The month of January means two things to students. Intense study, and its closely related counterpart, extreme procrastination. This playlist will aim to stop you trawling the web for music to listen to, and consists of tracks specifically picked to stimulate concentration.
Eevee- Unexpected
This lo-fi beattape is so calming it even makes Edward Boyle seem tranquil. Its simple organ motifs are underpinned by delicate drum patterns, whilst playful acoustic guitar riffs drift lazily in and out of the listener’s conscience. Intelligent samples selected from the likes of Chet Baker and Hiroshi Yushimura are the icing on top of this sugar-sweet effort.
Tycho- Dive
This album seems to sit in every single person’s YouTube sidebar since the dawn of time, and is a genuine treat for anyone brave enough to take the plunge. From the first keys of its opener, ‘A Walk’, a sense of calmness washes over the listener, which grows ever more resilient as the album flows into a genuinely atmospheric tour-de- force. Tycho has pioneered his own brand of ambient music throughout his career, one which doffs its cap to genres ranging from shoegaze to techno, and it is here that it reaches its brilliant best.
Nymano- Short Stories
Beautiful saxophone solos, torn from underground jazz classics, are resettled between kick drum’s and samples from Hey Arthur- sound intrigued? Nymano’s musical projects are always somehow both daring and comforting, and Short Stories is the benchmark at which all his other work should be judged. Enter his world, your essay is more doable there.
The XX – intro looped
Two hours, fourty five minutes and thirty seconds of unbridled musical serenity. It gives everything you do a renewed sense of purpose, when you’re churning out your first paragraph you will imagine yourself to be a renowned scholar, and by the time you press Turnitin you’ll feel like a demi-god.
Brian Eno- Music for Airports
The first album ever to be explicitly created under the label of ‘ambient music’, Brian Eno’s Music for Airports is a world-renowned classic. The album was created by Eno to be permanently looped as a sound installation in order to bring a degree of calmness to the tense, sterile atmosphere of airport terminals. In this aim he inadvertedly created one of the greatest albums to work to, which in his own words is ‘as ignorable as it is interesting’, ultimately inducing ‘calm and a space to think’.
Reece Parker