I’m fairly new to streaming music, having only conceded to using Apple Music two years ago. My preference is still CDs, vinyl, cassettes, or if I’m in the studio, my iPod. Because of the limited space on an iPod, I tend to listen to the same music in the studio over and over. My iPod includes albums that the art teacher in high school played in drawing class (Bridge Over Troubled Water, A Night at the Opera, Songs for Silverman), music from the print studio in undergrad (Age of Adz, Moment Bends, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?), and other tried and true albums for making art (The Ugly Organ, The Room’s Too Cold, More Adventurous).
For years, I have had a rule of only listening to the iPod in the studio, as an attempt to keep the phone out of that space. But over the last two years, I have begun breaking that rule to allow for other listening while in the studio.
Today is Spotify Wrapped/Apple Music Replay day (depending on which service you use). For the second year in a row I have noticed a very close connection to the work I produce in the studio to the music on my Replay. This realization caused me to think back over other bodies of work and the music I listened to in the making. I’ve always been somewhat conscious of my music choice’s effect on my art production, but I didn’t realize just how clear that connection truly is.
Stats:
2022 Top song | Read My Mind by David Bazan (Killers cover): This song reached number one for me due to the two weeks that I decided to listen to it on repeat while working on a large drawing of folding chairs.
2022 Top album | Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues by Vladimir Ashkenazy: This album reached number one for me due to setting the rule that I only listen to it while creating a suite of 18 lithograph and screen print monoprints inspired by Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues. That meant hours and weeks and months of listening to it in the print studio.
2023 Top album | Read Music/Speak Spanish by Desaparecidos: This album reached number one for me because I listened to it almost exclusively while creating the screen prints for my exhibition about American suburbia. My top artist and top song were also from this album. If I wasn’t listening to this album while printing, I was listening to The Suburbs by The Arcade Fire on my iPod.
I share these thoughts only to highlight not only the importance of music in my art making, but the role that repetitive music listening plays in the studio. From listening to the same albums for the last 20 years, to strictly choosing to listen to one song on repeat to affect my making, repetitive music plays a bigger role in my practice than I give it credit for.