bodhi tree swaying

From time to time I like to share music, especially when it’s a combination of tracks that just happens to have been thrown together by my iPhone while driving. I hope you enjoy these.

I liked what my iPhone randomly put together last night as I was driving home from teaching a meditation class.

8track plays them in random order, but here are the tracks.

Just Another High – Roxy Music
Just Friends – Amy Winehouse
Kakn – Gigi… See More
Kiss The Sky – Shawn Lee & The Ping Pong Orchestra
Knowing – Lucinda Williams
Lady Stardust – David Bowie
The Lake – Antony And The Johnsons
Land Of… – St. Germain
Last Nite – The Strokes
Last Walk Around Mirror Lake – Boom Bip
Lazy Calm – Cocteau Twins
le ciel dans une chambre – Carla Bruni

French pop music rightly has a reputation for being awful, but here’s some music in French that’s pretty good. Most of the artists aren’t French. Axelle Red is Belgian. Carli Bruni is Italian. Isabelle Boulay and Julie Dorion are Canadian. Bat For Lashes is a British band with a Pakistani singer. That leaves KYO, who are that rare thing — a French band that doesn’t totaly suck, Florent Pagny, who is one of those French singers who can’t decide whether he’s singing pop music or opera, and Francis Cabrel who is (in my humble opinion) absolutely brilliant.

Enjoy!

Last night I searched in iTunes for REM’s “Low” and up came a whole bunch of tracks with the characters “low” in the title. And I looked at the list of songs and thought it was a damn fine collection. I whittled out a couple that weren’t quite as awesome and I’d like, and here is the hand-carved, jewel-studded, lovingly polished essence.

I selected The Strokes’ “Is This It,” let iTunes’ Genius build a playlist of 25 tracks, picked my favorites, and ended up with this playlist. So it’s kind of half random, with a smidgen of discrimination, but of course it’s all based on stuff that’s on my computer, and since every song is hand-tooled it’s ultimately a very personal thing at root. Isn’t music always?

(Oops. Band of Horses was in my last mix too. Ah well, “Funeral” is a nice song).

Mostly mellow, which is what I like these days. We have (not necessarily in this order)

• Lonely Ghosts x O+S
• Killbot 2000 x Murder by Death
• Cherry-Coloured Funk x Cocteau Twins
• This Is How It Goes x Aimee Mann
• The Funeral x Band Of Horses
• Auf Achse x Franz Ferdinand
• Please Don’t Go x Barcelona
• The Move x Boom Bip

A few days back I got around to playing on 8track.com, which is a site where you can upload a playlist of music and have it available for others to listen to.

My first attempt was all mellow stuff. We often have a nighttime ritual for Maia where we play a slideshow for her on my laptop with some mellow music in the background. This includes a lot of the music I play for her so she can wind down.

I’ll post something more raucous later on. Feel free to leave a comment about the music.