Back in the day when I first started dotting out these dark fuckbuddy moments with music on the page, it felt like my hand and the keyboard were fusing into a bit of a saviour complex sword that they’d hold against my neck. Sit down. Be a good little human. Which was ironic, because the only way I felt I could even be a bit human would be to stand above the Long Island Expressway and just roar.motherfucker.roar until either I shouted out all the feeling or my organs came spewing out of me. I wasn’t human, I was Discord.Being–an alter ego I took on to advocate for my humanity when I was painted with a scarlet F for failure, fuckup, and foreigner to all. It comes from a Shlohmo remix of an Alan Watts lecture on the natural satori: that point where trauma faces you square in the eyes and there is really nothing you can do left about life, there is nothing you can’t do about life.

It’s absolute freedom.
When you know you are gonna die.

But you survive. And suddenly everyone is harmony on one level, and you’re just discord. You’d let go. And now you’re slammed back down to Earth again sitting in piss soaked alleys after a dour, disassociated attempt to dance in the club. I feel like I’d given my voice to the cosmos, that cancer had cut it out of me so others could use it to say words I’d never say about myself over my coffin.  So I started using music blogging to give myself a way to cope, a way to learn to cuddle my vocal cords until they spoke again.

I was driven by the fact that no one fucking interacts with music on a carnal level anymore.  We’re just pithy comments with good taste hidden by avatars that aren’t even really us, but that one time someone  fucked us and it felt.amazing so we developed into it an identity.  The less you can say about music the better. only emo assholes analyze music.It seemed nonsensical to me. Musicians shot that song up with a Colt 45 until it was bleeding emotion and you describe it as an ‘electro banger that makes me wanna dance’. Fuck you.It felt silencing. Here were all  these musicians shouting over the Long Island Expressway and all everyone saw them as was discord in the way of their good time.  I was on a mission to use my trauma to unearth the layers of emotion out of the singularity of the song.  Every great song had a gem of universal truth that needs to be cut by the hands of a music blogger and explored It’s our symbiosis with music, our reason for being. Otherwise we’re just fucking parasites.

And I took it to these playlists. It was my inspiration to share them with you: a way to store emotion away for when you could handle it, when it made sense for music to transport you

there.to.that.dark.place.that.liberating.place.
that.human.place.

Playlists aren’t just a collection of random tracks.  Fatal wine enemas sound infinitely more interesting than those. They hold within them a central tension, a story.  Track order matters. What you place one song against another can create an alchemy that could react in ways even you can’t control. Lyrics matter. Sounds of your heart carried on soundwaves matter. Playlists speak for you.

This one says my cancer has come back. It’s about the bargaining. When the natural satori is face fucking you, and you are doing everything in your power to pretend it isn’t. It’s about people going through trauma not as victims but as agents of intimacy, who feel their hand rub down a hairy chest and long for what it could mean. It’s about the way we smell a body, kiss a neck and take in all those pheromones–the scents carry us to places we never achieved.  It’s about learning to accept the end as natural.  About vowing to be.human.again. when it isn’t.  Madeon’s ‘Imperium’ isn’t placed accidentally on first base: it’s there to carry all the confusion, the intensity, the fuckery that you’re about to spend the next 20 tracks exploring. Lenesko’s ‘Circles’ doesn’t take up the rear end because it likes to get fucked in the ass by all the emotion that came before it: it’s noticeably lighter, it’s your commitment to not be a dark dick dancing in the wilderness should you ever return. Everything in between are last gasps of humanity caught mid-orgasm.

CATCH A FREE DOWNLOAD OF THE LIST HERE. CHECK OUT THE TOP 5 SONGS BELOW AND A FULL PLAYLIST BELOW.

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5. MADEON// IMPERIUM


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4. DAWN GOLDEN// DISCOLORATION (BESHKEN REMIX)

you took my hand and brought me down in the morning
and i was sitting, waiting for the telephone to swallow me whole.

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3. GALANTIS// RUNAWAY (YOU AND I) [GRIFFIN STOLLER REMIX]

My arms are wide, catching fire as the wind blows
I know that I’m rich enough for pride,
I see a billion dollars in your eyes
Even if we’re strangers til we die
I wanna run away
Anywhere out this place

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2. DIPLO (FT.  EDWARD DROSTE  & ROSTAM)// LONG WAY HOME

Wonder if you ever see me eating all alone
Wonder if you even notice when I’m gone
Wonder if you like to see me by myself
Wonder if you’re ever gonna care again
Gonna care again

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1. AQUILO// HUMAN (MARIAN HILL REMIX)

I know that its been hard,
But even when its hurting,
You’re gonna have to start,
To learn to recognize,
That even in the dark,
There’s lines between the spaces,
Hiding where you are,
This is us, you know it on the inside,
This is us, so you should show it on the outside,
This is us, dust the dust up off your shoulders,
Feet on ground, you’ll come round,
And be human again.

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FULL PLAYLIST

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