/reading find me something new to walk to
Ten doors. Each one connects to something already in your blood, but leads somewhere you haven't been.
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra - "Promises." The whole thing. 46 minutes. One continuous piece. It's electronic, it's jazz, it's classical, it's spiritual. It moves the entire time but never rushes. This might be the single most important piece of music you haven't heard. It is the center of your library - the thing everything you've ever saved has been pointing toward. Walk to this first.
Mulatu Astatke - "Yekermo Sew." Ethiopian jazz. 1974. This is a root you don't know exists yet. The same warmth that's in Hall & Oates and in Fairuz and in Air lives here in a form you've never encountered.
Khruangbin - "Evan Finds the Third Room." Thai funk filtered through Houston dub filtered through psychedelia. Walking music in its purest form. It glows exactly the way your ears need things to glow.
Nala Sinephro - "Space 1.8." Jazz harp and modular synthesizer. Sounds impossible. Sounds like warm water moving through a cathedral. Alice Coltrane has been in your library since 2016 waiting for you to follow her. This is where she leads.
Midori Takada - "Through The Looking Glass." Japanese. 1983. Percussion and marimba. Not ambient - it walks. It has the same hypnotic forward pull as Underworld's "Dark and Long" but made with wood and skin instead of circuits.
Ryuichi Sakamoto - "async." This is Thomas Newman and Erik Satie and Aphex Twin fused into one person. Japanese composer who scored films, made electronic music, played classical piano.
Boards of Canada - "Music Has The Right To Children." Warm, nostalgic, slightly decayed electronic music that sounds like a memory of a summer that might not have happened. If your library had a soundtrack, this is what it would sound like.
Tinariwen - "Tassili." Tuareg guitar music from the Sahara desert. Psychedelic like Tame Impala but from a place where the psychedelia comes from endless horizon and heat instead of a studio. Music made by people who walk for a living.
Bonobo - "Kerala." Then let the album "Migration" take you wherever it goes. Warm, propulsive, global, luminous, never still.
Hania Rani - "Esja." Polish piano. Your Satie and Dvorak and Shostakovich door just opened two weeks ago. Walk through it and she's standing there.
Start with Promises. Walk until it ends. See where you are.