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. 

Sound: “vibrations traveling through a medium, usually air.” I have uttered this definition to my Brooklyn College students on day one of probably every class I’ve taught. But it’s easy to forget this materiality of sound, that sound is not something that happens only to our ears and brains, but to our entire bodies. Just as any definition of sound implies a hearer, it also implies a body.

Let this gritty playlist be a reminder. And, fair warning: it’s unrelentingly gritty. Sand crunching between your teeth gritty. Metal grinding on metal gritty. Vibrations felt as well as heard gritty if played LOUD—which I recommend—especially if you’re looking to cathartically purge some anger in the service of artistic creation (and maybe rage-dance a little in the process).

We start out with two of my favorites from the New York no wave scene: Sonic Youth’s churning, industrial “Macbeth” and Suicide’s grimy-cute “Ghost Rider,” which is held together by a single synth riff and some vocal “whoops” that answer the question of what Buddy Holly would sound like as the singer in an electronic noise band. Moving to the left coast, we hit up Chrome’s post-punkish “Abstract Nympho,” complete with horror soundscape intro, and then circle back to Kim Gordon, whose unrelenting vocal sustains may as well be a distorted guitar imitating a voice on the chorus of “Murdered Out.” Then we’re transported to the pulsating, subterranean world of public transit with “Subway Rhythm” by Two Fingers. Angular guitar screeching collides with the ranting, indecipherable vocals of Julian Casablancas on The Voidz’s “Dare I Care,” followed by DJ Shadow and Nils Frahm’s hip-hopish instrumental “Bergschrund.” “Convinced of the Hex” by The Flaming Lips is up next, a messily dense exercise in monothematic excess, and then we get weird with Young Fathers’ “Wow,” in which strangled exclamations of the song’s title allow us to interpret a certain hellishness in the dryly repeated line: “what a time to be alive.” 

Youth Code’s hardcore “Sick Skinned,” St. Vincent’s anthem of refusal “Cheerleader,” and DILLY DALLY’s grungy “Purple Rage” all remind me of the embodied materiality of the voice, of what Barthes famously called the grain, “the encounter between a language and a voice.” Following this is Pile’s “Texas,” featuring asymmetrical guitar lines that allow us just enough space to breathe amid muddy vocals and relentlessly recurring drum hits. Then we enter the sludge section, in which Melvins’ “Night Goat,” Converge’s “Trigger,” and Swans’ “Blackout” envelop us in low-frequency distortion—sound: vibrations traveling through a medium, sometimes our bodies. The fast chaos of “Lie Lied Lies” by Japanese noise rockers Melt-Banana closes out the set, my de facto finale choice because really, what could possibly follow this?

Listen to Gritty on Spotify

Lindsey Eckenroth is a Brooklyn-based musicologist, flutist, and lover of sounds. When she's not teaching at Brooklyn College and working at RILM, she likes thinking and writing about popular music, documentary films, music and/as affective labor, rock stardom and celebrity, and psychogeography.