Letter #88

I hope you’re well. As I write this to you, I’m sat in the back of an Addison Lee car, it’s just after 1am, and I’ve just left the office. For those of you in advertising, you may recognise this as Pitch Life™️. To complete the picture, the very lovely driver is playing Magic FM, and we’ve just had some Never Gonna Give You Up.

Before I start rambling on, I wanted to say a massive thank you to Eamon for his guest letter last week – it was the perfect soundtrack to a sunny weekend.

Now, I’ve not written to you for a few weeks, so I had loads of music to choose from this week. I also had loads of interesting links saved up too – so this week’s is a bumper edition of TL;DR. I’d intended to write an essay on music and mental health, but Pitch Life™️ has taken over a bit, so it’s half written and half randomly scribbled notes. You can have it next time, I promise.

The spark for wanting to write about mental health was an instrumental song, weirdly, and it’s the song that inspired the mixtape. It’s Carl Stone’s Banteay Srey, a beautiful experimental track from the Electronic Music From the 80s and 90s EP. I first heard it a few months ago, and it’s not really left me. I bought in on vinyl a few weeks ago, and I’ve barely taken it off the platter since. I’ve found myself telling everyone about it… It’s beautiful. I played it to my four year old daughter, Effie, one morning and she asked me to describe it (this is a regular question, and either ends with us both describing it, or us both trying to interpretively dance to it). Later that day I was thinking about it more, and the best description I could think of (that I definitely didn’t give to Effie) was that it sounded like I’d imagine a machine from the future sounds, a machine that was made to literally suck out the feelings of anxiety and depression from your brain. In my head, the sounds that the machine made as it was whirring away, would sound like Bantaey Srey. It’s an odd description, but maybe you’ll see what I mean when you hear it.

Anyway, that thought lead me to think more about mental health, kick starting a warren of thoughts about our journey through life, and how the seemingly small decisions make massive differences, changing the course of our direction in sometimes enormous ways.

So I decided to use that song to build out the whole mixtape. While it’s built from that song, when I look at it now, all of the songs have a certain quality and tone to them. I think they sound like music from a different future. There’s something uncanny and futuristic-sounding about all the music. It’s moody in places, light in others, and while it’s not a full soul-and-disco-kitchen-dancing-workout, hopefully it’ll still get you moving.

Anyway, I have to go now before I fall to sleep. Enjoy ❤️