Infinite Playlist #5

1. Emancipator – “Soon It Will Be Cold Enough” (2006)

A lot of this past year has been about me adventuring into genres that I am largely unfamiliar with. I would just type in something like “best trip hop albums” and begin finding titles that resonated with me. Having already fallen in love with Portishead, I was eager to find more names. I am in love with the peacefulness and melancholy that every track carries. While those like DJ Shadow are ubiquitous masters of the genre, I found one name on Reddit that quickly caught my attention. I had no idea who Emancipator was. My only clue was that he was one of the latter trip hop artists who catered to soundscapes. While I personally found it to be a crapshoot on if it would be so mellow that I’d lose interest, there was something infectious from the moment I pressed play on this record.

This is what looking out a window on a wintery day feels like. It’s got this chill that hangs onto every note, where the desolate notes carry through the whirling melodies that come and go with such vivid emotion. While there’s this optimism somewhere in the mix, what ultimately shines through is how immersive it is. The sound is self-reflective, able to convey nostalgia for a year that’s passed with the mystery of what lies ahead. It’s an infectious little record that encourages one to close your eyes and just feel the snowflakes fall on you or wander through a forest where the branches are beautifully covered in patches of snow. It’s not the overproduced whimsy of a Christmas song, but something much more insular and cathartic.

At the halfway mark of 2023, Emancipator has ranked as one of my favorite discoveries of the year. While I can’t say that I’ve enjoyed his next three records quite as impulsively, there’s still something exciting about cracking open Spotify and pressing play. It’s a chance to mellow out, relax, and notice the power of instrumentals. It’s brilliant in its unconventional nature but, more importantly, each album feels like its own unique experience. He takes you to different corners and makes you see the wonder of the world. It’s cheesy to say and I realize that the meditative music that I haven’t fallen in love with do this more consistently. Emancipator at least knows to keep the listener’s pulse alive, adding enough percussion to make you feel connected to the environment, bobbing your head and occasionally finding a moment of zen that can only be achieved from devoted listening. 

2. Charlie Mingus – “The Clown” (1957)

Another major discovery of 2023 has been my infatuation with certain jazz artists. With an emphasis on the 1950s and 60s, I have been consuming records like crazy, adoring the way that they craft these notes into something new and timeless. You feel their soul in every horn blowing or piano key. I wouldn’t call myself a scholar, but I’m beginning to understand what’s so great about people like Charlie Mingus. Among a group of artists known for reflecting on their own struggles, there’s something transparent about Mingus’ ability to capture his rebelliousness through song. He would have his therapist write liner notes or break down conventions of the form in hopes of finding what's fresh. I can get a sense of him shining through in how he plays bass, where the notes that drag allow you to notice his pain and frustration with the world. He’s a genuine article.

It would be difficult to pick one record that I would call essential. He’s had so many that have left me smiling by the end. However, I choose “The Clown” because of something undeniable about it. At this point, he had worked through the previous era of jazz and was now challenging the form with poetry that details a Pagliacci-type conflict of the artist. His failure is his greatest source of comedy, and it shines in how the horn sounds like it’s drooping, pathetically sad, as the narrator – the dad from A Christmas Story (1983) – creates a galloping story so rich with psychology and pathos that makes you understand the weight of everything around this track. It’s supposed to be a concept album, and I think instrumentally it works so perfectly at conveying the pain and the importance of music as an outlet for escape. 

There’s a handful of artists whose work I’ll impulsively dig into, and Mingus has been that for me and jazz. Part of it is simply that he’s an upright bass player that speaks to my heart. It’s also that even in a genre that is about spontaneity and surprise, he has yet to dull me. His passion shines through and the more he plays with form the more I am intrigued by his direction. He had conflicts with society throughout his life, even making a documentary about the time he was kicked out of his flat, and I think it resonates with the implicit nature of listening to his work. He’s often an angry type but also someone who is fairly amusing in his antagonism. It’s the flicking of conventions, recognizing that he’s a clown but he’s also a deeply wounded soul. How does one live with that dichotomy? This record does a halfway decent job of conveying that.

3. Kid Koala – “Carpal Tunnel Syndrome” (2000)

This is far from the first time that I have heard OF Kid Koala. He’s actually been a fairly active collaborator with Edgar Wright and even donated tracks to Baby Driver (2017). There have been points in listening to his catalog where I recognize songs that had otherwise been obscure to me. They were in films like Shaun of the Dead (2004) and presented an interesting mix of dance music with jazz-style cutting that made the comedic nature shine through. An initial listen will convince you that this is just some strange experiment of sounds being put together. There’s no immediacy that someone like MF Doom would have. He describes himself as weird and I think his early work especially lives up to it.

