Air Texture Selects
Spotify Playlists of the Music that Influences Us. Tracks listed by original release date.
Sam Prekop - What happens when a multi-instrumentalist jazz player and former Sea and Cake member makes an artistic shift into modular synthesis from a musician's POV? Good things. Feels like: if Oval could also be post rock, somehow.
Boards of Canada - Nostalgia beats from an imaginary vintage North. Feels like uncovering a tape-saturated, sun-faded memory of a childhood you aren’t entirely sure you actually lived, and a cold war paganism lurking just below the surface.
Cocteau Twins - Nothing like it in music. Fells like “Swooping, wailing, simultaneously utterly impassioned and completely incomprehensible, as if she's singing in tongues in some wild, beatific state." - Guardian
GAS - Biophilia favourites from the maestro Wolfgang Voigt. Feels like wandering entirely alone through a dense, fog-wrapped Black Forest at midnight, where the trees are vibrating with the ghost of a classical orchestra and the ground beneath your feet is breathing.
18 Carat Affair - Denys Fontana, foundational architect of hypnagogic pop. Feels like old warped VHS jazzercize tapes and smooth jazz loops meld into a hazy, lo-fi dream (vaporwave references aside).
Joni Mitchell - The guitar, her voice, and her open tunings - a complete and singular singer songwriter, turning uncompromising vulnerability into sophisticated sonic architecture. Feels like watching a master painter sketch a portrait in real-time, where the guitar chords are fluid watercolor brushstrokes and her voice is the shifting light that completely changes the mood of the room from one line to the next, yet humanized.
John Daniels/ Forest Management - “Layers of rumbling sonic gravel rest below a deep sea of hovering tones and textures that gradually shift in and out of focus.” - Tone Madison. Feels like the exact moment a winter fog completely rolls over a brutalist city skyline, softening every sharp edge and swallowing up the noise of the streets until all that remains is a low, humming solitude, aka Chicago.
Devin Morrison - Dream Lobby favourites. Feel like like discovering a lost cassette of Quincy Jones arranging a jazz trio who trade their traditional acoustic instruments for vintage synthesizers and drum machines. Deeply in the vapor soul pocket.
New Order - focused on Peter Hook co-production. They may hate each other now sadly, but you can’t sound like New Order without Hooky’s lead bass phrasing.
Joy Division - Feels like a stripped down and minimal industrial approach that changed music forever. Ian Rest In Peace.
Stars of the Lid - “... communicating endless swathes of meaning through the sheer, breathless weight of their sounds." - Beats Per Minute. Feels like like floating in a sensory deprivation tank built inside an abandoned cathedral, where the boundaries of your own body dissolve into a warm, endless suspension of classical drone and nostalgia. Brian Rest in Peace.
Adult Contemporary - late 1970s and early 1980s Soft Rock, Disco Pop, and Songs for Love and Cocaine. Feels like stepping inside a high-end recording studio on the PCH in 1981, waiting for session musicians who show up 6 hours late and completely high, only to lay down the smoothest, most expensive-sounding groove you’ve ever heard.
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