Playlists

At age 12, I received my first electric bass guitar. It was a knockoff black Fender Squier, and I thought it was the most beautiful thing ever. Every day after school, I would play the same two or three Iron Maiden songs over and over again, practicing as much as any teenager could afford. But I was never a good bass player, or at least not as good as some of my musically inclined friends --I didn't have an amplifier, which contributed to not even knowing what I was actually playing. And I wasn't trying to be the best at it, either. In the bass, I saw a tool —or a game— to make a strange but grounding force, with a few precise beats, brought everyone into shared patterns.

That was, and still is, magic to me.

To this day, I enjoy sharing patterns with others. Nowadays, I mostly make eclectic playlists. Vangelis, Blondie, Don Omar, Phil Collins, Rachmaninoff, Sergio Vargas, and Kraftwerk were all part of my teenage soundscape.

Instead of genre puritanism, what matters to me in this sonic ecology is that bodies can find forms to be together, at home. I like to imagine playlists as affective architectural designs producing soft, felt spaces—compositions that anchor bodies in and through motion.

They are also experiments in bringing bodies together into common(ing) experiences.

In this section, I will share a few of my playlists. They tend to be long (3 - 5 hours) and do not have an internal order, so I suggest you listen to them on shuffle —have you read about the history & political economy of the shuffle feature?

• Refrains & intensities

A playlist for moments when you need to go elsewhere so you spin in circles until your core becomes your line of flight. Rhythmic patterns delineating territories in a field of chaos, through repetition and variations in intensity. Expect unexpected textures—sonic, affective, and otherwise.

• Writing

A playlist perfect for when you need to sit down and get into the zone. Piano pieces with no recognizable melodies, no voices—just pure focus for your writing.

• Sabroso

It's Saturday on a summer weekend, and you're driving back from Black Sands Beach, CA.

• Abstract space

This one is for late evenings or when you need to zero in on a task without interruptions. Imagine a white box in the middle of nowhere, an abstract space that lets you concentrate.

• Voyage 3,000

A playlist designed to help you step away from life and escape to another world. Neither acoustic nor synthetic, it weaves together repetitions, patterns, and intensities to take you elsewhere.