wow – so going to this playlist now several times in the course of trying to write an entry for this has arisen a bit of a haystack of thoughts and feelings about it. with significantly more experience than i had with this at the time and revisiting this playlist has me feeling a mess of ways about it. first things first – this one is not for the uninitiated and an experience one may not find appealing at all. but, it was most assuredly ‘an experience.’
despite knowing i used this playlist in the mildly spring-esque days of a PNW april, it surely feels far more like it belongs in the slow darkness of november.
let me just get the elephant in the room out in the open – track 3 – ‘A Quick One Before the Eternal Worm Devours Connecticut‘. this track is dark. this track is creeping. this track, even in the sober light of day, is simply unsettling. by this point i had experienced moments of ‘ego death’ in what is best, but somewhat problematically, defined as bardo. and i had at this point prior felt the pull of going ‘outward’ into the universe. but this time i remember setting my intention for this infusion to experience what might be found in the nanoscopic spaces between things.
memory, especially in regards to experiences while open and altered is at best, unreliable. but while i’m not certain i achieved exactly that, i definitely had an experience in an unsettling liminal space. despite a sense of vastness in scale, somehow the experience felt claustrophobic and dark; at times almost menacing – twitchy and lonely.
damn it alice, stay on task – lets just talk about he music for a few and let it speak on its own.
there is definitely a theme of both orchestrated pieces, but not on any sort grand scale. the lead in with the sort of hallowed chant of ‘Travelogue’ and then into the quiet composition of ‘Loom’ (which apparently was performed on the shortest day of. the year – again, better for november). and then the darkness of the ‘eternal worm’ – i think that track is better left to be experienced than described. the twitch-ness of the Tatsuro Kojima track sort of kept that mood up, but with less anxiety.
the second half of the playlist opens up a bit more – call it ‘aftercare’ if you like. quiet electronic mixed with strings and swells like on ‘impossible color’. these sort of songs weren’t quite a pathway back into general consciousness, but still enough to re-tether myself after 45 minutes inside the unquiet dark.
outside of infusions – i do think there is something there with this mix. but i don’t know what it is at the moment.
- Red Mecca: Travelogue [purchase]
- Ólafur Arnalds: Loom (Sunrise Session II) [listen]
- Have a Nice Life: A Quick One Before The Eternal Worm Devours Connecticut [purchase]
- Tatsuro Kojima: Surface of the Light [purchase]
- Billow Observatory: In a Stream [purchase]
- Inventions: Spirit Refinement Exploder [purchase]
- Disassembler: Impossible Color [purchase]
- Foreign Fields / SYML: Brand New [purchase]
- Sigrid: It Gets Dark [purchase]