor by Bicycle and Foundation by Spandau Ballet were listened to while I was in the plane and re-listening some albums that I had made available offline. The Visitor is pure American rock wizardry with such an infectious groove that it makes you start believing in rock again (If you have ever been disenfranchised.) And lastly, Foundation by Spandau Ballet is such a revelation to me. I mean, I love Gold and True, but man, the groove and danceability on Foundation is spellbinding. The rhythm section is indeed foundational and at such a great tempo which really sets the stage for the flourishes of the synth and saxophone runs, as well as for the backing vocals to really sell the song.

And with that, from feeling one way to another, this playlist still somehow managed to find its way to you. I wonder if it is because of the rhythm that I have set for myself that keeps me somewhat dedicated to still try in some fashion to get these out. It does feel like a combination of both fate and purpose, because I was greatly encouraged that I had actually started before feeling discouraged, that there was still new music to listen to and be inspired by, and also the drive to set time aside to just write. To write until it’s time to stop.