A [sad] backdrop

2020’s music for office workers playlist

Concentration and contemplation are two quite different things but often they require a similar backdrop. Music that becomes emotional osmosis, pulling you into the flow. Feeling everything or nothing or being so overwhelmed it’s sort of both.

Obviously the quest to avoid distraction and to be fully present in introspection are the flip sides of a coin. Music that was perhaps intended for one often ends up being a great backdrop for the other. And vice versa.

What I’m trying to say - not particularly well this week - is that we often *cough* imbue meaning on certain types of blissful or mournful music where there feels like a lot of “space”. Room for the brain to breathe or just be. Or hide. Burrowing the badness under a rug of strings.

For the last decade or more I’ve made myself a backdrop for working to… and if anyone else likes it, that’s a bonus.

I find a lot of the ambient music on the DiS forums when flicking through album recommendations and the rest is mellow tracks by either acts I’ve always loved or new discoveries. Calm is the only real criteria and often instrumental but I’m a lyric obsessive and sometimes it’s comforting (and not too distracting) when words trickle in.

I realise this may not be a properly sad af backdrop that you signed up for but we all need a few flares of light amidst the infinite darkness… right? And to be fair, some of it could be super bleak but it isn’t intended to make you grimace.

TL;DR? Pop the 2020 edition my Music For Office Workers playlist series on when you need to focus or if the vines of anxiety start growing around you or even if you just want a cushion of sound (glad I didn’t call Drowned in Sound that tbqh!).

listen / subscribe on Spotify

It’s all worth further exploration but if you’re looking for box fresh… there’s a glorious new instrumental album from Ed Harcourt (full disclosure: he was formerly managed by me, such is my level of fandom) and Sarah Davachi’s album that also came out on Friday are both fantastic listens - get thee to Bandcamp or your local record store.

For anyone not on Spotify, here’s the tracklisting:

Jon Hopkins - Scene Suspended

Daniel Avery - Illusion Of Time

Sarah Davachi - Play The Ghost

Ed Harcourt - Drowning In Dreams

Mary Lattimore - Sometimes He's In My Dreams

Noveller - Effektology

Sufjan Stevens - Disinheritance

Agnes Obel - Island Of Doom

Julianna Barwick - Inspirit

Isobel Waller-Bridge - September

Chromatics - Stiff As A Board

Inventions - Continuous Portrait

Kate NV - Du Na

Nine Inch Nails - Trust Fades

Eluvium - Dusk Tempi

Mary Lattimore - Dreaming of the Kelly Pool

Bing & Ruth - Live Forever

Julia Holter - Stealing Money - Extended

Laurel Halo - Hyphae

Jenny Hval - Bonus Material

Nils Frahm - No Step on Wing

Four Tet - Mama Teaches Sanskrit

Anna Phoebe - By The Sea

Susanne Sundfor - When The Lord

Erland Cooper - Hether Blether

Sofie Birch - Vidsyn

Daniel Avery - Inside The Ruins

Hilary Woods - N.I.B.

Noveller - Zeaxanthin

Marissa Nadler - Solitude