Music can spark ideas for visual artists, providing a mood for editing and sequencing, or even as inspiration for bodies of work. Each month, Lindsey Eckenroth curates a playlist of music to make art to.
As one of my dearest friends often reminds me, you just have to get through things one second per second. He’s right, and yet they don’t all feel the same—the seconds. The time spent being is not always experientially congruent with the clock time elapsed. We’ve always known this, but the COVID times have only amplified—at least for me—chasmic inconsistencies between the numerical logic of time passed and the affective instability of time felt. Time has become slippery. In curating this playlist, I was chasing sonic manifestations of these destabilizing experiences, seeking out music with the potential to instigate temporal distortion and contemplation. Specifically, I have included some pieces that might hold the listener in a trance through repetition and others that lyrically reference the complexities of time’s passing—our desire for and resistance to it.
You will find here a temporally (and stylistically) chaotic collection of music. We start out with the dreamy, post-punkish wash of stellastarr*’s Lost in Time, then move through three instrumental tracks: Oneohtrix Point Never’s remix of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s romantically ambient andata, the Colombian duo Mitú’s polyrhythmic NO SE, and Anna von Hausswolff’s gothically shimmering organ piece All Thoughts Fly. After surfacing back to lyrics with a bombastic B-side from The Cure, we dive again into twisting instrumental repetitions with Tezete (Nostalgia) by Ethio-jazz musician Mulatu Astatke, a section from Morton Feldman’s spacious Rothko Chapel, and the birdcall-quoting first movement of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time (which, by the way, was inspired by text from the Book of Revelation, in which an angel descends to declare: “there shall be time no longer”).
Moving erratically from earthly time eradicated to labor time logged, next up is U.S. Girls’ eternally danceable Overtime, followed by Anna Meredith’s galloping Nautilus (the drum entrance at 3:36... gets me every time). Black Flag’s sludgy-angry Forever Time slams in, and then we continue on with Weyes Blood’s devastating ode to the escapist promise of movies and Tori Amos’s resigned cover of Tom Waits’s Time. Finally, we close out with the glam rock ballad from David Bowie that contains the lyrical source of this playlist’s title: “You are not evicting time.”