Streaming Playlists

Sound As Raw Material

Picked by Hayden Fritzlaff

So, my friend wanted to demo their song. I showed them how to set up the software, where to plug in the guitar, how to hit record. I left them to it.

“I got distracted,” they said when I came back a few hours later. They’d spent the whole time messing around with effects processing and ended up writing an entirely new song.

There’s this idea that for a song to be ‘real’ it has to be able to exist in this pure, acoustic guitar/vocal form. I call bullshit. Instead of relying on chords or lyrics to carry the idea of ‘songness’, these tracks use sounds themselves as building blocks.

midwest – Golden Vessel

Golden Vessel collects sounds like they’re polaroids of friends. This track is a collection of pitched up Hoffner bass lines, melodies salvaged from the scrap heap of past song attempts, and long, meandering guitar improvisations cut down and manipulated into tiny windows to the time and place they were recorded in. Golden Vessel wrote lyrics over the top of the whole strange, wonderful puzzle. It all gives this unplaceable sense of melancholy – the idea that you’re free to go driving across the Midwest but your responsibilities are still gonna be there, bubbling away in your periphery.

Go Get It – Slowdive

As per the shoegaze playbook, the voices on ‘Go Get It’ fly off into the distance so that you can never really tell where melodies begin and end. In the verses, the complete absence of anything to latch on to leaves you staring up at the towering walls of guitars. That’s the song. It’s like you’re a tiny firefly in a giant cavern of sound. The songwriters are nervous wrecks, deliberately hiding their true intentions behind disorientating layers of shiny, pretty nonsense. Not even the internet knows what the lyrics are.

Stop – J Dilla

Yes, sampling is a thing. J Dilla encoded layers of history and meaning into his music by transplanting foreign sounds into recordings of his own. He feels like the ultimate starting point for that. ‘Stop’ can only exist in this exact, very specific order of samples. Ultimately, ‘Stop’ is a file, yet this song, and the record it’s from, is the gateway to so many sounds and so many artists, past present and future.

Round The Moon – Summer Camp

In its relentless pursuit of nostalgia, bedroom pop’s form inevitably dictates its substance. In this essay I will… Okay, so that sentence was a lot, but I stand by it. Just like bedroom pop (or, specifically, ‘bedroom pop-adjacent chillwave’), it’s self-aware and yet entirely earnest. Everything about Summer Camp, from their wobbly synthesisers to their band name, is meant to evoke this hypserpecific sense of nostalgia. Aesthetics can be an afterthought in songwriting. I would argue that bedroom pop is one area of music where aesthetics are so severely vital that they invade every crevice of every musical idea.

About Hayden Fritzlaff

I make music with my friends. I play in the bands Moaning Lisa and Helena Pop. I live in Melbourne (Australia) with two humans and two cats. They all have human names.