Music Recommendations for Times of Deep Flow

We islanders are always working on art projects, theater projects, music projects, garden projects, woodworking projects, writing projects, event projects, technology projects, and the list goes on infinitely. While I love absolute quiet for much of the time that I’m writing, reading, thinking, and creating, I put the following message on Facebook for the times I’d like music to accompany productivity…

What is some of your favorite background music these days (while working on projects/writing/etc.)? I don’t spend enough time looking and the sheer amount of music out there is mind-blowing – can you trim it down for me to some of your top picks?

Here are the responses I got, in case you, too, need some immediate suggestions…

Vivaldi

Kate Bush

Summer Jazz

TG4, Irish Public Television, and PBS

Native American flute music

Eremo by Jeff Johnson and John Van Deusen

Instrumental Celtic

Chill Lo-fi Study Beats on Spotify

Brian Eno – Thursday Afternoon

Frank Morgan – soft saxohone jazz

Atomos on Spotify

The Blue Notebooks (15 Years) by Max Richter on Spotify

Mysterium by Hammock on Spotify

Virðulegu forsetar by Jóhann Jóhannsson on Spotify

Kiasmos Selected Works on Spotify

Jazz Classics – Louie Armstrong, Nina Simone, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis

Khruangbin on Austin City Limits – “People Everywhere”

Yoga Padhi on Soundcloud.com

Lionel Hampton

Ray Charles

Orcatrazz Swing Band

Brian Eno

Different kinds of French music (didn’t always want to listen to instrumental music but couldn’t focus with music with words…but music with words I couldn’t understand was often the sweet spot)

Philip Glass

Andre Previn

Star Wars Lo-fi on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/live/ew9DydimCPc)

Nils Frahm on low volume

Vitamin String Quartet cover songs on Spotify

Lord Byron

Shadowfax

The Best of Windham Hill plus… on Spotify

Ali Farka Touré

Bon Iver

Indian Chill on Spotify

The last several are my own suggestions. I wrote and compiled my Life on Orcas Island book almost entirely while listening to Lord Byron, but then went completely quiet in order to edit it again and again. Shadowfax, Windham Hill Artists, and Ali Farka Touré have been the backdrop to umpteen projects of mine through the years. Every time I hear Bon Iver in Darvill’s, I am immediately put in a creative frame of mind and want to go off and write. And whenever I watch a movie or do yoga with calm Indian music in the background, I want more of it.

I am currently wanting to fill a void of needing various “chill” types of music from different countries and cultures, if you have any suggestions. Or even East meets West types of instrumental compilations and soundtracks.

The other day as the dark clouds weighed Eastsound down, I took one of these suggestions and played Brian Eno while I was writing. Wow – I’ve never written something so dark and dour. I read it to my son and he stared at me like I’d gone mad. Here it is but don’t read it unless you want to feel bad…

What I Can’t Shake

Global culture teaches a hunger for luxuries beyond warm food, warm showers, warm beds. For the buying of every last little thing we need. But what about the collective indifference? How easy to forget who or what is harmed because we are removed from all of it.

In having everything, are we selling our souls?

There is sorrow in lacking real skill: I haven’t built my shelter, I don’t grow all my food, I’ve never sewn the clothes I wear. Our children are born into it – no tool in hand, no fiber in hand, no seed in hand. Empty hands, hungry for purpose, left open, gnawing for something to do. Those empty hands are handed screens to watch millions of nothingnesses…all. day. long., their yearning, needy hands thinking surely they will find something in all of the searching. Children sit side by side yet as alone as spinning planets in the darkness, drinking red Prime, contentedly clueless of what total junk pours into them. There is fatigue in deep purposelessness. Is that why children extinguish themselves? No one has told them their importance here?

We are collectively forgetting what matters.

There is sorrow in having when others lack – refugees, trafficked children, war-torn villages, beautiful animals. But how quickly some forget on their way to coffee with Joanna Gaines looking back at them from a “lovely” magazine cover in a window, or while watching celebrities – the modern-day heroes – donning ridiculous fashion on TV. While neurosurgeons and aid workers quietly work miracles.

We tell ourselves having is the goal. That freedom from work is freeing. But there was community in beading and fashioning feathered headdresses together. In men far out on the land, talking over life as they provided. In women sitting circular, sewing garments for the coming winter. In singing in many-voiced harmony while planting seeds and harvesting grain. Together.

We sit alone in our homes now. Each with its own washing machine. Each with its own dishwasher. Each with its own garage of tools. We have traded everything. For having, for owning, for isolation.

Culture says rich is good. Retirement is good. Having abundance in expensive things is good.

I do not fit in my culture, in my time, sometimes even in my home.

Aging was supposed to bring maturity with it, but every day I want out of the paradigm that I continually do things that harm. I can’t seem to avoid the plastics, the exploited worker, the stripped land, the robbed local.

Even the beloved dog sits bound in four walls all day. Alone, purposeless, barely moving when I’m gone. Teeth rotting, muscles atrophying. Robbed of running along the land all her days. Can’t find her own food and hates the stuff humans have put in bags. Never gets to be with friends. A sorrowfully bored yet cherished talisman of a culture forgetting to think collectively about what they do.

We are told we are free to be anything and everything we want. But culture whispers other things… People born on the land for generations are stuck within boundaries of unwanted land and casinos, unlearning skills passed through thousands of years. It’s not enough to care for her home and love her children well, a woman must be captivating, entrepreneurial, work a high job, and repeatedly prostitute her personal online brand. You wonder why her children are beautiful and dysfunctional? Men are told that each and every one of them has harmed someone and must hang their head in repentance.

And all along, the unspoken mantra: We must be one culture, one media, one monocrop.

Meanwhile languages die. Cultures are snuffed. And whales? Pigs? Insects? Valuable only for entertainment, profit, meat, and mystery until proven by science to be smarter than their oppressors.

My soul yearns for what we traded. For knowledge passed down from grandparents upon grandparents. Not in a degree that indebts me. For togetherness bonded in communal activity. Not the stranger who has friended my avatar. For singing and dancing into the night. Not a club charging a fee, with a bar vomiting out endless liquor, drugs numbing the pain, and a stupid band people call trendy in order to sound good to the Joneses. For talk of God and the Universe. Not the songs someone else wrote, or a church culture spreading flawed theology, or the idols we make of ourselves, our homes, and our myriad inanimate things filling ever-expanding mansions.

Poetry, find the people I belong with, whether Ghanaian, Welsh, Orcas Islander, Amish, Muslim, Activist, Introvert, Philosopher, Geographer, Burner, or fellow traveler a thousand years dead or ahead.

Media, draw us together for purposefulness.

World, collectively decide to uncover and celebrate what really matters.

Friend, you are not alone.

No offense Brian Eno or to the people who recommended him. It was a momentary perfect storm of music and emotions. Now as I write with the Summer Jazz recommendation and the sun peeking out of the clouds, everything feels light and cheery. (Thank goodness.)

Thank you to all of you who chimed in with your suggestions. I am working through listening to them but not nearly fast enough, as I still love plenty of absolute quiet.

I hope these suggestions augment your creative times…