you are the dj of your own existence

new music 16/01/25

I’ve been on holiday over January having a very festive time! Festive times for me mean (among other things) making very good playlists because you can of course entirely ruin very good times with very bad music. Exhibit A: a man I once knew who was technically very good at throwing dinner parties. He would pay attention to the lighting, the drinks, the table settings, the flowers. The food was always excellent, the people were mostly excellent, but somehow he always entirely neglected the music. It would roam wildly from Taylor Swift to euro dance and it really just threw everything off. It was so incongrous with everything else that it made you sit on the edge of your seat rather than relax into it. I’m sure we’ve all experienced this: going to a dinner party or out to a restaurant and they are playing just entirely the wrong music and it ruins your exquisite vibes? Well do not do that to yourself or other people! You are the DJ of your own existence! Sometimes you are the DJ of other people’s existences! Be careful! You need to be putting as much thought into the music you play as the outfits you decide to wear! You should care about the music on in your home as much as the colours you decide to paint the walls! With this kind of thinking in mind, this year apart from just sending out these new music recommendations, from time to time I’ll also be creating different playlists, which will hopefully make your lives more glamourous and fun! Playlists based on books, playlists based on places, playlists based on a dress I once tried on and should have bought, bascially music that will hopefully make you the best DJ of your own existence you can be.

X

Emma

Spotify Playlist

Apple Music Playlist

This feels like a puzzle piece song, like all its parts were made in the different rooms of a doll house and somehow fit together. The whole album is a little miracle, muted, hushed. It is also representative of what Phillips likes the most: “writing every night, documenting the writing in 'good enough' recordings right away, and moving on.” The “demo-ness” of this creates something so intimate and alive you feel like you’ve been let in on a secret you weren’t supposed to know.

If this song owes another one anything it’s Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” but it’s so much wonkier , with Ishibashi’s film score abilities (she scored the Oscar winning “Drive My Car”) adding a rich and off kilter feeling.

Ah Dan Bejar I have missed you! I have missed your serious, self-referential lyrics, the feeling I always have that you have a substantial collection of scarves, the way that you undoubtedly refer to yourself as a poet. You are a poet! Who else could just be repeating the word Bologna over and over again to such great effect. Dan Bejar, I love you.

Ricocheting dangerously from one man who takes himself seriously to another! Ah men! Ah poets! Everything I have to say about this song I have already said to my friend Alex:

Dan Bejar, Panda Bear, Dirty Projectors, is it 2005-2010 again? If it is then where is our actual poet, Joanna Newsom? Anyway some of the best/most insane thinking about things is just happening on reddit and seriously I would never have managed to go full Greek mythology on this so thank you PeakBobe, I also hope both of them are doing ok.

Yes, this song is a bit like Flight of The Concords meets Emily in Paris, but it’s very cute and is the sort of song that would make you leave a shop with totally impractical, but adorable underwear. If you know nothing about music (or Italian) adagio means slow and it’s really a lovely word to keep around, with that gorgeous long aaahhh (a-daaaahhh-gio) sound slowing you right down.

This sounds like the soundtrack to ‘The Virgin Suicides’ if it had been set in Istanbul instead of Detroit. According to the band, the track was composed in response to listening to the work of two Egyptian greats: Umm Kulthum and AbdelHalim Hafez, and the song is a farewell to lead singer, Merve’s, grandfather, who passed away in 2023. Living in different countries, they never had the chance to say a final goodbye, and this song became her way of grappling with that unspoken parting.

serpentwithfeet says this track is “the sound of a lover begging.” He’s got to be one of our juicier artists atm — let me present the word WRITHING — but here he keeps it so crystalline as to almost feel pure, with the beautiful layered vocal ending and the way the song almost feels like a prayer to a lover.

Uche Yara really seems untethered by genre and on this Radiohead-esque piano ballad she feels totally at ease in a song that offers no real room to hide.

Everything Is Recorded is the project of Richard Russell, a man you think you do not know, but who is one of the owners of XL recordings, homes to artists like Arca, Charlotte Day Wilson and The Smile. If one sometimes gets the feeling that these days people who work at record labels don’t really care about music, then Richard Russell is proof that some still do. I read, in an article in The New Yorker, that he has printed instructions on how to listen to music on a wall in the office and since they they’re a good (albeit v time consuming) reminder of the sort of attention we should try and give music when we can, I’m sharing them here:

There is a proper procedure for taking advantage of any investment.

Music, for example. Buying music is an investment.

To get the maximum you must

LISTEN TO IT FOR THE FIRST TIME UNDER OPTIMUM CONDITIONS.

Not in your car or on a portable player through a headset.

Take it home.

Get rid of all distractions, (even her or him).

Turn off your cell phone.

Turn off everything that rings or beeps or rattles or whistles.

Make yourself comfortable.

Play your CD.

LISTEN all the way through.

Think about what you got.

Think about who would appreciate this investment.

Decide if there is someone to share this with.

Turn it on again.

Enjoy Yourself.

When I first read about Ethel Cain in 2022, I was excited to listen to her. There she was, resplendent in velvet and white collars with her Baptist upbringing and Southern Gothic vibes; I was ready to be haunted. What I heard though sounded sonically more like a depressed Taylor Swift than the bottom-of-a-well bleak romance of Judee Sill, I was hoping for. There was though, one hint of what I wanted: her song Ptolemaea and this new album feels like the continuation of that idea; it’s more industrial and it’s far, far darker. It’s music for your death drives, for those dark parts of ourselves we often bury or allow to run dangerously free. There are songs on here that feel like they could cast a curse and while I’ve chosen this track for the playlist this week, my favorite is really the incredibly unfriendly “Housofpsychoticwomn “ with it’s repeated curse of “I love you.”

Joy Crookes has been pretty quiet since she released her Mercury Prize-shortlisted debut ‘Skin’ - all the way back in 2021, but she’s back with this track about a women Joy describes as “nothing short of an arsehole,” which I feel is actually an unusual way for a woman to describe another woman. Normally we enjoy using the quite basic and evergreen “bitch” but passing a motion to start referring to each other more as arseholes this year.

DJ Sabrina has been creating some of the UK’s strangest and most exciting dance music since 2017. Her album ‘Charmed’, full of sample based, silly, cheesy little wonders became an underground pandemic hit in 2020 and lead to her working with Matty Healy. While the enigmatic producer’s identity remains a mystery — according to her bio, “a cat named Salem is uploading music from an old colonial Dutch house somewhere in 1996 — in a recent interview in The Guardian she was revealed to be a part-time retail worker and . . . that’s all we’ve got! Don’t you think though that it’s nice in a world of “relatable” aka deeply embarrassing celebrities to have a little mystery?

This is a great album that is at its strongest when referencing the past, interpolating generations of Puerto Rican sounds with today’s música urbana. On this track we get 20 seconds of El Gran Combo’s 1975 salsa hit “Un Verano en Nueva York” before booming into the present.