Undone

A playlist for October: Lucid dream pop, nearly all of it vintage, wrapped up in memories from a lot of different times, useful for touching from a distance. / 1 hr 16 mins

Listen at Deezer or transfer to Spotify, YouTube Music, and Apple Music

It is the season, and I have been watching a lot of horror or otherwise eerie movies, some cheesy but fun (early ’60s Roger Corman/Vincent Price), some surprisingly durable (the first Scream movie), some that don’t fit the genre but strike the mood (Edward Scissorhands), and I keep coming back to the idea that what makes horror work—or at least what separates it from a lot of slasher fare—is betrayal. It’s relatable, earthbound horror; unlike the supernatural, betrayal is the horror that touches us all, and that will reach us again. It is the true thing that goes bump in the night.

Betrayal is so common a theme in horror—there’s no shortage of listicles on the topic—that it almost wouldn’t be worth talking about, but when done right it’s what makes the plot. For betrayal to work as horror, it must be profound. The weight of it, and especially what it shatters when it lands, is what separates the telegraphed treachery of Midsommar from The Wicker Man’s devastating sleight of hand. The former is horror, the other is horrifying.

At some point we have all been misled, sometimes in awful and personal ways, so how could audiences not connect with betrayal on screen? It’s a go-to spot for pathos. But I suspect it’s even bigger than that, that betrayal is part of the human condition, when it’s betrayal by our own bodies. A transcription error. A clot. A small thing with consequences.

A few months before she died, Leslie Harpold told me she had been considering writing a piece about how as children, when we are small, we are frightened of large, imposing things, and as we get older, and bigger, we grow scared of smaller, barely visible things. Some 20 years on—especially 20 years on—I think about that a lot.

Somehow, this comes back to music. Songs that carry memories, literal and abstract, of people now gone, of futures interrupted, of interior treachery—songs that together, I’d argue, aren’t melancholy so much as uncertain. And that’s this playlist.

→ Listen at Deezer or transfer to Spotify, YouTube Music, and Apple Music

1. The Cure, “Plainsong”
2. Christina Vantzou, “Percussion in Nonspace”
3. Pale Saints, “There Is No Day”
4. Rafiq Bhatia, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”
5. Oneohtrix Point Never, “A Barely Lit Path”
6. Nina Simone, “Ne Me Quitte Pas”
7. Unwound, “Vern’s Answer to the Masses”
8. death’s dynamic shroud, “You Don’t Care”
9. Boards of Canada, “Telepath”
10. The Tear Garden, “Romulus and Venus”
11. Coil, “Dark River”
12. KMRU, “Space of Uncertainty”
13. Leonard Cohen, “Avalanche”
14. Spiritualized, “Harmony 2 (Piano)”
15. The Cure, “The Final Sound”
16. This Mortal Coil, “Another Day”
17. alva noto, “Conversation 9 Part V”
18. Julee Cruise, “The World Spins”
19. Slowdive, “Primal”
20. His Name Is Alive, “Here Eyes Are Huge”
21. Mercury Rev, “Holes”
22. Akira Rabelais, “Aphorisming, First”
23. Big Star, “Nature Boy”

Playlist notes

• I knew I’d only keep one, but I started with a handful of This Mortal Coil songs and built out the tracklist from there in a few different ways to see what got at the feeling I was hoping to corral. I wound up using “Another Day,” which I wouldn’t normally do because it’s so emotionally white-hot, yet here we are.
• Throughout, there are unpolished, crumbling, or otherwise noisy sections, and I think that captures the idea. At points I wondered if this was the soundtrack to a movie about interior horror. Maybe it is.
• The track order is highly intentional, and it starts with “Plainsong” because Disintegration starts with “Plainsong” and let us agree this is important.
• Recently I realized that of the 18 people involved in the Manual chapbook we took part in at The Morning News, four have since passed on.
• I specifically wanted to avoid melodrama, which is the key difference between this and the playlist I would have made 30 years ago with some of the same songs. Maybe it’s still too much, but believe me it would have been so much worse then.