Todd Rundgren
A lonely Friday-night bar excursion turns into something closer to a ghost story or wish-fulfillment dream, as a mysterious…
loneliness desire and fantasy the uncanny
Fairport Convention
An old Irish ballad, arranged by Fairport Convention with Sandy Denny's vocal at its centre, in which a young woman's parting…
death and mourning premonition lost love
A young woman walking in the woods meets a strange, magnetic man who half-admits to being an outlaw or something worse, and ends…
seduction and danger the fox as trickster/shapeshifter female agency and vulnerability
Boards of Canada
A near-wordless piece built almost entirely from a warm, looping synth pattern, punctuated by a handful of manipulated vocal…
nostalgia and memory childhood innocence versus threat repetition and ritual
The Chemical Brothers
An instrumental-led score piece built around a largely spoken/sung verse that imagines consciousness dissolving into water,…
loss of control altered consciousness transformation/adaptation
Aphex Twin
Iz - Us reduces language to a single barked command, looping and mangling it until the phrase stops functioning as speech and…
dehumanization of language surveillance and shame childhood discipline
An instrumental track built almost entirely from a looped, warped vocal sample inviting the listener to join a religious…
pastoral idealism turned sinister indoctrination and persuasion nostalgia for institutional innocence