I've taken to listening to Youtube playlists when working on stuff. For a while, it was Vulpixel/Fruddle's playlists of relaxing video game music, but those all got taken down over the past year which is an insult and an attack on my person
So instead I've been listening to less gamey and more general ambient/atmospheric/etc. playlists. For one: there seems to be a whole niche of "backrooms" music, stuff meant to evoke the emptiness of liminal spaces and inspired by that... game? It's a game now right? Surely it's a game but I didn't spot it on itch.io and you know if it's an indie horror game it's on itch.io
Backroom/dreamcore stuff is interesting to me specifically because it's ambient. It's kinda... just ambient. But that genre, even moreso than post-rock (which I used to play), is highly tied to context and presentation. The attachment to liminal spaces isn't even new: the album that defined ambient as a genre, after all, was Brian Eno's Music for Airports. You look me in the eye and tell me airports ain't liminal as fuck
But it's like, the next generation of the same context. As you go younger (in the US, at least), your instinct of a liminal space gets more digital. The airports of the 1970s are the abandoned VRChat servers of the 2020s. It's all part of the same continuum, and I love it. I love how a persistent human sentiment or curiosity ends up emerging in different ways due to the environment that surrounds it and the intersection of nature and nurture that it represents. It's like that ancient hedgehog on wheels demonstrating the innate human desire to see a speedy little guy. (I also love when the comments of those videos recommend stuff from earlier in the continuum, like Boards of Canada or what have you.)
For two: remember emo/indie bands around the early 2000s naming songs with rather long and specific phrases? Stuff like "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse" or "A Little Less Sixteen Candles, a Little More "Touch Me""? Well, in the world of mood-building Youtube playlists, folks have apparently learned to go hard on that design. Doesn't seem to matter the genre, the playlists that crop up for me have increasingly specific and elaborate titles. To wit, and to tie it all together, a selection of classical/ambient playlist titles from nobody:
- when you cry for days and see the devil within your own pond of misery
- you're the poet valmiki trying to compose the ramayana on palm leaf
- what the moon sings to you before sleeping
- you're being seduced by a rusalka but your friends are trying to stop you to go further
Having never been in any of those situations I can't say if they're accurate titles so this is more an observation than a recommendation