Playlists
Apocalypse Union
Monsterhearts: Messy Lives
TRASH ARMADA
Eclipse Temple
the feed
What is going on here?
Sometimes when I get obsessed with a creative project (usually a role-playing campaign I want to run) there are songs that get me hyper inspired about it and trigger all these aesthetic ideas. Then the songs start reminding me of the feelings of other songs and I start collecting a playlist.
I make playlists the way I imagine some people make mood boards — as a sort of aesthetic brainstorming / curation polishing / inspiration feedback loop.
There’s a gathering phase, then winnowing and re-ordering, listening over and over soaking in the aesthetic to distill what I feel about it, what I have to say and I what I am NOT saying.
The playlist is maybe not an end in itself, it’s a sort of emotional world-building prep for a creative project.
My friend Chris said
You know how, in Stranger in a Strange Land, Martian poetry is a sequence of emotions? That, to me, is a playlist. It is an experiential journey — and, like a poem, it must rhyme AND NOT be monotonous. Nor trite, unless triteness is the right state of mind to invoke at that time.
Which, yeah. I think that's right.
My Process
is like this:
There's a collection phase where anything interesting goes into one big unordered list. Good ideas, bad ideas, they all go in there. I listen to them while I walk around, work out, or do boring stuff like sort laundry.
There's a refinement phase where the tone emerges and bad fits are removed (often songs I love, but don't fit the tone or pull their weight). There's a degree of honesty to the project required here. Hard cuts.
There's a sort of annealing phase where I'll listen on shuffle and re-order songs that belong next to each other. I listen a lot. The goal is to make the start of every song elicit a sort of welcome shock of recognition.
Abrupt or fading beginning and ends matter. Matching or contrasting feelings matter. Late additions or removals happen here. Some times I have to add a few seconds of silence between songs. (For this, Buzzfeed's "Ultimate Playlist of Silence is useful.)
Gradually, moving songs around gets harder and harder as each song is tightly bound to its neighbors. Eventually, any change makes it less good. It's done!
😃🎧
Apocalypse Union
In 2018, I discovered Vincent and Meguey Baker's Apocalypse World (and the game design movement it spawned). This was right after there was that nuclear attack false alarm in Hawaii. I was in the late stages of training for my first marathon and in kind of a heightened state. I made a playlist to help me brainstorm apocalyptic imagery and feelings.
I think this track was the seed crystal.
In my apocalypse, civilization was destroyed by a self-catalyzing dissolution of the self-other barrier mediated by direct brain interface technology. Almost everyone was destroyed, but also they are still there. They've just dissolved into the World.
The distributed intelligence eventually migrates off the meat substrate into nano dust that permeates the ecology. The survivors have all been breathing in active nano computer dust since birth.
It interacts with their nervous systems and is the mechanism of Apocalypse World's Psychic Maelstrom.
(Originally, this playlist featured the extended version of Neil Young's Dead Man Theme. Neil Young pulled his music from Spotify in protest of the loathesome Joe Rogan's presence on the platform (though this particular version wasn't available even before he left). I'd pay good money for a version of the Dead Man soundtrack without dialogue samples from the film! It's such a haunting score and the random voiceovers on the soundtrack album are really distracting.)
Monsterhearts: Messy Lives
During the Covid Pandemic, I made a playlist while daydreaming obsessively about Monsterhearts.
Avery Alder's Monsterhearts is a roleplaying game about the messy lives of teenage monsters. Teen Supernatural Romances like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Twilight or Ginger Snaps.
Monsterhearts is queer. It explores themes of queer identity, teenage alienation, and sex/gender self-discovery through the lens of figurative and literal monstrousness.
In addition to being a brilliant game design, Monsterhearts features some of the best GMing advice I have encountered:
Keep the story feral.
The conversation that you have with the other players and with the rules create a story that couldn’t have existed in your head alone. As you play, you might feel an impulse to domesticate that story. You form an awesome plan for exactly what could happen next, and where the story could go. In your head, it’s spectacular. All you’d need to do is dictate what the other players should do, ignore the dice once or twice, and force your idea into existence. In short: you’d have to take control. The game loses its magic when any one player attempts to take control of the story. It becomes small enough to fit inside one person’s head. The other players turn into audience members instead of participants. Nobody’s experience is enriched when one person turns the collective conversation into their own private story. So avoid this impulse. Let the story’s messy, chaotic momentum guide it forward. In any given moment, focus on reacting to the other players. Allow others to foil your plans, or improve upon them. Trust that good story emerges from wildness. Play to find out what happens next. Let yourself be surprised.
and
Treat side characters like stolen cars
Think of it like this: between “make each main character’s life not boring” and “keep the story feral”, half of your agenda in this game is to make exciting, messy choices and see what happens next. Your side characters are part of that equation. Treat them like stolen cars on a joyride. You control them for the present moment, but it’s not like you get to keep them when the night’s over. Play them recklessly, and abandon them when they’re dead weight. You don’t necessarily need to kill your darlings, but you do need to accept that they are precarious, auxiliary, and yes, killable. Beyond just accepting it, revel in it.
Just, collapsed ultradense slugs of GMing wisdom. I love them so much.
Thing is, though: I have never played this game (and if I'm honest I'm a bit scared to).
Except maybe I have? Alder has said that making a playlist about Monsterhearts is itself a valid form of playing Monsterhearts. (See also Ribbon Drive, her game about road trip movies which uses mix-tapes curated by the players to drive the story. Which: I gotta play this game.)
A little game built into this playlist: Most (but not all!) of these songs map pretty directly to either a Monsterhearts playbook, move, or system element. Which are which?
TRASH ARMADA
salvage marine zero-g wrecker drag ball neutron star orbital decay anthem
A playlist about a neutron star whirlpool spaceship graveyard. Disoriented new arrivals are beset by waring tribes of scrappers. Strongest soft power is an elegant, vicious dueling culture of zero G drag balls.
No escape, everything just circling the gravitic shear meatgrinder drain, but new wrecks incoming, rich with salvage and biomass.
And most importantly, music from the universe outside.
(My one big platform disappointment on this one was not being able to include Yamantaka Eye's remix of Gong's Master Builder due to it not being on Spotify.)
Eclipse Temple
I went on my first week-long silent meditation retreat. There was a partial eclipse on the first day. They passed out glasses. These songs were stuck in my head for the rest of the week.
the feed
Dear [CONSUMER]
It is our distinct pleasure to introduce you to the [LINKED] media curation.
[THEMES] Social Mediation, Surveillance Capitalism, De-focused Anxiety, Autophagy, Phonemic Fragmentation, Context Collapse, Beeps, Doom
Share and Enjoy!
Your Friends @
The Enantiomer Organization
(A Note: Why Spotify?)
I moved to Spotify from RealPlayer (which got re-named Napster at one point, in an apparent attempt to cash in on early Zeroes nostalgia). I grew frustrated with RealPlayer's inability to play songs without tiny gaps of silence between them. This matters a lot for suites like David Bowie's Sweet Thing / Candidate / Sweet Thing (Reprise). Gapless playback is apparently a huge pain in the ass to make happen, due to technical weirdness around audio file formats. Spotified bothered to do this.
The other reason is that at the time I got fed up with playback gaps, it seemed like just everyone was using Spotify. I want my playlists to be accessible to the widest possible audience.
So between gapless playback and broad reach, Spotify was a clear choice.
I don't love everything about Spotify, but the reasons I picked them still seem sound.
I do wish they would let playlist curators adjust playback volume of songs in their lists! Levels are inconsistent. (70s kids will remember adjusting levels with VU meters during the mix-tape era.)