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.
“We wanted to break out of this conditioning, in search of different uses of the urban landscape, in search of new passions.” – Voiceover from Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (Guy Debord, 1959)
Psychogeography: “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” The Situationists thought that if we urban subjects could become aware of how the city lives us, maybe we could figure out how to “live the city otherwise”—subversively, playfully, in accordance with our own desires rather than those constructed for and against us. I like to think about how music can do psychogeographical work, how it might encourage us to feel with and through urban landscapes. To that end, this playlist is a call to hear the city otherwise.
Let’s meet on the post-punk corner: The Futureheads, in an irresistibly propulsive rhythmic context where somehow every entrance feels like an upbeat, assert that The City is Here for You to Use. Joy Division’s Insight brings us to late 1970s Manchester, full of empty industrial spaces where Ian Curtis’s howls and manically spat lyrics might resonate. Then we’re cold in NYC, and though Paul Banks keeps singing to us that “New York cares,” the way that all those eight-note subdivisions (so characteristic of Interpol) echo into the void makes it hard to believe. The Boss, recounting a story about the luck-sustained, tragic hope of non-bosses, drives us down to an Atlantic City filled with audible ghosts, and then we just drive towards Tiny [American] Cities Made of Ashes with Modest Mouse, guitar twang, and Coke-a-Coke-a-Cola. Arriving in Denver, the grain of Willie Nelson’s voice reminds us that even if the city isn’t exactly ours, we might still slowly smile the night away, dancing. Then it’s Summer in the City, and Regina Spektor’s cute-soaring lines blur distinctions between loving and longing, places and people. Weird that The Cleaners from Venus start off insisting that “I’m not going mad” because this Summer in a Small Town, with its suffocating cymbal-as-lawn-sprinkler hits, sounds like it’s lived on the brink of sanity.
Sometimes psychogeographical resistance means claiming your place in the city, as South-Bronx hailing, avant-dance-punk-funkers ESG manage on My Street, or like Bobby Womack and a shimmering, soulful string section do Across 110th Street. The Decemberists paint us a jangling, Dickensian picture of some vagabonds On the Bus Mall, and then we’re back on the grimy, hectic, post-punk corner with the Savages’ City’s Full. Next up is Special Interest with All Tomorrow’s Carry, a dissonance-filled sonic personification of gentrification as a violent drunk. The Strokes, with some jagged little guitar riffs, assure us that we “belong to the city now,” but then on a floated commute through the bubble-landscape of Radiohead feelings, it’s only Glass Eyes and the palpable absence of belonging. Finally, I’ll close it out epic with The Districts’ Hey Jo, one of those tracks I like to put on so my quotation urban drifting feels like it might mean something, psychogeographically.
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.