

And then I follow that with a track by Ry Cooder, from the Paris, Texas soundtrack, because there’s a song called “Ry Cooder” on the Tortoise album. Hearing the Metallica thing in that context makes it sound like a post-rock track. There’s also a Metallica demo of the bass player just playing solo bass, and the song after that is an early Tortoise track that has a prominent bass in the theme. If you listen to it with a different ear, there’s quite a lot going on. It’s the song “Everytime”-I mostly knew it because it’s in Spring Breakers-and then hearing it in the context of your playlist, I was like, wow, the production on this song is absolutely out of this world. That’s another one I was going to bring up. This is how the playlist works: leaping without prejudice between styles, decades, and continents mixing the relatively popular and the utterly arcane following associations that are sometimes apparent and sometimes oblique, probing your assumptions about what’s connected and what isn’t. George Harrison, the Beatle with the most pronounced interest in Indian music, rubs shoulders with Balsara & His Singing Sitars, an Indian band most famous for covering the Beatles. The winding melodies of American post-bop find echoes in Malian kora music. Hear them one after the other and you might wonder for a moment whether Starrah hired Emmanuel as her synth player.

On paper, the ebullient sing-raps of Starrah’s 2016 track “Rush” and the devotional arpeggios of JD Emmanuel’s 1982 new age cult-classic “Prayer” would seem to have nothing in common. Brandy’s “Turn It Up,” a clubby Timbaland-produced R&B song from 2004, follows “Aruca,” a nearly impenetrable wall of feedback from the obscure 1990s noise-pop band Medicine, which happens to share a slightly faster version of the same basic drum beat. It seems possible that no one knows all the playlist’s contours except Hebden himself.Ĭue up any section and you’ll find at least one revelatory parallel between ostensibly unrelated music. Every turn in between is deeply considered-every turn I’ve encountered, anyway. You’d start with “GL,” the raucous debut single by British-Armenian electronic producer Hagop Tchaparian, and end, six sleepless nights later, with “Earth’s Magnetic Field,” composer Charles Dodge’s 1970 attempt to render the titular force as primitive synthesizer music. Hearing it in its entirety would take just shy of a week, without breaks. Still, I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. I’ve been listening to it for years, at times as an idle curiosity and others as a minor obsession. Yet it would not be possible without streaming’s access to vast amounts of history’s recorded music.
#Spotify playlist full
The playlist is a rare welcoming spot in the otherwise alienating landscape of streaming: overgrown and unruly, full of strange humanity in a place where slickness and predictability are the norm. From my perspective, the whole thing has become nearly as important to the Four Tet canon as his actual albums.
