![]() ![]() There are words, but there’s also echoing, ambient breathing room. ![]() (I knocked out a couple final papers to Joanna Newsom’s Ys.) In the past month, Frank Ocean’s Endless has been fitting the bill quite nicely. Jazz, classical, and ambient music are seemingly tailored for thoughtful writing, but I find them oddly distracting-I’m usually sent down a Wiki rabbit hole spurred by the musician in question. So while it’s probably counterintuitive to prefer listening to music with words while writing, I’m at my most focused while listening to quieter, longer songs with lyrics and momentum. Cantu-Ledesma has cited Eno’s concept of “holographic music” as an inspiration, in which “any brief section of the music is representative of the whole… a consistent mood to the environments in which they are heard.”Ĭontrary to others here, finding my focus music doesn’t usually mean picking an instrumental album that my co-workers all agree on. A Year With 13 Moons is an elixir of shimmer and noise so searingly intense that it amplifies whatever you’re doing. The songs are wordless, but titles like “The Last Time I Saw Your Face” and “A Portrait of You at Nico’s Grave” give an idea of the poetry they contain. Cantu-Ledesma pushes the music so far into the red and imbues it with so much pummeling light, it arrives at pastel shades that color the album’s meditative drama. It forms a gate around me-with elegantly ripped shoegaze guitars and blistering LinnDrum beats-and there is nothing that exists in the world other than the record and my mind. But I can’t imagine being more focused than I am when Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s A Year With 13 Moons is occupying space in my life. Jenn Pelly: Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - A Year With 13 Moons Something about the combination of small sonic details and a gentle by insistent rhythmic drive makes it the ideal work music, ready to stimulate me when I need ideas and keeping me moving when I have to motor through a mindless task. But it also has an uncanny feeling of forward motion, despite the languid tempos. This is music with vast chasms of space, where every cymbal brush and echoing percussion tap and yearning syllable of voice is framed by silence. Hilaire and Jah Batta, but it’s the accompanying release, The Versions, containing the mostly instrumental dubs of those sides, that has accompanied me for many hours of work over the years. The 2003 compilation With the Artists found the duo teaming with vocalists including Paul St. While Basic Channel proper puts a dub spin on all sorts of harsh and noisy 4/4 music, Rhythm & Sound more leans toward reggae proper. Rhythm & Sound is an offshoot of Basic Channel, the legendary dub techno project of Berlin producers Moritz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus. ![]() This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. With that quick note out of the way, we leave you with the albums that have helped us, on a personal level, produce Pitchfork day in and day out. (That is, unless you have memorized the lyrics to the point where you can ignore them so they simply blend into the sound as a whole.) That’s the main way, for most of us, that soundtracks to computer-based work vary from workout jams or albums for cleaning the house, just so we’re clear on what “getting shit done” entails exactly. But it’s tricky.Īcross our staff (with a few dissenters, of course), we tend to agree that music with lyrics is not ideal when your work involves stringing together words in any capacity, as many office jobs do. Music can’t give you more hours in a day, but it can propel you to do more with what you have. Maybe you’ve recently gone back to school, or you’re slowly accepting the fact that summer is over and thus a slightly more languid pace is no longer tolerated at work. ![]() Chances are, you’re really feeling this right now. Work is so never-ending, Rihanna had to repeat it five times in a row just to make her point. ![]()
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