What I'm Listening To, 2025.05.19

"fight fire with fire / light enemies with love"

There’s something uniquely sinister about formless music. People still shit on the ABABCAB pop music structure, but at least it provides space and structure for development. It comes from somewhere, goes somewhere, and does something along the way.

I spent an hour over the weekend listening to hold music. The hold music didn’t change keys. It didn’t develop its themes. It played the same three loosely connected motifs in sequence over and over again for an hour. It’s hack to say that phone tree hold music will be the sound track to hell, but I’m 100% convinced that it will. The interesting part is why it will soundtrack eternal damnation. It’s not because it fucking sucks (though it does). It’s because it fucking sucks in the exact same way, ceaselessly, forever.

Anyway here’s some music that doesn’t suck.

A couple weeks ago I had lunch with a couple of friends. I’ve known one of them for over 20 years. He was a DJ when we met (and a good one). We spent most of our college years coaxing him into soundtracking parties and ever more ridiculous basement shows. (This culminated with a show so off the hook that I can’t tell the story here without his express permission and possibly that of a lawyer.)

One of the artifacts he gave me early on in our friendship was a burned two-disc set of Paul Oakenfold’s Essential Mix from the Rojan. It felt exotic and powerful. It represented a genre of music I knew almost nothing about (and, in my teenage insouciance had been dismissive of), recorded in China and arriving on US shores via the UK and delivered via the Internet, which at the time still felt like a place that contained mysteries. Needless to say, this mix is one of those pieces of art that I probably overestimate the quality of for purely biographical reasons.

In a way, it’s the opposite of hold music. Not only does it go places, it wanders through places just to pass through them to something else. It meanders and shifts tone and instrumentation, all while staying in a narrow lane of tempo and mood. It’s a great example of how to use differences in tone and texture to provide energy and motion in a set. If anyone wanted an on-ramp to electronic music, I think it’s one of the best. (I don’t think I’m saying that just because it was my entry point.)

I listened to this remix regularly all through undergrad. I studied to it, danced to it, drove around town to it, even memorably made out with someone to it (though I would not recommend it for that purpose).

The set starts strong, but really hits its stride a couple minutes in with a remix of Everything But the Girl’s “Five Fathoms” that replaces the weird flaring synth line of the original with a driving stomp/clap rhythm and clipped synth punches that gives the track a lot more motion. The lyrics (“I walk the city late at night”) serve to set up a suggestive tone for the rest of the mix. (It was, in fact, the soundtrack to a lot of late night walks for me in my 20s, given that I rarely went to bed before about 3am.)

The apex of the mix, Planet Perfecto’s "Bullet In The Gun" brings the whole thing to an ecstatic high before starting to ease the energy off with Skip Raiders’ “Another Day” and its ethereal use of the melody of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”. The effect is electrifying and nicely telegraphs the upcoming end of the set.

It’s a good example of the arc that a good set can have and how the whole can have a narrative quality all its own. There’s motion here not just from tempo but in the flow from track to track and the path they describe. You don’t need lyrical or even authorial cohesion to have interesting motion in your music.

So there’s really no excuse for the shit they force us to listen to while we’re stuck in on hold in the waiting room to hell.