What I love about his work is that I am not entirely sure where half of this stuff comes from. I feel like he goes to different corners of the earth to find the vinyl of these random sounds and assembles them into something brilliant. It’s more in the dialogue samples, all of which are inconsistently assembled to make it feel like the listener is wandering through a moment, landing on these tangents that make no sense but, out of context, are genuinely absurd. It’s the type meant to make you laugh and I especially love how he manages to make something that sounds like a dating mixer feel like it’s full of anti-social oddballs. 

Kid Koala comes across as an acquired taste and someone who took me a little bit to fall in love with. However, once it became clear what made his work stand out, it was hard to not want to add a few songs to a playlist just to add some flavor. He’s very good at remixing a melody and making you admire this old school vibe that feels like he grew up watching 80s sitcoms and random ads for products that may or may not have existed. This is a glimpse into an alternate world, and it’s something that I genuinely enjoy as something intrinsically dated, but also timeless for how it creates a sense of the past trying to scratch through and reach the present. It never quite does. Whatever resonates is coincidental. It may not be the grandest musical statement, but it’s still a worthwhile entry nonetheless.

4. A.G. Cook – “7G” (2020)

On the day that I wrote this, news broke that P.C. Music is officially closing its doors after 10 years in the business. While I have only been a fan since 2022, there was something sad about seeing this institution fade into the ether. It could be that their best work has been behind them, but it’s also that one has to wonder what the direction for P.C. Music could be at this point. Head producer A.G. Cook has pretty much reinvented pop and teamed up with people like Beyonce and Lady Gaga to produce new forms of madness. Others have created some of the most delirious, infectious sounds of the past few years. This clearly was some starting point, like Odd Future, and couldn’t last forever.

While I have really enjoyed a lot of Cook’s work as a producer, I haven’t actually taken the time to sit down and admire what he brought as a musician. This could be because his debut album “7G” was 2.5 hours long. I’m not the type to just play a few tracks of an album, so any ordeal to give it a respectable listen was a challenge. However, once I did I found that I was the type of person to love every minute of it. Not every section is as profound or essential as they could be, but all in all, they create the full embodiment of Cook as a creative. He’s always challenging the soundscape and presenting something that is meant to challenge the listener. What I love is that he’s in a fairly similar wheelhouse to me in that he’s pulling from genres relevant to millennials, finding a way to romanticize aggression and the perversion of ballads. It’s an inconsistent record that never settles for long, and it still works as highlighting where hyperpop could go or, more specifically, why Cook is bound to be a legend by the end of his career.

I can’t say that this is one I’ll continually put on, but it is a transcendental record of electronic sounds that opens different parts of my brain and ponders what I can do to make the world a weirder place. I have yet to listen to “Apple” yet, but if it’s anything like “7G” then I think I’ll have a great time. There’s so much that I don’t understand about P.C. Music outside of the big hits, but even then finding records like this makes me realize that the ambitions were never that small. They were always wanting to challenge our perception of where everything was going. In a time where 100 Gecs have produced my album of the year, hyperpop isn’t necessarily gone but its progenitors are starting to move onto the next phase. I can only hope it’s as wild and unexpected as what came before. 

5. Daniel Pemberton – “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” (2023)

Given that this is my third piece to reference Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), I think it’s clear how great I think this movie is. Not only is it narratively rich, but I found the work that composer Daniel Pemberton did to be another slam dunk. The first film was a maximalist achievement unto itself, so having the ability to go bigger and expand the musical pallet was a genius move. This isn’t just a soundtrack that throws every sound at the wall. They’re all placed in such a way that they convey the grandeur and intimacy at different points, knowing where to build and pull back in efforts to convey the humanity buried underneath the comic book majesty.

I’m not always a big fan of scores that have this larger than life nature. Some are downright unfocused and I dislike scores that are too discordant. Here, he manages to incorporate elements of punk and sitar alongside new motifs for its central cast. This is a fully realized world and I’m in awe of where the sound pallet goes. Even if I have yet to listen to the Metro Boomin’ soundtrack that accompanies the film, there is something fulfilling about a franchise that doesn’t think small. There’s a whole organic ecosystem that makes you buy into their world. It’s an animation feat that is made better by a near two hour score that manages to feel like you’re pulled into different corners of a Spider-Verse. It causes you to want to stop long enough to hear longer tracks and grow giddy at the idea that yes, a major studio actually can make art this inclusive and interesting.

Pemberton in general is a composer that I hope gets his due one of these days. He’s been a master of blockbuster filmmaking and adds plenty of humor to the average work. While I still consider Ocean’s Eight (2018) to be his best work, there’s plenty to like with how he reassembles the familiar in new ways. It’s not often that a superhero film is allowed to have music this daring, challenging expectations and leaving you with a few new melodies stuck in your head. There’s so much to love with this score and is bound to be one of my favorites from the past year simply because of how propulsive it is, engaging you for the entire running time without ever becoming too overwhelming.