WILT_2024-36

A playlist of songs that intrigued me from Sunday to Saturday. Week of 1 Sep 2024 to 7 Sep 2024.

1. All You Children – Jamie xx, The Avalanches
2. Come Find Me – Caribou
3. Hold On (feat. Dawn Richard) – KAYTRANADA, Dawn Richard
4. Knights – Crystal Castles
5. Baptism – Crystal Castles
6. Without Love – Alice Glass
7. Tommy Boy – Kid Smoko
8. Without Love (Mija Remix) – Alice Glass, Mija
9. Natural Selection (Ghostemane Remix) – Alice Glass, Ghostemane
10. The Altar (Ruined by Yves Tumor) – Alice Glass, Yves Tumor
11. Forgiveness (Paul White Remix) – Alice Glass, Paul White
12. Darkness, I’ll Always Be Your Girl – R. Missing
13. Dancing on Your Grave – Pixel Grip
14. White Gold – Labyrinth Ear
15. Black Chardonnay – Pictureplane, YAWNS, Wicca Phase Springs Eternal
16. Oppressive Face – Pearly Drops

Hyperlink to Spotify playlist: WILT_2024-36

Notes

It’s funny how music gets recommended, discovered, and re-discovered. It’s funny how we sometimes allow ourselves to be brought down a path versus deciding where we’d like to go and how to get ourselves there. Curation’s a funny thing in the regard that sometimes I can actively curate, but there are times that you allow yourself to wander, one step in front of the other, seemingly not knowing how your end up where you end up, and yet you always have a choice of taking that next step, to take a different direction, or go back the way you came. 

The week started with a notice that Jamie xx had a new single released, All You Children, in collaboration with The Avalanches. One listen and it was an immediate hit in my opinion. The classic production values of xx with the sample fuel of The Avalanches results in a collaboration that brings the best of both producers together in an updated electro-fuelled haze of beats, synths and wondrous vocal samples.

That then led to another new song, this time by Caribou. It’s amazing how everything sounds so familiar, yet so updated as well. That’s something to give thanks for, when artists continue to be inspired and are constantly innovating, sharpening, and re-defining their practice and their idea of what success looks like. So far, these are musical artists that I’ve listened for more than a decade, yet the music that they create continues to excite without being derivative.

Below are a list of videos I stumbled across that would continue to inform this week’s playlist

• Dance Visual for Hold On
• Shot-for-shot remaster of the music video to Crystal Castle’s Knights
• Music video for Baptism by Crystal Castles
• Video documentary explaining the abuse that Ethan Kath put Alice Glass through
• Crystal Castles: Made Of Chalk

The Crystal Castles story is extremely sad, traumatic and manipulative, particular from Glass’s perspective. As a listener and an outsider, on the one-hand the music is intense, macabre, and just effortlessly cool in both performance and practice. However, knowing what you know about the abuse, I don’t even know if it’s right to say that anything or anyone benefited, whether through listening, experiencing, or artistic output. Maybe they did, but it will always be at the expense of predatory behaviour, abuse, trauma and other dark places of the human condition. So with that, perhaps as one needs to continue the narrative on by closing the chapter on Crystal Castles and we ought to follow the trajectory of Alice Glass.

Listening to Alice Glass sounds like there’s some level of emancipation and catharsis happening. Knowing what we know, it is now her story to tell, whatever that may be. 

That journey also brought forward some meanderings into other musicians exploring soundscapes that are haunting, without being held back by oblivion, but propelled by release and stepping into some semblance of deserved-ness or acceptance. Darkness, I’ll Always Be Your Girl by R. Missing somehow embodies this strange, unsettling emotion. Speaking of unsettledness, the rest of the songs that close out this week’s playlist take us on an auditory journey by being that digital blanket in a digital winter. With that said, I would listen to more Pearly Drops.