end of year playlists

i love music and have always been in the habit with some friends of compiling and exchanging playlists for the end of the year. we used to do that via burning cds but now it's much easier to do via streaming services. the last few years i have actually taken to creating two because i listen to so much ambient/instrumental music that i ended up thinking that was better as a separate playlist. anyway here are the playlists and a bit more reflection on them below

2020 tunes on apple music or

2020 tunes on spotify

(for the record there is one tune that was not on spotify so that is one short - 1-0 apple!)

2020 horizontal on apple music

2020 horizontal on spotify

this year perhaps more than any other, music has been a great source of comfort and inspiration. i always listen to a lot of instrumental music but i have found quiet ambient music especially soothing. two things really inspired me in that regard - one was jon hopkins posting a playlist of his on apple music which consisted of 24 hours of ambient music (!) and the other is the curated playlist on apple music called pure ambient which has 100 tunes at any one time but that includes quite a lot of recent releases as well as more classic tunes. through those i have discovered the likes of snufmumriko (i had to include a tune in the playlist which is possibly my most played tune of the year but it came out in 2019 - don't tell anyone), antonymes (whose album like rumours of hushed thunder ois gorgeous but didn't feature as it came out in 2015) and ian hawgood.

but the other way music featured for me this year was in relation to black lives matter and the whole cultural debate and protest after george floyd's death. i found the response of dj's such as gilles petersen really amazing in how they played what seemed like just the right tunes of protest, lament and justice. his club lockdown was a wonderful moment in the year. i also really was inspired and challenged by steve mcqueen's incredible series small axe and the soundtrack to those was fantastic. so these playlists below are not tunes that were released in 2020 but they feel like they belong to the year as much if not more so than the playlists above. the first is simply a set of tunes i have added to through the year that i called blm (black lives matter) though i have not ordered it in any fashion so might be best played on random select. the second is the tunes i liked (which is most) from the small axe series - if you want all the tunes i have added the link below to the official playlist on spotify.

blm apple playlist

small axe apple playlist

small axe official spotify playlist

that should keep you going for a while!